Calculation and Candidate Moves
In 1971 the Soviet grandmaster Alexander Kotov published Think Like a Grandmaster, a book not about openings or tactics but about the act of thinking itself. Its central image is the tree of analysis. Faced with a position, you don’t calculate everything — you can’t. You first pick out the candidate moves: the two, three, maybe four replies actually worth examining. Then you analyze each branch in turn, and here is Kotov’s iron rule: do not check the same variation twice. Walk each branch once, to its end, then compare the resulting positions and choose.
The rule is really about discipline under a clock. The undisciplined mind drifts — it looks at move A, wanders to B, jumps back to A, re-examines what it already saw, and burns ten minutes producing fog instead of a decision.
Kotov named the failure mode too, and it’s painfully recognizable. A player agonizes over the candidate moves for half an hour, can’t decide, and then — often in the time trouble the agonizing created — reaches out and plays a fourth move he never analyzed at all, on impulse, usually losing. They call it Kotov syndrome: long deliberation collapsing into a snap decision worse than any of the options actually considered.
Strong players have since pushed back on Kotov’s tidy “analyze each line exactly once” as a literal description of how anyone really calculates — real calculation is messier, more intuitive, more back-and-forth than the diagram suggests. But the two core moves survive all the criticism. Narrow to candidates first. Then go deep, deliberately, instead of churning.
The transfer is direct, because most decisions are calculation under a clock — the same pressure that makes tempo decisive and rewards anyone who can run their decision loop before the situation changes underneath them. The first discipline is candidate moves: don’t evaluate the whole infinite space of options, prune to the few worth real thought. This is satisficing turned into method — search the small set of good-enough options, not the impossible space of all of them. Brainstorming that refuses to narrow is just Kotov’s drifting mind with a whiteboard. The second is don’t re-litigate: once you’ve thought a branch through, write down the conclusion and move on, rather than circling the same worry for the third time because it’s uncomfortable to decide.
And Kotov syndrome is everywhere a deadline meets indecision — the months of deliberation that end in a panicked, unconsidered choice as the clock runs out. The cruel part is that the impulsive final move is usually worse than any option you spent all that time weighing. If you’ve done the analysis, trust it enough to play one of the moves you actually looked at.
Go Deeper
Books
- Think Like a Grandmaster by Alexander Kotov — The 1971 classic that gave chess “candidate moves” and the “tree of analysis”; influential, and productively argued-with ever since.