Brilliant Moves And Beastly Blunders: JETINATE’s Full Guide To Game Review
Back to TopINTRODUCTION 😉
Ah yes- game review. Game review is one of the key selling points of chess.com, providing information about your moves, highlighting the blunders and brilliancies, and giving you an accuracy score and an estimated elo based on that game you requested to be reviewed. With all this stuff going on, it can get confusing, and honestly quite overwhelming. So, I have taken the time today to explain what game review is, the features that it uses, and more! So, let’s start, shall we?
Table Of Contents
1. Evaluation Bar/Evaluation Graph 📊
2. Accuracy And Estimated Elo 💯
3. Brilliant Move 😱
4. Great Move 🙂
5. Best Move ⭐
6. Excellent Move 👍
7. Good Move ☑️
8. Book Move 📖
9. Inaccuracy Move/Interesting Move ⁉️
10. Mistake Move ❓
11. Miss Move ❌
12. Blunder Move 😵
13. The Coach Craziness 🥸
14. Conclusion 👋
Fun Fact: The evaluation bar cannot rise in your favour when it is your move; the swinging comes from their moves and their mistakes. The reason for this is the engine has already calculated all the best moves before you have played a move, and when you play a move, the engine has already evaluated it, unless you do one of those positions in those forums on chess.com where it breaks the engine…
Evaluation Bar/Evaluation Graph 📊
The Evaluation Bar is a key tool in game review, as it tells you who the position favors. Let's say it says +3.00. That means that white is up 3 evaluation points, which roughly translates to being down a knight or bishop. If it says -3.00, that means that black is the one that has an advantage. The "+" indicates that white is winning, and the "-" means that black is winning. The evaluation bar swings up and down telling you who is winning move by move. Also, you may be thinking, can I use this in a game? It doesn’t tell me the best move, it’s just a moving bar. But, the thing is that when the game progresses the bar swings, giving you hints if they blundered, and thus influencing moves that you might have not seen if you didn’t know that you were winning.
Also, when you click game review, it shows you a little graph of how the game went.
The gray line in the middle symbolizes equality, and when the graph dips up or down, it goes away from the mid-point. When it dips below the line, black is winning. If it dips above the line, white is winning. The little dots symbolize different types of moves. Brown is a book move, red is a blunder, green is the best move, orange is a mistake, yellow is an inaccuracy (which does not appear here), blue is a great move, pink is a miss move, green is an excellent move, and a good move is a dull green. If you don't have time for a deep analysis, this can be useful to skim through the game and see where you went wrong.
When you click on game review, you will be greeted with your accuracy. This accuracy score is a percentage of how many of the computer (aka best) moves that you played. For example, 10% is horrible (barley any good moves), 50% is alright (some good moves, a lot of bad ones though), and 100% is perfect (all the moves were deemed the best according to the engine).
Also in the homepage of your game review, you should see a little box at the bottom of the page with your "estimated elo" based on the game you played and the moves you saw. But, chess.com messed up with this one in my opinion since it bases the rating off your actual rating, so if you're a 100 rated player that had the game of your career, too bad, because chess.com might give you a 500 estimated elo. Brutal!
I also must mention the little annotations below the game rating. These tell you how the player did in that stage of the game. For example, if you get a green star in the opening, a double question mark in the middlegame, and an exclamation mark in the endgame, that means you likely played the opening well, blundered the middlegame, but played the endgame like a boss. Hover over the icons to see your accuracy in that portion of the game.
A brilliant move is a move that usually consists of a sacrifice of sorts. The game review gives these out rarely, so getting one is quite the achievement. Out of all the chess moves, these feel the best to play and to look at game review and say "wow, I actually got it". Brilliant moves don't have to be flashy, though, they can be silent killers, like a tiger hiding in the jungle, waiting for its chance to strike. Also, Levy Rozman, also known as GothamChess on YT, has inspired many brilliant rook sacrifices with his famous line, THE ROOOOOK. So thank you to him for inspiring a generation of brilliant moves to come.
In my opinion, brilliant moves are the parts of chess that bring more people to our game. A world without brilliant moves, well, I can’t even imagine how bored I would get. Brilliant moves are the best, and you can’t change my mind.
