How to analyze your finished games?

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yoshtodd

Whenever I try to go over my completed games, I always end up just going "this move was bad, this one was good, this one was better"... So I spot mistakes I made but I don't feel like I've learned anything useful, because all I see is a particular wrong move in a certain position, but chances are I'll never see that same position ever again. How can you pick up more general and fundamental lessons from your games, instead of just finding obvious bad or good moves?

 Also is it neccessary to write anything out or can you learn much from just replaying the game? It seems like whenever I try and pick apart a game I just lost, the next game I'm all preoccupied with the mistakes of the last and I make different, very obvious mistakes (like my board vision is diminished). Thanks in advance for any advice and sorry for all the questions.


yoshtodd
diskamyl wrote:

maybe you will not see the exact same positions ever again, but the motifs and patterns will pretty much be the same (like removing the defender, the pin, the skewer, double check, and the list goes on.)

 so it's always a good to thing to analyse your games tactically. on a strategical point of view though, you first need to familiarize yourself with the concept of planning and long term goals in chess. For that you need to study some books. 


 Thanks... I'll try out that reinfelds 1001 tactical combinations to get a better grasp of each motif (suppose random tactical puzzles arent as good for that as ones separated by classification).


likesforests

yoshtodd> suppose random tactical puzzles arent as good for that as ones separated by classification

They each have their place. Doing tactical puzzles by motif helps burn a pattern in your mind of what each motif looks like. Doing random tactical puzzles helps you get fast at scanning for all the motifs you know. So many players begin with a motif-sorted book but then graduate to random-motif books or tools like the chess.com Tactics Trainer, CTS, etc. You are right that beginning with 'random puzzles' is probably one of the least effective approaches. Some authors are nice enough to combine both approaches--they begin with motifs, then end with random puzzles. :)