I'm surprised nobody has responded to this. Maybe people who have figured out how to analyse games properly and record takeaways from the analysis don't visit the forums?
Anyway, since I recently returned to chess after a 14-year gap, I'm trying to figure this out, too. Below are some resources from which I'm learning:
- Noël Studer's YouTube video How To Analyze Your Chess Games (the simple way).
- Alan-Safar Ramoutar's suggestion to build a blunder database (in A Self-Taught IM's 5-Step Guide To A Growth Mindset).
- Chessmo's blog post Structured Practice (which is about tracking study time mostly, not blunders, but this would be part of my own spreadsheet).
- A way of categorising blunders: how fine-grained should the categories be? See the inconclusive forum thread Types of Blunders (from 2009!).
- A way of entering critical positions into a spaced repetition system. See OhNoMyChess.com (which I haven't tested yet) and the daily chess trainer mentioned in a thread from yesterday. Of course, I could just use Anki; see Dan Bock's blog post Learn first, remember later.
Everyone says "Analyze your games, it is the best way to learn." I happen to agree with that. If you don't, you'll keep on making the same mistakes because you don't know you made those mistakes.
There are all sorts of ways to analyze games, don't use the engine, use the engine, use Game Review etc..., pick on you like. I have a method I think I'll like, but that's not the point.
What are the mechanics of game analysis? I can think of four ways, there are certainly more.
1) Analyze and don't record anything. This seems a little pointless since you'll only remember the most egregious mistakes.
2) Analyze, and make comments on the moves in your analysis. Easy, but will you ever go back and look at them?
3) Put the game into your chess.com Library, analyze, and make comments on the moves in your analysis. This is actually really nice. The infrastructure is there and you don't have to worry about copying screenshots to some other place. All the games are in one place. The problem is that there isn't a central place to go and look at all your commented lines.
4) Make a spreadsheet, analyze positions, put screenshots of the analyzed positions, put the comments in the screenshot. The advantage of this is that you can go to ONE place and quickly scan all your analyses. The disadavtage of this, and I just tried doing a single commented line, is that this is tedious beyond belief, which means one will give it up after a few games.
Is there a decent approach to recording the results of your analyses for later review?
Thanks!