My opponent, John Stepp, is someone I’ve played quite a few times, and someone whose tactical skills I’ve learned to respect the hard way! John has been the US Deaf Champion three times over the years, and he was the American entrant in the 1996 World Deaf Championship. What might this initial analysis look like? Below is my most recent tournament game, played here at our local club in Omaha.
What we are doing here is trying to catch glimpse of our intuition and judgment at work, and any introduction of computer analysis at this stage spoils that. It is essential that your first notes mirror your in-game impressions as closely as possible. Do not turn on your engines at this stage. What did you analyze during the game? How did you feel – yes, feel! – during the game? Did some of your opponent’s moves surprise you, and if so, why? You can end lines with Informator evaluations, but you should use plenty of words here. First, take some time to recollect what you were thinking about during the game, and put as much of it as you can into your notes. What now? There are two steps to proper analysis, and both are critically important. So you’ve played your game, done your postmortem, and put the game into ChessBase or Fritz. (6) The postmortem is increasingly a lost art today, but it can be very useful to discuss games with your opponents after hostilities end. Are you thinking too long over forced moves? Are you not spending enough time in critical positions? Add this information to your annotations where pertinent. To this I would add the following: (5) make a point of tracking your time expenditure while you play. (3) “Seek new possibilities.” What moves did you miss in your analysis? What ideas might you have considered?.(2) “Seek reasons for your own mistakes” – not just what went wrong, but why.(1) “You should find the turning-points” or critical moments in the game, where mistakes were made, the nature of the position changed, etc.
What are best practices for game analysis, and what role should the computer play in the process? Yusupov mentions four key themes: As Dvoretsky himself puts it, “he ability to analyze your thinking, develop rational methods of planning, determine what lies behind mistakes committed and, by contrast, identify your creative successes – it is clear that all this is no less important than the mastery of purely chess subtleties.” Everything else in Dvoretsky’s training philosophy depends upon this. The point of analyzing one’s own games, as Yusupov clearly states, is to try and discover errors in our decision making, in terms of both the moves we made and the ones we didn’t. Sometimes the opponent punishes us for our mistakes, but often they remain unnoticed and can be revealed only in analysis." In analysis it is possible to check and clarify the evaluations by which we were guided during the play, and determine where they were incorrect, where we played inaccurately. We have played them and have tried to solve the problems that were facing us. Our own games are closer to us than any others. But in general we learn best from our own examples. You must study the opening, the endgame and the middlegame, and it is exceptionally useful to study the games of strong players. Of course, this does not mean that other forms of chess work should not be carried out. I am convinced that, without a critical understanding of his own play, it is impossible for a player to develop. Yusupov writes in “The Analysis of One’s Own Games” that: "… the analysis of one's own games is the main means of self-improvement.
Perhaps the best discussion of analyzing one’s own games comes from Artur Yusupov, one of Dvoretsky’s finest students and his collaborator on five books. Among them we find notable authors like Jacob Aagaard, Jesper Hall, Axel Smith, and Alex Yermolinsky.
Many theoreticians and trainers have described protocols for analyzing one’s own games. To read Hartmann's introduction to "Chess Tech University", visit Part 1 of this article.
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