How and when should you calculate

Title.

I watched Gothamchess's video but it didn't help a lot.

Please help

You should calculate when both you and your opponent have only a handful of meaningful alternatives to choose from.

What's the point of trying to calculate if you have twelve reasonable moves to choose between, each of which can be met by any of a dozen different replies from your opponent?

You should calculate when it is your turn.
Identify 3 candidate moves. Calculate what follows. Evaluate. Select your move. Check it is no blunder. Play it.

Pointless until you've reached a position in which the move-choices for each side are restricted. It is quite literally a waste of clock-time trying to calculate deeply in a position where each side has a wide choice of perfectly reasonable moves. In positions of that sort, your move should be determined by strategic consideration... or even by intuition.

You should calculate when a position is sharp or when you are evaluating different choices or identifying tactics. At your rating, it’s taking free pieces and easy checkmates tbh

#5
"a waste of clock-time"
++ Missing an opportunity is worse than burning some clock time.
"your move should be determined by strategic consideration... or even by intuition."
++ Even then you should consider 3 candidate move. Sometimes the move order matters.

it depends a lot what time control you play.. but simply calculate at moments when you think that there could be some tactic stuff.. also, when there are some principally different ways how to continue the game.. ( interesting exchanges.. changing pawn structure..) then is good to evaluate the ending positions of those posibilities.. but its always a comprimse with how much time you have..

You should calculate whenever, in your own judgement, you have the time to do so and the situation is sufficiently complex that it is required. Sometimes due to prior preparation you will know the next move. In these situations calculation is unnecessary. You might just have to try it and see where you run out of time and where you make mistakes, then adapt accordingly. You'll find obvious situations where the next move starts off a chain of exchange of material. In these situations you should always calculate because one player has a good chance of benefiting significantly from the exchange. In other situations it will be more difficult to anticipate a pivotal move, but that is one of the most important differences between a high ranked player and a lower one. There's no quick fix for that.

Even if you calculate you will miss your opportunities if you don't decide what lines to calculate. Many times I really don't see what there is to calculate about a move if you don't count calculation that I do to make sure that my move is not a blunder. For many moves, the only thing that I calculate is during the phase of checking whether my move is a blunder.

I second this. I still calculate when I check whether my move is a blunder though, I calculate forcing moves that my opponent has.

You should calculate when there are forcing moves. In the beginning this is checks, captures, and threats. For more advanced players there might be an important positional move (a simple example is needing to castle to get the king safe).

Having a definite objective with limited ways to do it / limited ways to prevent it makes calculation possible (and necessary). Pretty much what @blueemu was saying.

In most positions there are at least a few quick things to calculate, so it's not like @tygxc was wrong to say calculate when it's your turn, but in some positions there's essentially nothing to calculate and you're just trying to understand where the pieces belong / what the main idea is... for players who don't / can't use strategy yet, then of course you calculate every move, because you'll be randomly looking at sequences until you find something that looks kind of active.

Yeah, I'm a bit surprised that anyone was arguing with me on this.