Direct Claiming
Direct Claiming is Claiming with a payoff. When every candidate for a digit in a row or column sits inside one 3×3 box, you can already erase it from the rest of the box — that's regular Claiming. But if that erasure leaves some other row or column with only one spot left for the digit, you get to place it right away instead of waiting for the next round.
What is Direct Claiming?
Regular Claiming already does half the work: a digit's candidates in a row or column all sit in one box, so the rest of the box can't have it. Direct Claiming just keeps going — it looks at the other rows and columns crossing that box and checks whether one of them ends up with a single remaining candidate for the digit. If it does, that's the placement. You skip the separate Hidden Single step and get the answer in one move.
How to spot it
First find a Claiming pattern — a row or column where a digit's candidates are all in one box. Then, instead of moving on, trace the other lines that cross that box and imagine the digit gone from every cell in the box except the source line. If one of those lines now has only one candidate left for the digit, that's your cell. Pencil marks help a lot here, because you're juggling two lines and a box at the same time.
The logic
The source row or column must contain the digit, and all its candidates are in one box — so the digit has to sit in that box on the source line. That locks it out of the rest of the box. Now any other line crossing the box has lost some candidates for the digit. If only one candidate remains on such a line, that cell has to be the digit, because there's nowhere else left on that line.