A CHESS ENGINE IS YOUR TRUSTY SHERPA GUIDE
The reason why you should analyze as many of your chess games as you can is not because of specific moves suggested by the engine in specific positions. It ' s because of what the analysis of many games will tell you over a longer period of time.
You should look at your games as an overall whole and try to spot tendencies, mistakes which you make repeatedly – not necessarily in every game, but often enough for you to see a pattern form. Take the example of the White player in the game we just looked at: he could have won the exchange( Black basically gave him the Rook), but he failed to take it. If the White player spots this as a regular pattern in his games, he should focus more of his study time on solving tactics problems. He missed a one-mover which wins material in this game; it ' s a fair bet that he ' s also overlooking two and three move combinations which can win material and set up checkmates.
There are two things for which you should be on the lookout when you ' re reviewing your games: how your losses occur and when they occur. It ' s not hard to spot these tendencies, either; your chess engine will act as your“ Sherpa guide”, because the evaluation numbers will act as signposts which point the way.
The first thing to look for when you ' re reviewing the evaluation numbers is how you ' re losing. Are you losing a little bit at a time, with your position being eroded by a quarter-pawn here, a third of a pawn there, until your opponent has built a significant( about one pawn or more) positional advantage, even though the actual material on the board is even? If that ' s the case, you ' re losing because of what the first world chess champion Wilhelm Steinitz called“ the accumulation of small advantages”. Steinitz is known today as the father of positional( a. k. a. strategic) chess. If your position is getting whittled down a bit at a time like that, through your opponent accumulating these small fractional advantages, you should concentrate a good portion of your study time on chess strategy. Learning common strategic themes will help your game, because you ' ll not only see how your opponents are building up their game( and maybe see how you can make moves to hinder them), but also discover ways to do the same thing as your opponents – that is, slowly build up your own position to match your opponents ' buildup( nullifying their advantage) or even gain advantages of your own.
But if the evaluation numbers indicate that you ' re cooking along happily with a roughly even position when suddenly WHAM! Your opponent drops an A-bomb on you, winning material to gain an advantage, and you never saw it coming, you should spend more time studying chess tactics. This
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