Now you know how you can win material by capturing higher valued or unprotected pieces. But these captures are not always winning, for example if your capturing move allows your opponent another capture. In this level, there are always multiple captures available to you, but only one of them is good.

Examples

Black can capture the rook on g7 with the king on h8 or the bishop on e5. The correct move is 1...Kxg7, because capturing with the bishop would open the line from e5 to h5, and White would be able to capture Black's unprotected queen: 1...Bxg7? 2.Qxh5+.

Black can capture the rook on c4 with the pawn on d5 or the queen on c7. Capturing with the pawn would allow the white queen to capture the knight on d4: 1...dxc4 2.Qxd4. After the correct move 1...Qxc4, the black queen protects the knight on d4, so that if White now plays 2.Qxd4? they would lose their queen to the recapture 2...Qxd4.

How to spot good and bad captures

First you spot all your possible captures. After each capture, you visualize the resulting position, and see if your opponent can make any winning capture in turn. The possible captures are called candidate moves. For each candidate move you visualize the resulting position and possible moves.

This is your start of learning to calculate variations, where you visualize multiple possible sequences of moves to find the best move. Calculating variations is one of the most important skills of a chess player.

To become strong at calculating variations you need a lot of practice. Solving chess puzzles is a good way to practice and improve this skill.