Coming from 3DS Max, there’s a checkbox you tick called “By Angle”, with an angle threshold value you can change, so that when you select a face, it automatically selects surrounding faces until the angle differs too greatly between polygons.
I manually selected these polygons to illustrate how this would work - notice it selects the smooth round area with one click, but stops at the hard edge of the belt.
I can’t find this feature in Blender, and people seem stumped about how to do it - surely such a useful feature isn’t missing?