Evaluating your Games, the most wasteful mistake chess players make

 When improving at this complex game, nothing is more important than evaluating your games. There is no improving at something when you don’t even know what to improve at! This is why evaluating and analysing your games is so critical.

Evaluating your games will allow you to identify weaknesses in your play, or tactical options that you haven’t even considered. Even though Analysing games is by far the most critical part of the game, many players still don’t know how to properly analyse!

So, read on further to see how you would properly analyse a game of chess!

TOOLS

There are a wide variety of tools that you could use to analyse your games. Do note that most of these tools are available on both Chess.com and Lichess, but not all. So, without further ado, here are the tools!

• The Engine: This incredible tool is used by all major chess evaluation sites. It is the same as having a friend rated 3600, standing next to you, and telling you the best possible moves, as well as other tactical options.

• The Eval Bar: This tool is available on all major chess sites, and allows. However, a less common use of it is seeing in any given variation, who is winning. By extension, another use is comparing what happened to another possible variation, given best play.

• The Move List: One of the best and simplest tools for those who are starting out. This tool is capable of telling you the inaccuracies, Mistakes, and Blunders you may have played as well as Great and the Fabled Brilliant Moves.

• Player Rating Estimation: Arguably the Best tool for improving at chess. This tool estimates how well you played that game in chess ELO. Meaning that you should always aim to get that score higher and higher. Unfortunately, this tool is only available on Chess.com at the time of writing.

HOW TO PROPERLY ANALYSE

Yes, all these tools are absolutely incredible. However, it still does not tell you how exactly to leverage these tools in order to properly analyse your games. Not a problem! Here are some simple tips to analyse your games!

• Firstly, it is imperative that you don’t use the game review feature by chesscom. While it is incredibly powerful, it is not powerful enough to look deep enough when properly analysing your chess games.

• However, something you can do, is you can click Game Review -> Analysis. This is powerful because it gives you the Move List, even for different variations, something that will make analysis so much simpler.

• Finally, while you can look through every single move, identifying blunders, conveniently given to you on the Game Review tab, will allow you to notice areas of improvement substantially quicker than if you were to do them normally.

CONCLUSION

Analysis is by far the most important part of Chess improvement. After all, what’s the point of playing games of chess when you won’t even notice where you went wrong? Hopefully, our tips to assist you in properly analyse will help you on your chess journey!

Keep on Learning!