Improve your skills from your blunders
This advice is for those just starting in chess or those that have restarted back into chess after a lapse of years. I hadn't played in 20 years and wish I knew this when I started back up.
The main method I use to improve my skills in chess is the analysis of completed games. I suggest sticking to daily games, you can make your moves as fast you want, but really you should be exploring what you believe is the best move that the engine would pick. After the analysis, you'll see the "Best" moves if you didn't make it.
The quickest way to improve your skills, gameplay, and rating is to focus on eliminating blunders, especially "missed wins". You could also improve by minimizing moves identified as mistakes and inaccuracies by the analysis. You should perform the analysis while the game is fresh in your mind. You should also check that you are capitalizing on your opponent's blunders with your following move when checking the analysis.
How to analyze your game
You'll come up with your own methods that help you learn from your past games, but this seems to work for me, and works both in the mobile app and on the website.
- Fire up the analysis, you can click on key moments or:
- Step through each move until it's not a "book" move or "best" move.
- Try to understand what you were thinking when you made a move to see what thinking method would have made you choose the engine's "best" move instead.
- Only skip ahead moves if the moves made are "best" moves
- If the "best" move doesn't make sense, play it out in the self-analysis so I can see how the game could have been different.
Example analysis of one of my recent games:
My game with the infamous Podcaster and Twitter influencer Bryan Sharpe (HotepJesus) who is near my current rank at the time, but he's really much better than his ranking online and thus far more superior to my skills. I will challenge him when I feel I've gained significant skills to test my mettle against him. I have a select few opponents that I only play to see how far I progressed in leveling up my skills.
In this game, at move 25, I thought I had gained the upper hand on HotepJesus when I captured his Rook, but the engine evaluation still favored him with a +6, even though I was up +4 piece points. He did have my King cornered but I fought off threats of mate with trading pieces.
Then at move 44 apparently HotepJesus had his first blunder, which completely eluded me in the game. Just before this move, we were even per the evaluation engine, but this blunder apparently put black favored with a -5. Needlessly though, I should have doubled my rooks as suggested by the "best" move (also making it 2 moves away from the attacking knight), but instead a big mistake of just moving it out of the way.
With me having 2 black rooks vs. his white rook-knight pair, I was trying to be cautious to try to get a win or a draw out of this game. Then I made my move 47 blunder (image at the top). White had just pushed me off my back rank, I was worried about that passed c-file pawn getting promoted. I knew my rooks couldn't get to the c-file. I was torn between using my King as a barrier for the passed pawn and possibly losing to some checkmate or the plan I went with, to get around the pawn to try to support my rooks to mate his King.
I chose wrong! He pushed his pawn, I should have retreated my king back to prevent it from promotion, but instead, I got greedy to eliminate his knight which was my demise, after a few more moves his newly promoted queen captured a rook and the game was done.
Lesson learned:
Always have a plan for a passed pawn or it will become your loss in the end.
