Analysing Your Own Games

A practical process for reviewing your own games and improving steadily.

Reviewing one's own games is the single most effective method of improvement for a club player. The purpose of analysis is not to produce a finished commentary but to identify recurring mistakes and missed opportunities, and to record them in a form that can be referred to later.

A four-step process

1. Annotate without an engine first

Record, for each important decision, the move you made, the moves you considered, and the reasons for your choice. The aim is to reconstruct what you were thinking at the board. An engine consulted at this stage only tells you the right answer. It does not show you where your thinking went wrong.

2. Identify the critical moments

Most games are decided by a small number of moves: the first significant departure from theory, a lost tempo, a missed tactic, or the move that converted an advantage. Mark them. An ordinary game has two or three such moments, rarely more.

3. Compare with an engine

Run the game through a strong engine, examining only the critical moments. The point is not to memorise the engine's line but to understand the difference between your evaluation and its evaluation. A short note on each difference is worth more than a long one that restates the engine output.

4. Record what you want to remember

A running list of recurring errors — forgetting to defend the back rank, exchanging active pieces, playing automatic recaptures, missing simple tactics — is more useful than a thick folder of annotated games. Reread the list before each session of play.

Practical improvement

Alongside analysis, three activities produce faster improvement than any single other:

Tactical puzzles. Beginners benefit most from solving large numbers of simple puzzles, focused on the motifs described in the tactics chapter. The chess puzzle index provides a graded collection.

A limited opening repertoire. Choose one opening as White and one defence against each of 1.e4 and 1.d4 as Black, and play them consistently. Refer to the opening directory for theory. Breadth is less important than depth.

Slow games. Long time controls produce games worth analysing. Blitz games usually do not. A mix of online and over-the-board play is the usual club-player balance.

Engines and puzzle trainers are valuable tools but should supplement, not replace, the player's own judgement at the board.