The Thought Process

The process of choosing a move to play is surprisingly difficult to quantify. If you ask a strong player about their reasoning behind playing a move, the most common responses are either vague affirmations of the move's strength ("it looked good", "I followed my intuition", etc.), a few unexplained variations, or some other fragment of decision-making that only constitutes a fraction of the entire thought process. Strong players have essential parts of the thought process embedded into their subconscious and don't need to actively remind themselves to follow certain steps off of a list. Naturally, internalizing the thought process takes time and practice, and following a bad thought process can be detrimental. The exact method differs from player to player, but here are the essential components of the thought process:

1.0: Candidate moves

The first thing you need to do when your opponent makes a move is to choose candidate moves to consider. Everyone does this subconsciously, but it's important that you choose candidate moves before going onto further steps, like calculation. Having more candidate moves will give you more ideas further down variations during the calculation step, and will prevent you from diving too deep into one move when another one is clearly better than it. Of course, you cannot simply look at moves randomly, since you are not an engine, so it's important to have guidelines on choosing candidate moves.

1.1: Forcing moves

You must always look at all checks, captures, and threats. There is no exception to this rule unless you are literally about to lose on time. This is one of the most important and easily forgotten components of the thought process, especially when it is applied during calculation (more on that later). Of course, some forcing moves look stupid, and you don't need to spend much time on them; however, it is worth taking a few seconds to make sure you aren't missing anything, as forcing moves can change the course of the game entirely.

1.2: Other candidate moves

Your non-forcing moves should come from your understanding of the position, or "positional play" as many call it. Some people subdivide finding positional candidate moves into further steps, like Aagaard with his 3 questions in his GM Prep - Positional Play book (highly recommend the series). However, I am not trying to explain all of positional play with this article, so that will suffice. If you find that your non-forcing candidate moves are frequently bad, you should work on your positional play skills.

2.0: Calculation

Calculation is the most controversial step of the thought process. Kotov's "Think Like a Grandmaster" outlined a robotic, engine-like method of calculation using the depth-first algorithm. For those not familiar with computer science terms, depth-first search entails going all the way to the end of a variation, backtracking to the nearest decision point with unanalyzed options, and then repeating these two steps until calculation is complete. The issue with such an approach is that you must search for candidate moves at every move, both yours and your opponent's, or else you run the risk of missing an important resource. As a result, this method takes far too much time and memory to be practical for humans. Nunn criticized Kotov's methods and proposed his own calculation method, a weird hybrid between depth-first search and breadth-first search that involved switching between variations instead of going extremely deep into a single variation (I believe this was in "Understanding Chess Middlegames", but don't quote me on that). Aside from being unnatural, I didn't feel like this method was really that superior to Kotov's. In my opinion, generalizing calculation to create an algorithm applicable to all positions is not a good idea.

2.1: My suggestion

I believe that the method used for calculation should change based on the position. We can divide positions into two categories: positions where decisions will matter greatly, and positions where decisions will not matter greatly (unless egregious blunders occur). The chess community typically refers to these position types as "sharp" and "quiet" or "critical" and "non-critical", respectively. Determining whether or not a position is a critical position takes time and practice; indicators of critical positions include, but are not limited to, abundance of forcing candidate moves and important long-term decision points (trades, castling, pawn breaks, etc).

In a critical position, you should go full on Kotov style, stopping at each move to consider possible candidate moves. Most of the time, you can get away with looking only at forcing moves and one non-forcing move chosen through intuition. Calculating a series of non-forcing moves is absurdly difficult and useless, as none of the moves are forced. Looking at one non-forcing move at each point in the variation will give you an idea of what the position would be like if the forcing complications ended right there. Keep calculating as long as there are forcing moves.

In a non-critical position, many resources recommend that you calculate 2.5 moves (5 ply). Again, there's little point in calculating non-forcing lines, but calculating just a little bit is helpful to give yourself an idea of how the position might progress. Definitely calculate at least 3 ply, but beyond that, you don't need to go deep at all. However, this doesn't mean you can slack off while looking for candidate moves for yourself and for your opponent.

3.0: Comparison

Once you've finished calculating, you need to compare the variations to see which move you like better. Some resources dump a bunch of guidelines about evaluation, but conflicting principles are more likely to just confuse you, and no one really uses them to evaluate, anyway, aside from comparing lines with only one difference, ceteris paribus. Use your intuition to evaluate; which line looks better? If you're wrong in your evaluation, you will learn something about your personal biases in evaluation. By contrast, if you picked the wrong line because you were following a principle, you would only learn that the principle doesn't apply or is not the most important thing in that particular position, which is too specific a lesson to be useful.

4.0: Blunder-Checking

This is the final step of the thought process; make sure you don't skip it. Essentially, blunder-checking is simply calculating only your opponent's forcing moves (or dangerous non-forcing moves) following the move you have chosen through calculation and comparison. Think of it like checking your work before turning in a test; it doesn't cost you much time since you already calculated the lines, but you can save yourself from blundering if you had missed something earlier.

5.0: Opponent's turn

Honestly, I haven't really found that my actions during my opponent's turns have particularly affected how well I play. If you use the time to calculate, you'll get more thinking time, but if you use the time to walk around or relax, you'll be refreshed and better-equipped to calculate once you've seen your opponent's move. Use your own judgment on how to spend your opponent's turn based on the position.

Building good habits is essential for succeeding in chess. Make sure you apply the thought process to your games. It's okay to miss ideas because you are unfamiliar with them; this helps you grow as a chess player. However, it would be unfortunate to miss ideas because you weren't looking for them. If you follow the thought process rigorously, it will be much easier for you to learn from your mistakes and become a better player.

noice

you could blog this or smth lol

get views from the beginners

Nice I'll come back to this

Ommm?

lmao I just realized "Weekly Articles" meant 1 article total per week, not 1 article per instructor per week 💀

omm u a db hoodlum

“Some resources dump a bunch of guidelines about evaluation, but conflicting principles are more likely to just confuse you, and no one really uses them to evaluate, anyway, aside from comparing lines with only one difference, ceteris paribus. Use your intuition to evaluate; which line looks better? If you're wrong in your evaluation, you will learn something about your personal biases in evaluation.”
Now I know why every time I try to verbalize concepts and evaluate them it turns out poorly… thanks for that.

Though, what about calculations such as space & time, they seem a bit off the “principles” arc but could also not be useful to count… thoughts?

I've never really believed in "space advantage"; it's basically just a more misleading way to quantify piece activity, and generally I don't take it into consideration when evaluating. Not sure what you are referring to with "time". Anyway, my suggestion was to not "count" anything at all and simply use intuition to decide which line to go for, i.e. aiming for the position you would prefer to play. Considering complicated abstract concepts like space advantage and initiative along with concrete factors like weak squares and bad pieces will just confuse your evaluation, especially in a comparison.

I'd like to add that time management also plays a role in calculation most likely. I tend to spend too much time on non-critical moments; finding those critical ones is an important skill in its own right. 

shameless bumping