The truth about checks-captures-threats

Probably the most common advice you hear in chess is that you should always look for forcing moves (aka checks-captures-threats, or CCT). Every chess content creator seems to have a post or Youtube video about that. Still, I think this advice can be a bit misleading.

The truth is that advanced players don’t look for forcing moves. They just see them. It is an automatic process without any conscious effort. They don’t go and fetch the forcing moves, the forcing moves come to them. And this is not a question of talent - it is a hard-earned skill.

When I started my coaching career, it was a surprise to me that even experienced tournament players don’t notice forcing moves. It really made me think: how come that I see that stuff automatically, and they don’t? At what point did I pick this up?

I am pretty sure that nobody taught me some kind of forcing move recognition method. I never practiced this separately. None of my coaches insisted that I should work on this skill. Maybe they talked about forcing moves passingly, or I read about it in a book, but I certainly don’t remember that.

I even asked some of my friends recently, who are all in the 2000-2200 rating category: Do you guys make a deliberate effort to find forcing moves during calculation? Do you follow some kind of method?

The answer was the same: no, they just see them. It is completely automatic, so they don’t even think about it.

So where did me and my friends pick up that skill?

I firmly believe that it simply comes with traditional chess training. Calculating challenging positions, including endgames. Solving studies. Solving tactical puzzles (that is, calculate them instead of guessing them). Playing a lot of tournament games. Analysing your games. Playing blindfold chess.

Do a lot of this kind of stuff, and your forcing move recognition skill will develop itself. That’s why our coaches did not talk a lot about forcing moves. They knew there was no need for it.

As a chess coach, I am yet to meet a student who haven’t heard about the importance of looking for forcing moves. All my students subscribe to the idea. They still miss them big time during their games, because they haven’t had sufficient training yet.

Knowing about forcing moves is one percent of the road. The remaining 99 percent is good old training...

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