Analysing Ones Own Games (General)

by mindcramp, Saturday, November 17, 2007, 02:46 (6363 days ago) @ malcolm

I rarely go over games with my opponents - there just doesn't seem to be time (it may be time for the next round, or time to eat, or...) - or they just pack up and go away right after the game.

When analyzing, I first try to study the game on my own without a computer. I take notes, especially writing down variations that I want to check with my silicon assistant. I also identify points in the game where I didn't have a good sense of what was going on.

Then I enter the game into my database, and let the engine do a full analysis. When it is finished, I go through it again with the engine running. At this point I add annotations. I might add opening improvements, or add the main line where the game went out of book. I note any tactical oversights. I add descriptive prose to turn analysis into a meaningful narrative I can take away.

One thing I really like is to spend a fair amount of time fiddling with positions where my intuition did not square with the "truth" of the position. That means playing out as many side variations as I need to in order to "feel" the right move in that position. I think that is where most of the improvement takes place.

Using that above approach, I have discovered that lately I have overlooked some winning lines (for either side) because they seemed naively "anti-positional" in my mind's eye. Now trying to fix that, somehow.