Blunder Avoidance and Finding The Best Move Checklists - Chess Cheat Sheets For Improvement
Stop losing games you were winning. These step-by-step checklists stop blunders before you make them, and helps you find the best move to make every single time. You know the feeling. You're up a piece. Maybe two. The game's basically won. Then you play one careless move, your opponent finds the reply you didn't see coming, and it all falls apart in a single move... Fifteen minutes of good chess, undone in about four seconds. Or the other one. You sit there for two full minutes, staring at the board, completely unsure what to actually play. You end up going with whatever feels right and hoping for the best. Half the time it's fine. The other half, you've just handed your opponent the game. If either of those sounds familiar, it's not because you don't understand chess. It's simply because you don't have a process to follow each time you make a move. And without one, even good players blunder. Here's the thing nobody tells you: strong players aren't smarter than you mid-game. If they were, you wouldn't be matched to their elo. They're not calculating twelve moves ahead while you're stuck on two. What they've actually got is a routine. A set of questions they run through, almost on autopilot, before every single move. It's why they don't hang pieces in positions they were winning, and why they always seem to find the move you missed. That routine is exactly what these checklists give you. There are two of them, working together. The Best Move Checklist walks you through finding your strongest move in any position, whether that's a forcing tactic sitting right there on the board or a quieter positional idea you'd otherwise miss. The Blunder Checklist is the safety net you run straight after, catching the hanging piece, the missed fork, or the mate in one before you commit to a move you can't take back. Each one is broken down by rating band: Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. Because what actually trips up a 700 elo player has almost nothing to do with what trips up someone with a rating of 1900. A beginner needs to stop hanging pieces. An advanced player needs to catch the zwischenzug two moves deep and notice the slow positional slide that has no immediate punishment. Same idea, completely different checklist. And because everyone learns differently, you get two separate formats to use the checklists. A printable version for your desk or your notebook, and an interactive version you can tick through as you play. Either way, it's the same process, laid out so clearly you'll be running through it from memory in no time. So, now picture your next few games. You sit down at the board and you're not guessing anymore. There's a process running in your head. Checks, captures, attacks What's the opponent threatening? What's my best possible move? You find moves you'd have completely missed six months ago. The step-by-step process means you stop relying on hope and start following a system. It's not a magic pill to get cleverer overnight... but it does have the same effect. And before you play, there's a second check the checklists prompt you to make. A quick scan for the hanging piece, the pin, the back-rank mate you nearly walked into. The move that would have thrown away a completely winning game gets caught before it hits the board, not after your opponent's already punishing it. Games stop slipping away in one move. The tilt that follows a bad blunder, the one that wrecks your next three games too, starts happening a lot less often. And every position starts feeling a little more manageable because you always know exactly what to check next. The aim with these checklists are simple. They're not about grinding more puzzles or memorising deep opening lines. The intention is to give you something that helps you stop throwing away losing positions from habitual autopilot move-making that could have been caught with a quick 10-second scan. Now then, it's time to get the full set of checklists across all three skill levels, in both printable and interactive formats. Stop making mistakes and letting good moves slip by. Start finding the best moves, every move, every game.