After the brilliant move comes the great move, who is often overshadowed by its brother, the brilliant move, but is equally as important. What does a “great” move mean? Well, it doesn’t have to be a sacrifice, but it could also be stuff like capturing a piece or finding mate in one. A great move is like “nice job you found the idea”. While it is not as flashy as a brilliant move, they still can change the course of the game dramatically, depending on if you find it or not. Also, for some reason, when you play a great move game review gives you an option to share you move via text or something. I mean, I get it when you are sharing a brilliant move, but imagine if you are sleeping, and your phone wakes you up. You get up, and it says 1 message. So you click on that and your bro’s like: ya man I got a great move. I would block that guy so that he doesn’t wake me up with his “great” moves.
The best move is actually the same as the brilliant and great moves since they are all considered the best move. So, why is one considered "not as impressive"? Well, brilliant and great moves alter the course of the game- without them you might find yourself in a rather difficult endeavor. Best moves, on the other hand, do not necessarily alter the course of the game and are usually not a flashy sacrifice. Despite this, getting the best move shows that you are as powerful as stockfish... at least for one turn.
Here, for example, black moved the bishop to e7. Is it game-changing? No. Is it flashy? No. But is the best computer move? Yes! That is how to tell if it is a best move.
An excellent move refers to a move that might have been the 2nd or 3rd best move. These are essentially the same as best moves, but technically slightly worse. Or, as game review puts it: “It’s basically the best move- be proud!” Okay, I don’t know WHO is like bragging about getting an excellent move and being proud about lol.
A good move is a move that is alright, but is not the best move. For example, if you miss activating your queen, and play a different move that does not throw your position away, that is a “good” move.
A move becomes a "book move" if it is a recognized part of accepted chess theory, documented in chess literature or databases, and played decently during the opening phase of the game. Once you leave theory, the system switches to evaluating the move’s quality instead of labeling it a book move (or, in better words, it stops being lazy and actually tries to evaluate your moves instead of automatically saying it is a book move).
"Best by test"
-- Some random dude named Bobby or something
Inaccuracy Move/Interesting Move ⁉️
An inaccurate move is not really a bad move, but a move that could be greatly improved. Most inaccuracies aren't game changing, since most are just like blundering a pawn or locking your piece behind pawns. And then there is the interesting move, which is the inaccuracy move logo reversed (which would be !?). It symbolizes a move to think about, one that might be good but is unclear and/or risky.
A "mistake" move is a move that is not good. It could be a move that blunders 2 pawns or a move that loses the exchange. A mistake move............................... (pov: me tryin' to think of more stuff to put in this chapter).................. is a... mistake?? Idk what else to say lol.
The miss move is the most misunderstood move of them all. People think a miss move is so bad. But, a miss move is simply saying you missed something. Let's say you have checkmate in 1 on the board, but you take their queen instead. That is an example of a miss move. Still winning, but not as easily and quickly, unlike a blunder which would throw the game away.
Blunder moves symbolize a move that gives away a large chunk of advantage, possibly losing a minor piece or higher, or even blundering checkmate. Blunders can be painful, especially if you are the one playing, but they can also be milked for YouTube content (I’m looking at you GothamChess). Blunders are goldmines of learning experiences. If you make a blunder, don’t shrug it off. See where you went wrong! That is how you improve!
Note- don’t go and play the scholar’s mate after seeing the picture above. I just said that because I don’t want to get 100 DMs from 200 elo players saying it didn’t work.
If you didn’t know (which you should know if you have done game review once), there is this dude telling you about each move when you go through your game in game review. But, what many people don’t know is that you CAN actually change him to be something different!
Will changing the coach make you a better player? No. But do you want to hear Levy screaming the rook at your face? Of course you do. I like this addition, since it makes the game review feel less generic and more customizable and fun.
Tip: Want to hear the “roooook” infinite times? Do a brilliant rook sacrifice, then change your coach to Levy, and you can hear it over and over again.
Note: I think you have to be a beta tester to have these coaches, though.
So, after all that, you might be thinking, “what am I going to have for dinner tonight?”… Or you could be thinking after all that reading “at the end of the day, is game review good”? And, yes, it is good, but analyzing the games yourself or with a coach is so much better.
In conclusion, game review is actually decent, and quite interesting.
Do you like game review? Tell me in the comments!
Okay… that is about it. See you next time, and remember:
Be yourself!
— JETINATE 2025
