How to Analyze Your Own Chess Games For Beginners

Before I begin explaining how to analyze your own chess games, it is important to understand why it's so important in the first place. In my own personal opinion, if you could only do one thing to increase your rating, analyzing your own chess games after you played them would be the most important thing to do, more important than watching chess videos, getting lessons, or doing tactics trainer. In fact, it can be even more important than playing more games!

Too many beginner/intermediate players I know fall into the trap of playing a ton of chess games without ever taking a look back and wondering why they never improve. The reason is simple, you don't learn by playing, you learn by analyzing and learning from your mistakes. If there's one thing you get from this post, it's this...

"Playing will get you nowhere if all you do is reinforce your bad ideas. By analyzing and finding your strengths and weaknesses, that is the only sure way to gradually increase your rating over time."

With every analysis you are learning what to do, or what not to do in any given position. With every piece of knowledge you can see yourself getting better and with every pieces of knowledge your rating will definitely increase.

Now, onto the core part of this forum post, how to analyze your own games. Watch the following quick but informative video by skipping to the 2:03 mark for the full explanation with my own personal example of how I analyze my own chess games, and how you should too.

How to Analyze Your Own Chess Games

If you have any questions whatsoever, about analyzing your own chess games or about chess in general, feel free to ask, and I will be happy to answer any of them.

Thank you, sir. It was really helpful .I subscribed your channel & hopping that we will get more useful videos like this . And feeling glad to be a friend of your list(chess.com).

yay! sean!

ummmmmmmmmmmmm...

thanks!

but why do you have to do that?

Thanks Sean.

I mean I am not in you class any more.

Thank you!

slap!

Thank you kind sir! If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Doesn't matter ^_^. You should never stop learning!

You are welcome!

Thank you!

Thanks for this!

I don't think it would help you out very much

Hi Sean. Are you interested in video ideas? Something I'd like to understand better is trading off your opponents good pieces preferably for your bad pieces. I'm aware of good and bad bishops but I presume there are many other examples. It would be helpful to see examples of good and bad pieces in different positions. I imagine this might interest advanced beginners. Often the GM will explain a position and comment that a piece is bad but not explain why. Sometimes it is obviously trapped, othertimes the reason appears more subtle. What I'd like to be able to do is look at a position and identify the good and bad pieces (if they exist). Something that helps this would be great.

I presume it depends on the features in the position such as weak squares, open diagonals etc. so what might be of interest is a video on middle game positions that emphasises good vs bad pieces. Just a thought.

ummmmmmm...

If you watched the video , it would tell u a completely free resource to use if you don't have premium which is almost as good as chess.com's... Lichess analysis!