With the recommendation of starting with the candidate move connected is a big oversight.

Being in a game and solving or exercising over a position is not the same. Natural human thinking starts with the perception of features of a situation. Connected to features is an action. This action is done mentally and the result of the action will be evaluated.

I admit, this is very abstract. For chess this means: You start thinking, if you're not content with the evaluation of a position in a game or you start thinking, if you see a diagram.

The good part of the "candidate move theory" is the discipline it carries. That's why it survives. The bad part is condensed in the sentence: I'm no tree.

Here are a few tips to answer these questions:

Focus on what you are doing,not what you are solving.
Be clear. If your grandma doesn’t understand it then rewrite it.
Be specific. Don’t boil the ocean.
Focus on what you offer, not how great you are.
Once you have clarity on these, move on to the brainstorms.

My opinion and experience about  thinking process - all grandmasters think the same way, but the difference is that when you start thinking new way you to it mechanic way where GMs do it automatic way. Searching candidate moves, then analysing threw the lines of each candidate move and comparing the ending positions between all the candidate moves. Even 2100 players do it same way, they just don't notice it. But the difference is that GM's will find better candidate moves or calculate the lines deeper. A lot of times when 2700 GM wins against other 2700 GM the problem was not that one has missed something but rather the evaluation of ending variation. That's my experience of this question.

Sylvester wrote on 09/06/16 at 02:24:00:


I'd really not recommend that one : from the excerpts I read and the author's rating, I think it's completely off the mark.

Completely agree with ErictheRed that it's much better to try and develop the natural way the human mind works in chess, which means seeing and projecting patterns (aka. intuition/calculation).

If you really need some hand holding, then why not read some Heisman (although you could pretty much sum it up as "watch for your opponent's threats"), but your best investment might just be to read well annotated game collections from the past 

Other books to consider:
The Process of Decision Making (Vol 1 and 2) by Phillip Ochman
How to Think in Chess by Jan Przewoznik and Marek Soszynski
Rethinking the Chess Pieces by Andrew Soltis
All the work by Dan Heisman as prerequisites for the above.

@Stigma - tks for the sources. About the stages - it would be more psychological to talk about "automatic" instead of "unconscious" which is more a psychoanalytical than a psychological expression.

Back to the question of adoption thinking processes to growing knowledge.

The only winning move for white is 4. Re2-f2 after which you reach the following position:



This is a basic pattern. It helps to explain the concept of a "chunk". The beginner and some intermediate players won't see the attack of the rook against the king as a black and a white piece are interfering. Combine this with the defenders rule to stay on the f-line and it's neighbours g and e. You see at once that Bf4 and Bg4 are answered with Ke5+ and Kg5+.

A chunk is a piece of information consisting out of features - here the four pieces on one file and operators or actions to transform the given situation to another one.

If you have worked out the example from the beginning you know that the black bishop on the files a-d and h will lose. With the knowledge of the discovered check in the above position you're able to transform this position with much less thinking than before.

Remember this chunk and look at another position and the text from an article of Jon Tait he linked to yesterday in this forum http://www.chesspub.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1313620779/55#55

Source ?, p.21:



I like this position very much. Five pieces stand between Re1 and Ke8. Yet if Black tries 18. .. Ng6 they remove themselves in quick succession: 19. Nxf7! Bxf7 20.Nxf6+! gxf6 21. Bxc5+ and wins.

You can see the differentiation of a pattern. Depending of the knowledge state the first diagram is more complex (for a beginner) than the second one (for a IM probably). The mental operators - searching the connection of operators and features on the basis of our mind - stay the same. And I hope you can deal the fun Jon Tait had and has about this position.

Rethink all this and it becomes obvious, why good chess books and a trainer and the advice of experienced players in this forum b.e will give you more for your chess playing strength than the psychological knowledge.

Larsen_fan wrote on 07/04/11 at 09:05:01:


As long as you're improving just by playing and studying chess, your thinking process just develops without you being aware of it. It only comes to light when challenged; when a coach, author or other player thinks completely differently about a position.

With a concrete thinking process that you're trying to learn and implement, the change process should follow the "Four stages of competence" model from psychology: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

1. Unconscious incompetence 
2. Conscious incompetence
3. Conscious competence
4. Unconscious competence

Someone deciding to learn a thinking process is at stage 2: Doing some things "wrong", but at least aware of that! But note that the end goal is not 3., consciously running through a process or checklist every time you're on move, but rather 4. where you have practiced a process consciously for so long that in the end you're using it unconsciously, automatically (and therefore faster).

You can then add new elements of both knowledge and process in the same way; at first they will be conscious and time-consuming but eventually unconscious and fast. For most people this requires working hard (maybe even exclusively) on one part of one's game for a while, something GM Smirnov recommends in his courses. So "freeing oneself from the process" actually happens when it's still operating but you no longer notice you're using it. Much like any other complex skill like tying shoelaces or driving a car become automatic over time.

Concretely, a lot of the things I now do automatically come from patterns I've built up from Silman's strategy books and lots of tactics training. (I never consistently followed Silman's concrete planning process from RYC 3 though, and in the 4th edition he abandoned it as too confusing to many people). I also picked up some ideas from Tisdall's "Improve Your Chess Now" on which candidate move to analyze first in different kinds of positions (attacking vs defending). And I routinely analyze the most forcing moves (for both sides) first in any tactical position. In the future I should try to develop and automate more efficient calculation. I'm also keen on the "falsification" view of chess: My task at the board is to find out what's wrong with the move I want to play, and only if I can't find anything wrong despite my best effort I'll play it! I read Dvoretsky on prophylactic thinking when I was as weak as 1500 and that influences my thinking a lot, to the extent that I sometimes play bad moves because I try to prevent something my opponent didn't intend or doesn't have to play. So I need to deepen my understanding of when prophylactic moves are warranted.