Which nominee will win?

Once you've got your candidate moves in mind, you need to select the one you will actually play. Soltis, in How to choose a chess move, identifies four strategies people tend to use, and the strengths and weaknesses of each one:

1. Prioritizing: focus on one particular move that catches your fancy, and analyze it thoroughly to make sure it is playable. If you find a flaw, go to the next candidate. Soltis says GMs often use this method (indeed, Tisdall says it is the best method as it is what our minds spontaneously want to do: explore the candidate that intuitively seems best). GMs can get away with it because their intuition is so damned good. On the down side, after spending a lot of time on one move, you might become irrationally committed to it, and if it turns out to be a bad move, it has stolen thinking time that you should have spent on the other moves.

2. Thinking like a Kotov: analyze each candidate in turn, examining each move tree only once, and after this is done, pick the candidate that yields the best consequences. The upside is that it is thorough, and you aren't as likely to miss a sneaky great move as you are with Prioritizing. On the down side, it is unrealistic. Nobody analyzes a line only once: at the very least, in crucial positions you need to recheck your analysis. Also, most people don't deeply analyze every candidate move. How many need to be analyzed deeply depends on the position.

3. Elimination: Try to find the biggest weakness in each candidate move, and select the move with the smallest weakness. That is, via process of elimination, whittle down to the least objectionable move. This is very helpful when you need to defend, and instead of being used exclusively, can be used to trim down the number of candidates down to a Kotov-able size. There is a danger of prematurely rejecting a candidate, so be careful. I really like this strategy: the least bad move is the best move!

4. Back and forth: Analyze one candidate a few moves deep. Then another. And another. Kotov shoveled derision on such a thought process as inefficient, but it does have its advantages. First, an analysis of one move can reveal features of the position that could come in handy for one of the other candidates. It would be strange to be stubborn and refuse to go back and reanalyze a move based on such new information. Also, since you are most likely to see tactics early in your thinking process, a quick search of all moves may reveal tactics you might not see if you already have spent 10 minutes on your first candidate (Soltis calls this tactical fatigue).

I use a mixture of all these methods. I think this is unavoidable, as they are not mutually exclusive but can all play a role in selecting a move. I usually start by doing a quick tactical scan before tactical fatigue sets in, and if something particularly promising pops out, I spontaneously will think it through to its conclusion (Prioritizing). The result of that analysis then becomes the basis of comparison for the other candidates. I am not very good at thinking like a Kotov, so reserve such effort for those cases where there are a couple of moves I can't decide between, and I have some reason to think one of them may be significantly better than the other (e.g., it leads to sharp play). If the position is quiet, and a superficial analysis doesn't reveal striking differences, I decide based on general principles and save my thinking time for sharp positions.

That's all the ideal. A more common thought process is "Three moves ago I planned on making this move now, so I'll just make it." [move] "Oh, crap, I just hung my knight. I didn't visualize the position very well three moves ago. I should have used Fine's modified rule."

Anyone out there think like a Kotov?