• On the road to checkmate, it can be said, that capturing your opponent’s pieces is good, and avoiding the captures of your own pieces is good. Capturing a piece removes all its moves from the board permanently.
• Queening pawns is good, because a Queen gives you a lot more moves than a pawn gives.
• Developing pieces is good, because it gives your pieces more moves, and gives them shorter turn numbers to captures.
• Space advantage is a good, because you have more moves available than the opponent has.
• An inactive piece is less valuable, and an active piece is more valuable.

It can be said, that the road to checkmate increases your own moves (development and queening) and reduces your opponent’s moves (restraining and captures), until the opponent has no moves to avoid your checkmating moves.

• As checkmate ends the game, and as chess is a game of reducing your opponent’s moves until checkmate, it can be said that the checkmate’s value is: reducing all the mated player’s moves to 0.
• Hence the goal in chess is to maximize the ratio of “own moves / (own moves + opponent’s moves)” to 1, and avoid the ratio 0. The game starts from a ratio of 0.5, plus minus the effects of calculation and actual play.
• The best moves are those, whose futures nett the highest number of moves, the opponent’s losses netting plus.