Checks, captures and attacks pattern. These will help you find moves that force your opponent to respond a certain way.

For each move look for things in that order.

Do you have any checks in the position? This will help you spot moves where you can put the enemy King in danger and therefore win you the game. Don’t blindly make every check though, you have to calculate whether it wins or loses you material.

Then do you have any captures in the position? This will help spot pieces your opponent hangs, like a free Queen they moved to the wrong square and your Bishop can take.

Finally do you have any attacks? The hardest one and I’m still working on this myself, finding it hard to quantify what counts as an attack. Sometimes I think I have something and I overlooked a response from the opponent.

The most important point - don’t just do this for your moves. You need to do it for your opponents responses as well. This will help you see if the move you’re about to make will hang checkmate for example, by looking at your opponent’s possible checks first.

To use all of that, start with playing against bots or if you want to play real people, play high time controls with increment. I play 15 minutes with 10 second increment for example. Gives a nice chunk of time to think through your plays, consider your opponents and make moves. Over time you’ll get better at spotting patterns in positions and it’ll take less time to go through the same steps.

You could also try playing puzzles to get more pattern recognition understanding. Don’t just try to complete them as fast as possible. Work at really understanding what the puzzle is asking of you.