Knowledge Base - The Concept of Candidate Moves

In general you study some chess material and make decisions about which variations lead to middle game positions you want to reach no matter what your opponent plays. This requests some effort on your side as you have to make sure that on the way to those positions your opponent can’t play let’s say a drawish variation.

Now, to achieve your goal you have to decide for each position (beginning with the start position) what you want to play keeping in mind that it is supposed to be guaranteed to lead to one of your favourite variations and finally positions. Thus you have usually just one move for your side, but you have to consider several moves for your opposite side, because you can’t legally force your opponent to play your preferred variation. However, by your choice you restrict the reasonable options for your opponent and this is exactly the effort you have to make: whatever he plays you have to ensure you still have one move which continues to lead to a variation / position which you prefer to play. Wait a moment and let this sink into your brain. Re-read this paragraph as it is key to the whole opening module and CPT in general. If you have never heard about the concept of candidate moves it can be confusing at first.

All considered moves in your opening are called Candidate Moves. No matter whether the moves are for your or opponents side they are called candidate moves, because these are the candidates which are considered for your repertoire. You will add new candidate moves over time as you make your personal experience.

You can have several candidate moves for a position. Also you can change the order of all available candidate moves. However, for your side you will usually have just one candidate move.

Let’s say you face with Black e4. You always want to play the Sicilian as the reply to e4 so the candidate move in that position is c5. All other moves, while they might be absolutely sound, are not your first candidate move. CPT won’t help you to find all these single moves, but it will help you to organize and to train them in a very efficient way.

The candidate move concept is very important in CPT. Many other concepts are based on this basic concept.

Of course, sometimes there exist two candidate moves which you would like to play and especially the stronger you are the more likely it is that you have more than one line which you can play for the most popular variations just to make it harder for your opponent to prepare a game against you, but even then it’s quite easy with CPT to manage the repertoire. You can have more than one candidate move and later change the order of your candi-date moves. However, only the first ranked move will be considered for several functions which CPT offers like the training mode. Keep this in mind!
A short list of functions which are based on the first ranked candidate move:

• Training mode: you have to play your first ranked candidate move or the program will count it as an in-correct answer unless you changed the training settings
• When you run your played games against your repertoire to find any novelties CPT will check where you didn’t play your first ranked candidate move for the first time

Updating your repertoire based on your played games works similar