Studying the Masters

   Someone once told me in addition to studying and annotating your own games, you should study a master. My question is this, how much truth to this? And second if there is truth which Master should you start studying?

I think there can be a lot of value in studying the games of the Masters, after all they clearly know what they're doing.  I think there are many good choices for which master(s) to study.  One is to pick a master whose style you enjoy and would like to emulate.  Another interesting idea is to study the World Champions, in the order that they became champion; that way you get to see the progression of chess ideas, the development of chess thought, so to speak.  Just my opinion, I hope it helps!

There are two approaches that I've heard of here: a) study / emulate some strong player whose games / style you feel attracted to, and b) study well-annotated games of any strong player to come to understand why he/she is making the moves that you see - to begin to understand the thinking of strong players.

Either or both of those approaches can be helpful. Proteges need mentors. The great masters can serve as mentors to us.

The way I study GM's games are by studying their moves.

How they open up their games. Knowing book opening lines are sometimes not good enough. GM like Topalov don't play book moves. He is popularly known as a Street Fighter. It is interesting to see how he evaluates his move to confuse his opponents. Try to understand from GM's perspective why they made such a move and why don't their opponent takes the sacrifice, etc.

You would be surprise, after detailed analysis of GM's game, you could improve your own chess repertoires much better. The obvious reason is, you had taken a step to think how the masters think. How deep is your thought/lines depends on how deligent you are in your analysis.

Look through some grandmaster games and note some of the tactical shots. Notice how they transition from opening to middle game, middle game to end game. There will be GM's whose games you enjoy more than others. Study them. Morphy and Capablanca are two good legends to start with. 

Get ahold of The Mammoth Book of The World's Greatest Chess Games. It presents games from all sorts of masters. If one of them uses a style that you would like to emulate, then try to find books that present lots of games by that particular master.

Thanks everyone for their advice and insight. Please keep it coming, I believe it is giving me a good starting point.

Agreed. I was told the best way to study the master games is in chronological order, and I agree, taking special note of the hypermodern movement.

You should of course study your own games, and find your own mistakes.

But you should also study the super GMs. Who you ask? The super GMs, who is playing the same opening as you are!
There's also a book by Lars Bo Hansen, titled 'Improve your chess by learning from the champions'. 

Every top player has studied lots of master games. Even back in Morphy's day he was studying his contemporary's games. I suggest you start with Morphy. His games are very easy to understand and extremely inspiring/entertaining. Just head over to chessgames.com and start browsing. Here is his famous "Opera Game" to wet your feet:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1233404

It even has its own wiki page describing the circumstances of the game:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_game

If you love attacking chess then I suggest you try out Marshall and Alekhine after Morphy. Both of them wrote "my best games" collections where they annotated their own games. Alekhine's annotations in particular are full of useful lessons and insights.

Dadwhosmilesnow: assuming that your rating is relatively accurate I would not recommend wasting too much time studying masters just yet. If you feel interested by those games then there's obviously no harm in studying them (I agree that Morphy especially but also other players from about same era would be a good place to start). I just think that you won't understand too much about these games before improving further and therefore studying them won't improve your game that fast.

For your amusement you can study master games but if you want to improve you will probably benefit much more from tactical exercises, playing a lot, maybe some endgames etc.

Thank you for your honesty, I am trying to learn from my mistakes, studying tactics,etc.