Candidate Move
A casual and analytical term for a plausible move that a player identifies as worth calculating further during the thinking process.
Strong players typically generate a short list of candidate moves before calculating each one in depth, a process popularized in chess literature as a structured approach to decision-making at the board.
Etymology
Candidate comes from Latin candidatus meaning white-robed, from the white toga worn by Roman office-seekers, and is in English from about 1600. In chess a candidate move is one of the small set of moves a player identifies as worth calculating in a given position, before working through them systematically. Wikipedia's Glossary of chess carries candidate move as a headword, and Wikipedia's dedicated article states that the idea of candidate moves was first put forth by Grandmaster Alexander Kotov in his book Think Like a Grandmaster. Kotov was a Soviet grandmaster, born 12 August 1913 and died 8 January 1981, and Think Like a Grandmaster appeared in English in 1971, with an algebraic edition in 2003. Kotov's method, of listing candidates and examining each branch once without revisiting, became one of the most widely taught and most widely debated pieces of chess training advice.
First documented: 1971 (English edition of Think Like a Grandmaster) — Alexander Kotov, Think Like a Grandmaster (English edition 1971)
Translations
Translations for this term haven't been added yet.