What do best, excellent and good mean in chess?

You open the review and most of your moves are green, but only a few have the star. Best, excellent and good are the three labels for moves that were fine. Best is the move the engine would have played. Excellent is almost as good. Good gives up a little more, and it is still not a mistake.

What does best mean in a game review?

Best means you played the move the engine likes most in that position. Chess.com puts it as the same move the chess engine would play. It does not mean it was the only good move: often two or three moves are close to equal, and only one of them gets the star.

You won’t find a symbol for best, excellent or good in annotated games. Commentators mark a strong move with ! and leave ordinary good moves alone. These three labels only exist in computer game reviews.

Is an excellent move worse than the best move?

Only just. Chess.com describes excellent as almost as good as the best move, and good as a move that doesn’t make your position bad. The labels that mean something went wrong start below good.

For the labels below good, see what an inaccuracy is and what a miss means. Book and forced have their own page: what a book move is.

Are brilliant and great moves better than best?

They are usually the best move too, or close to it. The badge tells you something extra: a sacrifice that holds up, or the one move that keeps the game going. Chess.com says its brilliant moves are always the best or nearly best move in the position. More in what makes a move brilliant and what makes a move great.

What do best, excellent and good moves look like?

Here is the position from the top of the page again, with two other moves Black could have played. All three keep the game going. Then an example from a winning position, where the safe move was good enough.

Why was my move only excellent when it looked like the best one?

Because several moves can be almost equally good, and the star only goes to one of them. In the position above, castling and 8...b6 lead to nearly the same game, and the label comes down to a small preference of the engine.

Every site also has its own engine and its own scale. The same move can be best on one review and excellent on another, and neither is wrong.

Do you need to play the best move every turn?

No, and nobody does. A game full of excellent and good moves, with no inaccuracies, mistakes or blunders, is a well-played game. In a winning position the safe line is often the right choice in practice, like the trade-down above, even when it doesn’t get the star.

The moves that cost you games are the ones below good. For what those look like, see what counts as a blunder.

Does Lichess show best, excellent and good moves?

No. Lichess’s analysis only marks inaccuracies, mistakes and blunders, and shows the best move next to each one. Moves that weren’t errors get no label. Chesslord gives your Lichess games the full scale, from brilliant to blunder.

What should you look at after a game?

Skip the missing stars and go straight to the moves that lost something.

Start with the move where the game turned

Find the biggest swing in the game and work out what you missed there. Fix that one before anything else.

Compare your move with the engine’s

For each inaccuracy or mistake, look at the move the review would have played and ask what it saw that you didn’t: a threat, a loose piece, a better square.

Leave the excellent and good moves alone

If your move was excellent or good, move on.

A game review shows what each of your moves was worth and what you should have played. The move quality panel in insights shows how your moves spread from brilliant to blunder across your games.