Checks, Captures, Threats

Every board on this page is live. Move the pieces by tapping or dragging, click any move in the lines to see that position, and press ↺ to start again.

2.1 Why Forcing Moves Come First

In Chapter 1 we said that calculation means playing moves in your head. But which moves? In an ordinary middlegame position each side has thirty or forty legal moves. If you tried to look at all of them, and then all of your opponent's answers to each one, you would need hours for a single move.

Strong players solve this problem with a simple trick: they look first at the moves that give the opponent the fewest choices. These are called forcing moves, and there are three kinds:

1. Checks — the opponent must deal with the check. Usually there are only one, two or three legal replies.

2. Captures — the opponent usually wants to recapture, or else they are simply material down.

3. Threats — moves that attack something valuable or threaten mate. The opponent has to respond to the threat or lose something.

After a forcing move, your opponent's possible replies shrink from thirty to just a handful. That means you can actually calculate them — all of them — and be sure of the result.

2.2 The CCT Scan

Here is the habit this chapter is built around. Before every move, run through this list in order:

C Checks. Find every check you can give — even the ones that look silly, even the ones that sacrifice a piece.

C Captures. Find every capture, including captures with your queen and captures of defended pieces.

T Threats. Find every move that attacks a piece of greater value, attacks an undefended piece, or threatens mate.

Two words in that list matter most: every and even. Beginners tend to see only the checks and captures that look good at first sight. But the winning move is very often the one that looks impossible — a queen sacrifice, a check that "hangs" a piece. If you skip it because it looks silly, you will never find it.

So the rule is: first list, then judge. Do not throw a move away until you have calculated the opponent's replies.

2.3 Checks

2.4 Making a Candidate List

A candidate move is a move you are seriously considering. The CCT scan gives you your first candidates. Let us do a full scan, step by step, and write the list down just as you would in a notebook.

2.5 Threats

Threats are the hardest of the three to spot, because a threatening move looks quiet: it does not check and does not capture. But a threat that attacks two things at once is one of the most powerful weapons in chess.

2.6 Your Opponent Has Forcing Moves Too

The CCT scan works in both directions. Your opponent also has checks, captures and threats, and the most common way to lose a game is to forget about them. That is why the first of our three questions was "What does my opponent want?"

Make it a routine. After every move your opponent plays, run the scan from their side of the board:

1. Which checks could they give me now?

2. Which of my pieces could they capture? Are those pieces defended enough?

3. What new threats did their last move create?

In Example 2.2 we began with exactly this step: before looking at White's moves we noticed that Black's knight attacked the queen. The move ♗a6 looked active, but it lost on the spot because it ignored Black's threat.

2.7 Worked Examples

Study each example as if it were a puzzle: cover the solution, calculate, and only then read on.