Every move does four things.
A square empties. Ranks, files, and diagonals open up. Other pieces can move to and through that square.
A piece leaves. Its influence no longer applies there. It doesn't attack or defend the same things, or control the same squares.
A square fills. Ranks, files, and diagonals close. Other pieces are prevented from moving to or through the square.
A piece arrives. Its influence spreads out from this new spot. It attacks and defends new things, controls new squares.
Four things. On every move.
Our most accurate calculations come when we notice each of these things, identify the positive and negative ways they impact our position, and correctly evaluate whether they're good or bad for us on the whole.
Pattern recognition, working memory, theory, and positional knowledge all play a part. But it begins with simply noticing what a move does.
All the things a move does.
The four things are the raw input data of your calculations. If the data you collect is sloppy, the decisions you make down the line will be sloppy as well.
Garbage in, garbage out.
When your opponent moves their bishop, maybe they clear a file for their rook (square empties), and they attack your queen (piece arrives). But they also leave an outpost square open for your knight (piece leaves).
Maybe on another turn, you could move your knight to support a checkmate threat (piece arrives). But moving your knight opens a file and the rooks would be staring at each other across the board (square empties); you'd leave your back rank vulnerable!
I've seen plenty of moves that look awesome when judged against just two or three of the things. But become huge blunders when we add in the others.
Noticing four things on each move sounds dead simple in theory. In practice though, challenges abound.
Firstly, it takes effort to notice all four things. Not just the effort of checking for them, but the effort of holding back your intuition so you can check for them.
While you're playing a Chess game, your intuition is always on. It gets excited, jumps to conclusions. It hates anything that slows it down.
When your opponent moves their knight to attack your rook (piece arrives), your intuition notices the attack immediately. It wants you to resolve that threat right away.
Your intuition is convinced it already knows what's important about the last move. Any further thinking is a waste of time. Just solve the threat!
This happens in your calculations as well. Intuition picks out whatever it considers to be the important "thing" about a move, then urges you to push forward.
Think about it in your own games. Once you've thought of the next move, how often do you really check for all the effects of that move? Most of us go straight to thinking about how our opponent might respond.
That's the influence of our intuition. It creates an overly-simplified assessment of each move, and opens the door for all sorts of missed opportunities and nasty surprises.
Secondly, we have the challenge presented by our seven slots, the limits of our working memory capacity.
As we push deeper into a calculation, we increase the load on our working memory. Our brain, trying to help, does whatever it can to manage that load. Often this means it starts to reduce the amount of information it takes in.
The first things our brain stops checking for are normally the piece leaves and the square empties things. The second-order effects.
But as we push ahead, increasing the pressure again, even the piece arrives and square fills things drop away. Eventually, we're so unsure about anything that we give up.
Ironically, our brain becomes much better at conceptualizing future positions when we do take in all of the four things for every move.
As with much of the human experience, our brain resists the very thing that would help it the most.
The extra information allows our mind to build links between the pieces on the board. It creates "chunks" of interconnected information in our working memory that our brain can store and manipulate far more efficiently.
In short, even though your brain resists it, the more information you encode about each move in your calculation, the easier you will find it to conceptualize and calculate with clarity.
The four things are critical for accurate calculations.
All the strong masters check for them by default. It's so natural for them they don't even notice they're doing it.
We don't have the years of training they do. But we can be intentional in our practice and build the habits we need anyway.
There are three stages to increasing your awareness of the four things. Below are the steps I recommend. Adapt them to whatever your individual goals, skills, and brain requires.
First, learn to recognize the four things on your opponent's last move.
A good place to start is the Five Sentences exercise. Pick a master game, maybe 20 moves or so, and write five full sentences about every move and how it affects the position. You'll have to dig deep to fill five sentences, and that's the point.
Use the four things as a guide, and notice how they all affect the game in different ways. Reflect on how often a less obvious thing, one you might otherwise have missed, actually becomes central to the game.
Then, with that experience under your belt, play some rapid games. On every one of your opponent's moves, check for the four things.
The point of these rapid games is to practice this awareness, not to win the game. Keep yourself laser focused. You can get the rating back later. (Or better yet, use a practice account.)
Second, learn to consider the four things before playing your own moves.
Once you're noticing them for your opponent, you need to start noticing them for yourself. You want to build the skill of assessing your candidate moves based on everything they do, not just the things your intuition is excited about.
If you already have some kind of robust blunder check habit in place, add a four things sweep to that. It'll work in nicely with whatever you're currently doing.
If you don't already have a blunder check habit, then go back to those rapid games and focus on checking the four things for any move you consider. Again, building the awareness is more important than winning the game. Be intentional.
Third, add the four things to your calculations.
Once it's feeling natural to check for them on your opponents' moves and your own moves, you can start to push into the future.
For this, you want a combination of calculation exercises and blindfold work.
For Don't Move members, I recommend working through Couple-Too-Early and Find the Blunder exercises, keeping your focus on the four things throughout. These exercises both target the ways a move transforms the position. Start with the CTE and move to the FTB as you build comfort.
(Some Find the Blunder exercises are also available on my podcast.)
For others, Listudy has a look-ahead puzzle tool that works nicely as a four things trainer. Follow the moves shown on the screen, paying attention to all the ways they affect the position, then solve the tactic at the end. Raise the number of ply as you build strength.
For stronger players looking for really complex, nuanced calculation exercises, I recommend Ramesh RB's famous Improve Your Chess Calculation book. The exercises in there are hard, and demand total awareness of the four things to navigate them.
The four things are the raw data of your calculations. If you're not getting all that data, you're daring your opponent to surprise you.
The more raw data you pull in, the more threats and opportunities you'll spot, the clearer you'll feel, and the easier you make it for your brain to juggle it all.
A square empties. A piece leaves. A square fills. A piece arrives.
Everything else flows from there.
Here's to the journey,
Aiden
P.S.
For those of you interested in learning to play blindfold Chess, the four things are your friend there too.
Jump into the Blindfold Trainer, and take the time to consider how the four things affect the position with every move you and the computer play.
One of the keys to blindfold Chess is building large, meaningful chunks in the position to help your working memory juggle it all. The four things are fantastic at helping you do just that.
