What's the difference between the best move, a great move, and brilliant move?

The difference between a brilliant move and a merely great move in chess lies in the depth of intention, the level of risk, the degree of originality, and the contrast between what is humanly intuitive versus what is objectively optimal, and while a great move is typically one that is strong, principled, strategically consistent, and aligned with the engine-approved best choices in a given position, a brilliant move is something far rarer: it is a move that defies conventional logic, appears counterintuitive or even outright losing at first glance, yet contains such profound tactical or strategic justification beneath the surface that it overturns expectations and forces even an experienced player or a powerful engine to reevaluate the position from the ground up, and this is why chess platforms like Chess.com reserve the “brilliant” tag for moves that involve unexpected sacrifices—especially quiet, nonforcing ones—that appear to give the opponent freedom or material but actually set up hidden resources, long-term initiative, or unavoidable tactical collapses several moves later; meanwhile, a great move could be a strong prophylactic maneuver, a flexible developing move, or a powerful tactic that is obvious but correct, such as a clean fork or a simple exchange sacrifice that the engine immediately endorses, whereas a brilliant move tends to be the kind of decision that a human would almost never consider unless they possessed extraordinary insight into the underlying geometry of the position, often involving paradoxical themes like retreating a piece to open a line, allowing checkmate threats to hang because of a deeper counter-threat, placing a piece en prise to force zugzwang, or sacrificing a queen not for immediate checkmate but for a long, subtle positional stranglehold, and thus the distinction between great and brilliant becomes a distinction between clarity and surprise: great moves are clear in purpose and strong in execution, while brilliant moves shock the mind, bend expectations, and demonstrate an understanding so deep or a calculation so razor-sharp that the move feels almost magical, the type of move that becomes memorable in annotated game collections, that coaches show to students for decades, and that players themselves remember as a moment of rare creativity where the game transcended calculation and became art—ultimately making brilliance not just a measure of correctness, but a celebration of originality and audacity in the endlessly complex world of chess.