3 Steps to Analyzing Chess Games Effectively
Analyzing chess games is essential to improving your game overall — to help learn from and fix your mistakes while continuing to improve and play to your strengths. Here is a simple three-step process you can use to analyze your chess games.
1. Reflect
The most important thing to do right after a game is simply to reflect overall. Why did you win or lose? What move seemed like it was the turning point of the game? How was the opening/middlegame/endgame?
The important thing in this position is to not use an engine or any analysis software, but to think and try to answer these questions. This is especially true if you aren’t playing a fast time control game, such as blitz, where you don’t typically want to improve as much as rapid or classical.
After this general reflection, be sure to remember it for later or write it down somewhere, and then continue with the next step — the actual analysis.
2. Analyze
This is the fundamental step of any analysis — where you go deep into each move and essentially answer three fundamental questions: why did I play this move, how good was this move, and what can I do to improve? Generally speaking, you’ll also want to do this without an engine at first.
To illustrate this, here’s a position where I was playing Black:
Let’s answer the three questions.
Why did I play this move? Initially, I wanted to play Rb8 but then realized that dxc5 couldn’t be played if white plays dxc5 (since the rook is hanging). I had already touched the rook, and (since this was an over-the-board game), I had to play Ra7.
While this answer may tell us a little about why this move was played, it’s usually much better to go deeper by repeatedly asking questions. Here’s an example, continuing with this position:
Q: Why did you want to play Rb8?
A: I wanted to prepare potential pushes with b4 and continue expanding on the queenside, while also moving away from the weak h1-a8 diagonal. It also allowed me to easily fianchetto my bishop with Bb7 since the square was defended.
Q: Why did you feel the h1-a8 diagonal was weak?
A: If I played Nxe4, the reply Bxe4 would’ve attacked my rook and forced me to lose a tempo. It also would’ve granted my opponent control over the long diagonal.
Q: Doesn’t Bb7 help protect the diagonal while also developing the bishop, allowing the queen and second rook to come and prepare this queenside attack as well?
A: Yes, but I thought that it would be better to play a move like Rb8 to defend the b7 square before developing the bishop. It doesn’t seem that necessary now that I look at it though.
These answers provide a lot more insight into my thought process during this game. We can keep going with this for a long time, but this is good enough to illustrate the point. After finishing with this, write down a general summary of the answers overall (or all of them if you would like).
How good was this move? In retrospect, this move wasn’t bad, but it was quite uncomfortable due to the rooks not being connected for the majority of the game. A better, simpler move likely would’ve been Bb7, which would strengthen the h1-a8 diagonal while also developing the bishop.
The answers to the first question (why did you play this move?) also sometimes help with judging a move’s quality, like in this case.
What can I do to improve? Judging by the answers to the other two questions, the best thing to do would probably be to learn the plans associated with this specific opening. Another thing to do might be to become more comfortable with developing pieces, even if they seem weak or are undefended.
After answering these three questions, analyze positions with an engine (and an opening database if you’re in the opening), and see if you’re analyses were right. If they were, then continue with the next move. If they weren’t, then analyze the move’s quality and variation lines with the engine, and add comments to the second question above.
Though it may seem lengthy, this shouldn’t take longer than 30 minutes — 1 hour depending on how many moves the game was. However, due to how much time it takes to analyze games in this much detail, you’ll generally only want to do this for tournament or classical games. For faster time control games, you can make this process shorter by only analyzing critical positions and moves.
3. Reevaluate
After you analyze every move of the game, it’s time to reevaluate your initial reflections while also noting down ways to improve. Reevaluation is simply thinking about whether your initial thoughts and reflections were correct.
For example, was the turning point of the game the move you thought about, or was it some other move? After analyzing the game, which phase of the game was the best and worst for you? Ask other similar questions, and write them down somewhere along with what you thought right after the game.
Noting down ways to improve is the more important part of this step. The aim of doing this is that you can compare areas of improvement across games, and implement these methods. The best way to do this is to look at your game overall (and your reevaluation) and see which weaknesses seem more common. For example, for the game above, these may be ways to improve:
- Learn about this opening and its strategic plans
- Work on detecting pins
- Understand when development should be prioritized and when it shouldn’t
- etc.
Some of these ways usually tend to be harder than others to implement (for example, “understanding development”, etc. ). This is still useful though, since it still highlights weaknesses that can be solved in other ways. In the case of understanding development, that can be achieved through simply increasing knowledge of a variety of openings.
Nonetheless, the key thing to remember for this step is to reevaluate your initial reflection while also finding ways to improve based on mistakes.
Summary
The three steps of any effective analysis:
- Reflect on the game overall.
- Analyze specific moves and positions, and answer three main questions on the purpose and quality of the move as well as possible ways to improve.
- Reevaluate your initial reflection and note tips or plans for improvement.
Thank you for reading! Please leave a clap if this article helped you, and respond with any additional ideas or comments.
