Reviewing Chess Games for Improvement Purposes

There is plenty of talk about whether someone goes “straight to the computer” after a game or if they analyze themselves first. Purists say that we should use our own brain first. I’ve went back and forth on this over the years depending on how much a loss bothered me and/or how strong my feeling was that I missed something big. Overall, I think that the majority of club players treat game review as an exercise of finding out what moves were right and which were wrong.

Over the past several years, my attitude on analyzing my games has had a major shift. I believe that the main point of reviewing games for improvement purposes is to FIND PATTERNS in your incorrect play. Ultimately, chess is so vast that your chances of getting whatever specific position on the board again in your lifetime is extremely low. Therefore, knowing that you should have played Nxe5 in that particular game is the minimum piece of knowledge to make any sort of difference. The real question is WHY DIDN’T YOU FIND IT?

Deeply thinking about your games and how the same concept difficulties keep recurring is where improvement lies. The lower rated you are the lower the fruit hangs for you. The higher you get the less obvious the adjustments you need to make are going to be. To go to another level of depth, I believe that core aspects of our personalities either serve or inhibit us in playing our best chess.

For me, I’ve always struggled with Time Pressure. There are all kinds of recommendations on how to fix this. Most logical always seemed to be the idea where you divide the time control by the amount of moves in an average game and then stick to the “budget”. It’s only been the last few years that it occurred to me that the piece of advice that isn’t given about fixing Time Pressure is to just play simpler moves. I realized that I was resistant to this because at my core, my personality is always trying to work the hardest and be the best I can be. So, it’s against my nature to even solve my time pressure problem because it runs against who I am as a person.

To get the most out of analyzing our games we need to be thinking deeply not just about the moves and variations of the game, but how we as a human being came to play the moves that we did. You shouldn’t just be learning about what the computer says is the right move, but about yourself as a person. I think that can be why it’s so difficult to improve past a certain point. Once we hit a certain level, especially as an adult, it can come down to whether we can work on ourselves as much as our chess.

So, go ahead and put the game into the computer right after you finish if you want. The real improvement is in finding out the “why” rather than the “what”. The computer can’t tell you that part. 

     P.S. You can visit this post on my newly created Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/muskeebooks/p/reviewing-chess-games-for-improvement?r=1pvlsb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true