Chess Position Trainer – © Stefan Renzewitz 2012- all rights reserved 18
All considered moves in your opening are called Candidate Moves. No matter whether the moves are for your or opponents side they are called candidate moves, because these are the candidates which are considered for your repertoire. You will add new candidate moves over time as you make your personal experience.
You can have several candidate moves for a position. Also you can change the order of all available candidate moves. However, for your side you will usually have just one candidate move.
Let’ s say you face with Black e4. You always want to play the Sicilian as the reply to e4 so the candidate move in that position is c5. All other moves, while they might be absolutely sound, are not your first candidate move. CPT won’ t help you to find all these single moves, but it will help you to organize and to train them in a very efficient way.
The candidate move concept is very important in CPT. Many other concepts are based on this basic concept.
Of course, sometimes there exist two candidate moves which you would like to play and especially the stronger you are the more likely it is that you have more than one line which you can play for the most popular variations just to make it harder for your opponent to prepare a game against you, but even then it’ s quite easy with CPT to manage the repertoire. You can have more than one candidate move and later change the order of your candidate moves. However, only the first ranked move will be considered for several functions which CPT offers like the training mode. Keep this in mind!
A short list of functions which are based on the first ranked candidate move:
- Training mode: you have to play your first ranked candidate move or the program will count it as an incorrect answer unless you changed the training settings( s. Correct Move p. 72).
- When you run your played games against your repertoire to find any novelties CPT will check where you didn’ t play your first ranked candidate move for the first time( s. Run Against Games p. 61).
- Updating your repertoire based on your played games works similar( s. Run Against Games p. 61).
1.5 Previous users of Chess Position Trainer 3.3
If you have used a previous version of CPT the new version will be familiar to you in many aspects. The following brief overview helps you to make the switch even smoother.