How to Analyse Your Own Chess Games

Why Your Own Games Are Your Best Teacher

Most club players spend their study time on grandmaster games, opening books and tactic puzzles. All of that helps, but there is one resource that beats almost everything else: your own games. When you analyse a game you have just played, the mistakes you find are your mistakes. You recognise the position, you remember what you were thinking, and the lesson sticks in a way that a random puzzle never will.

The good news is that you do not need to be an expert to do this well. You need a notebook, a chess set (or a board on screen), and a simple method you can repeat after every serious game.

Step One: Replay the Game Before You Check Anything

As soon as the game ends, before you touch an engine or an opening book, replay it from move one on a fresh board. Do not move the pieces for your opponent's replies yet — just write the moves down and try to recall your thinking at each turn.

Ask yourself two questions at every move:

• What was I trying to do? Was there a plan, or was I just shuffling?
• What did I think my opponent was threatening? Often the answer reveals that you were worried about the wrong thing.

This first pass is about honesty, not accuracy. Write down your thoughts in plain language: "I wanted to trade bishops and play on the light squares" or "I had no idea what to do here, so I pushed a pawn."

Step Two: Find the Turning Points

You do not need to analyse all forty moves with equal care. Most games are decided at two or three moments. Across a club game, the critical points tend to be:

• Where a piece left its best square for no good reason.
• Where a pawn move created a permanent weakness.
• Where you missed a tactic — yours or theirs.
• Where you traded into an ending without checking whether it was good.

Mark these moments clearly. A useful trick is to give each one a label: blunder, mistake, dubious, or good idea, poor execution. Being specific about the type of error tells you what to practise. Repeatedly losing material to forks points to tactical training. Repeatedly drifting in quiet positions points to studying plans and pawn structures.

Step Three: Check with an Engine — But Ask Better Questions

Engines are wonderful servants and terrible masters. Once you have done your own thinking, turn one on and compare notes. The mistake is to look at the evaluation bar and nod. Instead, ask:

• What move did the engine prefer, and why? Look for the idea behind it — a square, a plan, a piece that was tied down.
• At what point did the evaluation shift most sharply? Go back a move or two before that; the real error often happened earlier.
• Did I have a plan that was reasonable but not best? That is a very different problem from having no plan at all.

If the engine suggests a move you do not understand, stop and work it out. A single move you truly grasp is worth more than twenty you skim past.

Step Four: Write Down the Lesson in One Sentence

This is the step most players skip, and it is the one that makes everything else stick. After each analysis session, write a single sentence beginning with "Next time I will…" For example:

• "Next time I will check for enemy knight forks before moving my queen."
• "Next time I will not open the centre while my king is still uncastled."
• "Next time I will spend two minutes on move twelve instead of thirty seconds."

One sentence per game. Keep them in a notebook or a document, in date order. Within a few months you will have a personal list of your habits — and reading back through it is one of the most motivating things a club player can do.

Building It Into a Weekly Routine

You do not need hours. Twenty to thirty minutes after each club game, plus one longer session of an hour at the weekend, is plenty. A sensible rhythm looks like this:

• Immediately after the game: five minutes writing your thoughts while they are fresh.
• Same evening or next day: a proper fifteen-minute analysis, ending with your one-sentence lesson.
• Weekend: review three or four recent games together and look for patterns.
• Monthly: read back through your lessons and pick one theme to work on for the next few weeks.

You will also start to notice something encouraging: the mistakes you record change over time. Opening blunders fade, then middle-game drifts, then endgame technique becomes the thing that costs you half-points. That shift is progress, even when your rating has not moved yet.

Analysis is not about proving you played badly. It is about turning each game into a small, private lesson that only you could have written. Do it consistently, keep it honest, and the improvements will show up in your results faster than any opening repertoire ever will.