!?

The combination !? marks a move as interesting, worthy of attention, or speculative. Speculative means that it tries to create opportunities, such as an attack or a sacrifice, deliberately giving up a piece or pawn to gain another benefit, although the idea has not been proved fully correct.

The mark is not a safe recommendation. The move may be good, risky, or even inferior to another option after careful analysis, but it contains an idea worth examining. Its meaning therefore depends heavily on the annotator and the position.

Order matters. ?! usually leans toward criticism, while !? leans toward interest and possibility. ! is more direct praise. A program may read !? in Portable Game Notation (PGN), the plain-text game format. When saving the file in standard form, it replaces !? with $5, a dollar sign followed by the number 5.