How analyzing my own games without an engine helped me improve.

Analyzing your own games with/without an engine is one of the best ways to improve. I would prioritize recent games. Old games may tell you what you misunderstood, but not always what is holding you back now.

If you can find a partner and do this together, it can improve your game immensely.

During the pandemic in 2020, I had a 2-month camp with my second GM, Burak Firat. We basically only did this. We analyzed all my recent games without an engine for hours, then checked what the engine said.

Those long analysis sessions made one thing very clear to us: my main issue was the opening relative to other +2600 players. After that, we seriously worked on improving that part.

It led to a great run for me: winning the Azerbaijan Championship, reaching the last 16 in the World Cup, and overall becoming a better player. I remember that soon people started getting worried about my prep.

Engine analysis is useful, but if you start with the engine, you skip the most important part: understanding how you were thinking during the game. When you analyze with an engine first, you act like everything was easy and become too judgmental. But if you analyze first on your own, even when you know, “okay, this move was a blunder,” you still ask: what is actually happening after this move? Then you realize things were not as easy as they looked when you checked with the engine. And you learn.