Deciding Which Position Is Better

     Hello. I like playing chess and have been studying a little bit as a hobby, not professionally and there is a problem that keeps messing with my head. I hope you can help me with it.

     How do you decide which position is better? Lets say you are in a game and trying to decide between two moves, move 1 leads to position A and move 2 leads to position B. Now, of course I have to calculate what would happen if I played move 1 and 2, however at some point I have to stop calculating since I cannot calculate forever, I don't have neither the time nor the power.

     The problem is, I cannot calculate "further" to see which position is better, because I've already calculated as far as I could.

     Of course I'm talking about positional decisions, lets say neither of the moves grant any matherial gain. Maybe I could say it like, "What should I look for in a good position?"

     I'm sorry, It was hard for me explain what I'm having trouble with but I hope you can understand me. I thank you for your concern.

Remove the comparison from discussion for a moment. What you're talking about is called "evaluation", short for "positional evaluation".

Although there are a lot of books offering various methods of how to do this, it really just comes down to judgement based on pattern recognition ... often misleadingly called intuition.

Evaluation methods involve analyzing the position based on a set of "positional factors" such as material, king safety, space, pawn structure, mobility, etc. Basically it all boils down to comparing the immediate and potential activity of each side's army. All else being equal, a material advantage means a potentially more active army, for obvious reasons. If there are no weaknesses in your opponent's position, for example, your army's potential activity is minimal.

This is not so easy to explain, but I give it a go(my english is not so good). Imho and own experience it is all about experience and strength. The stronger the player, the less he calculates unneeded positions. A weaker player will try to calculate all possible variantions, but the stronger player will only calculate those which really matter. Why? a stronger player looks for known patterns, ideas, positions before he calculates. When a stronger player gets into muddy waters, I believe in most cases he will pick the variant in which he feels most comfortable with, at least that is my own experience. In your case i wouldn't worry about not calculating far enough, just calculate to the position where it is still clear and the decide. If it gets too "muddy", just abort and pick a more solid solution Again this is how I look at it, in your case it is not the calculation, but you need more time analysing positions in general. once you get slowly stronger, the calculation will get easier.

I forgot to suggest resources....

Playing over master games will develop your store of examples on which to base your judgements.

Any book on "strategy", "planning", etc. should cover some method of evaluation. A popular source for this purpose is Jeremy Silman's How to Reassess Your Chess and The Amateur's Mind, wherein he provides one simplified method.

Learning any number of methods will be far less effective than playing over as many master games as you can get hold of, though.

Ah, which position is better?

The question all newbies to masters to engines ask themselves...

(if that is any consolidation for you )

Thank you all for your helpful replies, suggestions and informations. I will certainly look into what you have told me.