Why analysis of your own games is important?

    We all want to review our games, some of us want to see again how they won the game, how they gave mate, or conducted great combination with sacrifices, others want to see what they did wrong and how they can avoid the same mistake again. I personally want to analyze my defeats more, than my victories. That is because, sometimes when I play against much more stronger opponent then me I can’t find my mistake, and when I look more closely I see that my defeat was a set of many inaccuracies. Looking at a game like that makes you realize how much more you need to improve. During my trainings I have seen many games of the strong players analyzing them I realized that they all make mistakes, and sometimes even top grandmasters play extremely weak moves. Of course, those mistakes are very rare, but they do exist. What distinguishes strong player from average or weak player is his ability to find his mistakes and to learn how not to make them again. While other players just look their games superficially, strong players analyze very deep especially their defeats.

Nowadays ones improvement largely depends on his quality of the analysis of his own games. Of course, you should learn the openings, middlegame, endgame, train calculation, but on your own games you learn the most. Our own games are closer to us, we have played them, resolved problems, took decisions, calculated.. In the analysis we can see if the evaluation of the position that we made was right, if the variations that we saw were correct and many other things that might not been noticed during the game from us and our opponent. During the game we often make choices, choosing one continuation over another, and we are the only ones that know the reason for that, in the analysis we are able to see if our choice was right or wrong. Another benefit from analyzing your own games is that you become more familiar with the positions that arise after the openings you play, which makes you more experienced and more knowledgeable than you opponent in that particular position.

The first important thing to do in our analysis is to find our mistakes, after that we need to find the reason for those mistakes and then find a material in order to cover our weaknesses. Another part that we must concentrate is the opening stage. During the game we forget about the moves we prepared before, and the analysis will tell us where we could play better or it will show us some new idea that we previously haven’t been aware of. Also, I always tell my students to write the thinking time after every move they played so that we can improve the time management and avoid time troubles. In my opinion the best way to analyze a game is to see it first carefully by yourself and then to see it with computer or with strong player.

Below I will show you how the analysis helped me win against strong opponents

I analysed this game very profoundly, and I found my mistake. The fruits of my analysis I got to take 3 years later by winning very important game