How To Analyze Your Own Games

Eighty-five years ago GM Mikhail Botvinnik won the premier tournament of the year, the Soviet Chess Championship, with a very impressive score 12.5/17 (+8−0=9). Later, in his book about the tournament, Botvinnik shared his methods of chess preparation. Botvinnik considered one of the most important methods to be the analysis of his own games, including to publish such analysis in order to get a critical feedback.

While chess is significantly different today compared to 85 years ago, the main points of Botvinnik's recommendations are as valid today as ever. Of course, these days you don't need to publish your analysis in order to get a critical response from other chess players since your chess engine will do it for you instantly. Still, you should analyze your games on your own first and only then check it with an engine. This way you'll get the maximum benefit from analysis of your games.

I am going to use a game of one of my students as an example of such an analysis. As a rule, whenever I use games of my students for my articles I withdraw the names of the players. Here I'll make an exception, because by winning this game my student became a master, so it can be considered a serious professional game now—and besides, he also gave me his permission to do so. I already used a game of his for a previous article, but at that point he was a little kid, rated USCF 1543, so I removed his name then. His opponent, GM Dmitry Gurevich, is a good friend of mine and also the nicest person I ever met. He is always rooting for young talented players and, by the way, was the first coach of the super-talented IM Alice Lee. While a loss is always painful, I am sure that Dmitry will be happy to know that it helped a young kid to fulfil his dream.

Now, without further ado, let's look at the game.

Up to this point, the game doesn't really need any annotations, since the opponents have reached a well-known theoretical position. There were two games played over 50 years ago that defined the theory of this opening line:

GM Boris Spassky vs. GM Tigran Petrosian, 1969

GM Lev Polugaevsky vs. GM Mikhail Tal, 1969

In his excellent book My Great Predecessors, GM Garry Kasparov analyzes both games and recommends 14...h6 in order to avoid the sacrifice that Polugaevsky executed in his game against Tal.

Gurevich follows Kasparov's recommendation. Even after that move, the standard continuation 15.d5 was still good for White, but Ryan goes his own way and pretty soon the game reaches a very interesting position. Here White came up with a very strong idea that helped him to create threats to Black's king. Can you guess White's next four moves?

It is a very creative idea, which I have never seen before. Nf6 is a very standard tactical shot when there is a white pawn on e5 and the knight is on e4, but Nf3-e5-g4-f6 is completely new to me. If you, my dear readers, have seen this idea before, please share in the comments section the game(s) where it happened.

Meanwhile, in our game, Black's king became very vulnerable. The knight cannot be taken and therefore Black had to play Kh8, leaving the dangerous knight so close to his king.

And now we have a critical moment of the game. What would you play here for White?

In the game, White instead moved the knight from its excellent post and immediately lost all his advantage:

While it might look like White is ready for a draw by repeating moves, in reality this is a very strong psychological trick that I learned from none other than Garry Kasparov. I explained this concept more than 10 years ago in this article, and of course Ryan was familiar with the feint, which we discussed numerous times. Naturally, Gurevich rejected a draw because his position was slightly better, and the game continued:

I really like Ryan's 32.h3 and 35.Kh2. It is a useful idea to move your king to a safer square before engaging the rest of your pieces to attack your opponent's king. We discussed this topic a couple of years ago in this article and yes, as you can see there, Kasparov used this idea in his games as well!

So, what have we learned by analyzing this game in-depth? A lot of things! Let's summarize our analysis of White's play:

• Ryan's opening knowledge was quite good, which brought him a promising position.
• Then he found a very original and creative idea Nf3-e5-g4-f6! which gave him a significant advantage.
• 22. Ne4? was a very bad mistake which lost all the advantage. This counter-intuitive move looks plain ugly—you don't want to move a knight from such a tremendous position! The mistake was caused by a wrong plan of transferring the knight to d6, where it looks good, but in reality it is not as dangerous as Nf6!
• After the advantage was gone, Ryan didn't get upset by the unexpected turn. He played quite opportunistically and created all kinds of problems for his experienced opponent. Ryan's knowledge of typical middlegame patterns was very helpful there.
• After White managed to grab the initiative again, he played flawlessly and didn't give his opponent a second chance.

If you analyze your games this way, you'll quickly see the strong and weak sides of your chess, which will help you to become a better chess player!