Are you playing hundreds, if not thousands, of chess games a week and still not improving? Perhaps you are even analyzing your games, reviewing them constantly, trying to figure out how to win more often and gain even more ELO. The problem is that many players, especially new ones, add chess analysis to their training inefficiently, and in some cases, they may even be worsening their chess. So let's learn how to improve your chess analysis, and not slide backwards with your rating.

What is Chess Analysis For?

Chess is a unique hobby where you can genuinely improve by watching and analyzing other people's games. However, you can also easily replay and watch your play. Beginner basketball players may have a harder time watching and analyzing their play without the help of a coach, but in chess training, as long as you notate and record your moves, you can learn from your own games. Once you understand chess notation, you can replay your games, but you can also learn from grandmasters of the past. Why do we analyze? To improve! Looking through your games and others is how we improve at chess. If you only play the game without analyzing it, then you will have trouble improving.

How Do You Analyze a Chess Game?

Let me give you four steps to analyzing your chess games:

1. Record your moves.
2. Take notes after the game.
3. Look for game-changing moments.
4. Add additional input.

Record Your Moves for Chess Analysis

The first step in analyzing a chess game is to record your chess moves. Even if you're just playing a casual game with your friends or family, learning to notate that game can help you replay it and identify areas where you could have played better. 

Take Notes

Once you have notated the game, review it and record any notes or thoughts that came to mind during the game. Were there any moments where you were debating between moves? Or perhaps moments where you almost blundered, or moments where you remember worrying about particular moves or ideas. Recording your thoughts will help later as you learn from the game. Take this position, for example:

Let's say you had this position in your game, and you decided to trade pieces. Did you consider any other moves? Write those down, and what made you choose to make the decision that you did. Did you miss anything that you now notice? Those are the kind of questions we can ask ourselves in this portion of our game analysis.

Game-Changing Moments

In most chess games, there are two or three moments where the outcome of the game swings. As you are looking through our game and your notes, look for moments where the game shifted to be in either your favor or your opponent's favor. Were there pieces that were lost? Queens given away? Or it could be something that you notice upon review, where you realize your opponent's pawn storm ignited their attack, and you didn’t know it during the game. You can turn on the evaluation bar if you want help identifying these game-changing moments, but do not use the computer to analyze the entire game. This will undercut so much of the benefit that you can gain from analyzing your moves and thinking about what you could have played differently, especially if you already know the computer's best line.

Adding Additional Input to Your Game Analysis

This doesn’t mean that you have to be completely alone in your game analysis, though. First, ensure you take these steps before examining it with a computer or consulting a friend or coach. Coming to your own conclusions about the game, even if wrong (especially when wrong), is an integral part of improving through chess analysis of your games. Once you have completed the first three steps, you can run your computer analysis, or even better, show the game to a chess coach!

How to Integrate a Chess Coach into Your Chess Analysis

Most chess coaches will be ecstatic if you show up to a lesson with notes and analysis from games that you have played recently. This will give the coach a deeper insight into your mindset when you played the moves and help them work like a doctor, using symptoms to identify the underlying problems with the health of your game. 

Chess Engine Analysis

If you don’t have access to a chess coach, it can also be helpful to put your PGN into an analysis board and use a chess engine to help you identify other moments that you may have missed during the game. However, it is most useful to your improvement if you do this after analyzing the game on your own, following the four steps I outlined. If you jump straight to asking the engine for input, that will quickly become all you can see or think about the position. Instead, we want to try to understand our thoughts on the position independently, before incorporating that added input, and then use the computer as a resource, as if it were a chess master sitting next to us, to point out the areas where we made mistakes.

Places to Focus During Chess Analysis

It can be helpful to break up your chess analysis into three sections: the opening, the middlegame, and the endgame. These three sections of the game can offer us different insights into areas we need to improve.

Studying Openings Through Game Analysis

You likely have some kind of an opening repertoire that you attempt to follow, so note exactly where you left your book knowledge. What was the first moment when you were entirely making your own decision, and not playing a move that you had memorized? This could be move two, or move twenty, but either way, it can be helpful to write down that moment. Then, try to learn the next move. Adding moves one at a time to your openings can be a slow and steady way to improve your opening knowledge, not trying to learn an additional twenty moves of theory, but just trying to go one move beyond what you knew at the time of the game.

Middlegames

Once you reach the moment after you are out of your opening theory, do you have a good grasp of what your plans should be from that opening? Or do you feel lost and uncertain about what to play? This can be reflected in how solid your position is after the next few moves, as well as in your time usage. It's best to understand your openings not just by memorizing the exact moves you play, but also by learning some of the best middlegame plans and ideas that arise from the positions you typically reach. Take this position, for example, from the Italian opening. There are several general ideas to play for here, and if you’re not aware of those ideas, you may waste a significant amount of time trying to determine your next move.

Endgames

The endgame is where heartbreak can happen. You played a perfect opening, a masterful middlegame, and entered an endgame up two pawns, only to blunder into a losing endgame. Endgames can have plans just as easily as middlegames. When taking notes about the endgame, be sure to include any concerns you had. If you have particular winning scenarios in mind, that's great; if not, it may be time to up your endgame study. There are also some great online resources for learning and practicing basic endgames.

Chess Analysis in Your Chess Training

Analyzing your games should be a significant part of your chess training. You can categorize your chess training into three main areas. Play, analyze, and study. You study to play, and you play so you can analyze. If you work these methods into your training, you will improve in online and over-the-board play.

Over The Board Post Game Analysis

Chess analysis doesn’t always have to be done alone! One of the best parts about playing an OTB tournament is analyzing your wins and losses post-game with your opponent. After your game, politely ask your opponent if they are interested in analyzing the game or having a “post-mortem,” or post match analysis,  but don’t be pushy! Especially if you've just won, they may not feel like looking at the game. If you have made other friends at the tournament, however, there will likely be others willing to look over your game with you, and this can be a fun part of the chess-playing experience.

Five Tips to Improve Your Chess Analysis

If you learn anything about how to analyze a chess game, or you want to teach others how to do it, take these five tips seriously.

1. Start Without Engine Influence

Far too many players immediately use the computer to analyze their game. No one cares about the mate in seven you missed if you still don’t understand how to develop your pieces!

2. Be Honest With Yourself

Chess analysis is much like self-reflection; we can only improve once we are completely honest with ourselves. Did you see that tactic that saves your move from being a blunder, or did you just get lucky? Be honest; then you can improve.

3. Mark Critical Moments

Take note of the critical moments! If you can become well-practiced in identifying the critical moments post-game, you will start to have alarm bells going off when you are in the middle of one during a game as well.

4. Compare Plans, Not Just Moves

Don't catch yourself comparing moves, especially different engine moves, during a post-game analysis; try instead to focus on the various plans and strategies in the position that you could pursue, and compare those.

5. Ask “Why?” After Every Move

When you are stuck and don’t know where to start in your analysis, just ask “why” after a move.  If the answer is, “I don’t know,” then you have a place to start.

Frequently Asked Questions