Identifying bad moves during analysis (450 rated)

Hello, 

I would like to analyze my games,  but am so new to (and bad at) chess that I'm not sure what makes a move bad other than if it blunders. I see plenty of videos on analysis, but they appear to assume a level of strategy awareness that I do not have. 

These videos also say to ask yourself why you made that bad move. I'm unsure what I'm looking for to answer that question.

Any help on this topic is appreciated.  Even a "learn xyz" would be helpful.

Thank you!

Edit: my rating is 438, I looked it up. 

I've looked at two of your games to see if I could identify some weaknesses and give you advice. Against noagil6 you played really well. Against ackillez you did not. You hung your Queen multiple times and missed multiple opportunities to capture their hanging Queen.

Your biggest flaw is lack of board vision. You miss threats and opportunities because you simply overlook them.  My suggestion is to focus on that for now.  Study tactics (puzzles) and play more games, And for every move check if you have considered all candidate moves before you make a decision. That should be enough to get better. Strategy will come later.

Holy cow, thank you!!

Am I doing myself a disservice by playing 10 minute chess and not faster/slower?

Hi! My name is Lauren Goodkind and I’m a respected  chess coach and chess YouTuber who helps beginners out : 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP5SPSG_sWSYPjqJYMNwL_Q

Send me one of your games via https://chessbylauren.com/contact and I'll be happy to analyze the game for free on my YouTube channel on Sunday livestream from 1-2PM PST.  Ask me questions in real time!  

 This is a great way to improve!

Play 15|10 and use 40 seconds per move, finish on increment.
That gives you time to think
and to check that your intended move is no blunder before playing it.

Thank you all for your responses!

Where do people post their self analysis? Also,  it's there any easy way to share?

 I disagree with the advice given above. At low rating levels analyzing your own games is too difficult. And it's not needed. Your games get decided by pieces that are given away. That's okay, everyone starts there, but it does mean questions of wanting to attack the king don't come into play yet. Just focus on tactics and opportunities to win or not lose your pieces. If you want, you can train yourself by looking over your last game and look for 1 move blunders: where you or your opponent hung a piece that could be taken. Ask yourself why you didn't see that you or your opponent could have taken the piece. What did you miss? Afterward let the engine tell you if there were more 1 move blunders. Ask yourself why you missed that in the game and during analysis too. Afterwards you're done with that game. This way you train and study your tactics. Posting a game online or looking at more things isn't useful yet. You won't know which advice is right and you might get advice about things youi're not ready to learn yet. Maybe someone would point out that you should study the opening for example, which at your level is completely wrong. Analyzing games in depth doesn't help you yet, just focus on tactics.

Thank you, RAU4ever! 

Late last night on very little sleep I tilted hard and dropped from 450 to 388. Whoops....

Early in the day I played a couple games with 0 blunders. My last game of the night I blundered 10+ times.

* her

(sorry, pet peeve, I know you had no way of knowing and appreciate your help)

Edit:

Also though, what kind of other analysis is there than what you describe?

Would agree that analysis of own games - a la chess.com - is probably not the best way to go - because it doesn't give you a structure to build from.

My 2 cent are:-

(a) Obtain a good 'Chess For Beginners' book - this will form the foundation of your future learning.  Chess learning - like most formal systems, like Maths - is a pyramid, you must have a solid and COMPLETE base to work from.  Work between your games and the book - analysis your game in this way without an engine and compare your move to the advice from the book.

Frankly any 'Chess For Beginners' book will do, but you can have fun selecting the one you want. 

(b) Start doing chess.com lessons, right from the beginning. These are free but rate of learning is limited by the paywall - i.e. slow. Record in a notebook any important things you learn or mark up your 'Beginner's Book'.

(c) Do the puzzles BUT use the custom format and select ONLY the mate-in-one or basic checkmates puzzles with a limited range appropriate to your level - completely ignore the 'normal' way of doing the puzzles.  These are all your going to need for quite a wee while and the learning will serve you well.  Losing maybe the worst in chess, but missing a mate-in-one comes a decent second! You can move onto say mates-in-two after a few months then double back to refresh your previous learning once a week.

(d) Play the Computer Bots.  One of the things that will limit your chess progress is real-player game time constraints, you can play the Bots with infinite time and refer to any resource you have available - it's pointless to use an engine for this! In general the low level Bots play a semi-solid game but randomly throw you a piece to capture giving you 'easy' subsequent gameplay, so you can practice keeping your game solid and tight whilst waiting for the Bot to blunder. This is true for the Bots up to 1000-1200 rating range, start with the 100 Bot.

This is quite a good low-level gameplay strategy as most low-level player play far too fast and thereby will blunder just like the Bots. Also beginner learn best when winning!

(e) Against real-players play the longer time formats, avoid sub-5min games for learning but fine for throwaway fun games.  Your gameplay will be better - as will your opponents - but you will have more time to recall your learning rather than play impulsively. You have to practice recalling your learning for learning to occur!

(f) Develop some objective measure(s) to monitor progress. As a beginner I would choose win/loss rates against the Bots X/Y/Z rather than ELO rating which at low-levels is far too random to be of practical use over short durations (months).  If you don't see any progress then reconsider your learning methods (including any advice I have supplied!).

Don't do things which 'should' work, do what works!  

Why a book on top of the lessons? (Thank you for the detailed response)

I would recommend a physical 'beginners' book because of ease of reference, you can mark them up, and most authors put far more effort into the structure and ordering of a book than bit-sized lessons (which can be accessed randomly). 

In short a book is wide and dense whereas lessons are very narrow (the onus is on you to find and select the most appropriate lesson at a given time which is not necessary a good idea for a chess beginner) and then incorporate the learning into your existing knowledge.

Also note that all learning includes refresh repetition and people have a knack of never repeating on-line lessons (or vids). having 'done' then once thus the learning is soon lost. In this way people can do huge amounts of on-line learning and never really progress.

have you tried computer analysis?
any move that changes your current 'score' by more than 1 point, esp decreasing it by more than 1 point, is worth studying.  Most of these at your rating are going to be either immediate material loss or a short sequence that will lead to it if the opponent sees the mistake.  One issue at your rating is that the opponent will very often NOT see your mistake.  For example, your knight is out there, and you shove your bishop near it, with a one square gap on the same rank.  Its now vulnerable to a pawn fork, and say the pawn has backup so the bishop can't take it, and so on.  Setting that up for your opponent is going to cost you a piece, but a typical 400 ranked player may not see that.  You can't learn from your opponent never seeing your mistakes, let the computer tell you where those were.  Here is an overly simplified example of that.  In analysis of this game, the score jumps to -3.7 points after the last bishop move because next move the pawn fork will win 3 points of material (one of the forked pieces).  This is what you are looking for in the analysis number changes -- why is it bad, what was better?