The Complete Guide to Candidate Moves

Before generating your own candidate moves, assess what your opponent's last move threatens. Is there a check? A capture threat? A positional threat? If you skip this step, you risk generating candidate moves that ignore an immediate danger, the most common cause of blunders.

In any position, generate 3-5 candidate moves. Start with: Forcing moves (checks, captures, major threats). Active moves (improving piece placement, creating threats). Prophylactic moves (preventing opponent's plan, securing weaknesses). Don't generate too many, analysis paralysis wastes time. Don't generate too few, you might miss the best option.

For each candidate, calculate the consequences: What is the opponent's best reply? What do I play after that? Continue until you reach a "quiet" position (no immediate forcing moves). Then evaluate: material balance, king safety, pawn structure, piece activity, and long-term plans. Compare the resulting positions of each candidate.

Choose the candidate that produces the best resulting position. Before playing it, perform a final "blunder check": does this move hang a piece? Does it walk into a tactic? Does it create a weakness I haven't considered? This 5-second verification prevents the majority of "I didn't see that" mistakes.

1. Anchoring: Falling in love with the first candidate and not seriously evaluating alternatives.
2. Shallow calculation: Stopping calculation after 1-2 moves when the position requires 3-4.
3. Ignoring the opponent: Assuming the opponent will play your preferred response instead of their best one.
4. Time misallocation: Spending too long on routine decisions and too little on critical ones. See time management.