Check, Capture , and Attack
What do you mean by this? As in always look for those moves first? To that question - yes. Live by that and you won't miss many wins
A vast amount has been written about this. Good references for beginners are the writings of Dan Heisman (for example: https://www.danheisman.com/articles-by-subject.html lots of this is behind a paywall, tho) and The Amateur's Mind by Silman.
A few positional things to consider:
- Making your pieces more active
- Improving your pawn structure or weakening your opponent's (e.g., creating or preventing doubled pawns, isolated pawns, and passed pawns)
- Creating and controlling open files for your rooks and queen
- Trading a knight for a bishop (or vise-versa, depending on the position)
- Preventing your opponent from castling
Ah man! I can’t even remember the check, capture, threaten mantra. Now this too? 🤣 I’m gonna try it out though. Thanks.
I tend to find my moves backwards.
That is, instead of (or perhaps, in addition to) looking at what I can do, I try to visualize the end goal: what position or arrangement of pieces do I WANT to have?
Then I try to "draw a straight line" between my current position and the desired position, and with that guideline in mind I start looking for a few candidate-moves to analyze.
The "I-go-here, he-goes-there" stuff tends to happen LAST.
Did you want me to post a sample game?
Here's a game where I found the correct piece maneuver by working backwards from the goal rather than working forward from the current position: