How to Analyze by Garry Kasparov

You have to analyze your own games. Analyzing your own games is vital for your progress because that's the ultimate source of inspiration.

And when I say inspiration, it's more like a learning experience. But if you want to understand how to get better, you have to look exactly at the moves you made, and find out the nature of your mistakes. But also to understand why you made good moves in certain positions.

Learning about yourself is impossible-- is absolutely impossible without being very thorough analyst of your own games. And you have to be very honest, brutally honest, even relentlessly honest with your own games.

Don't try to please yourself with some commentaries, oh, why this is here? I made a bad move because somebody was talking loudly, or my opponent looked at me, just it wasn't very pleasant. Don't look for any excuses. It's all about you, about your moves, about the quality of your moves. And better you understand the nature of your mistakes, better you understand the nature of your game, good and bad moves, better are your chances of making fast improvement.

While being a professional player, I had a habit that you have to glance at your game almost instantly. When it's over, you have to analyze it while it's all fresh in your mind. You try to understand what's happened in the game. And then you can set it aside, because you have another game probably the next day. And then you have to go back. And you have to find out what did go wrong. But also you have to find out what did go wrong with your opponent. Because if you won the game, it doesn't mean that you haven't made a mistake. Most likely is because your opponent made the last mistake. It's very important that you find these mistakes, opponent's mistakes and your mistakes.

The greatest danger it's what I call gravity of your past success. If we win, we're always tempted to consider it as a result of our greatness. We made great moves. We crushed our opponent. Let's move on. But I bet you there is a mistake. And if you don't find these mistakes, if you didn't find what's went wrong in your game before they did, they will be ahead of you next time.

So to be ahead of a curve, you always have to analyze your own games, even if you win. And that's what I did all the time. Studying classical games always helps. Because at the end of the day, it's about patterns. And working and find the best place for learning patterns if not starting the games of those giants, who have invented these ideas. I spend a lot of time working on a series of books called My Great Predecessors. And one of the things I discovered in the process of working on these books is that very often, in the crucial moments of these games, they made better decisions at the boards, at the moment where all your senses are mobilized.