PRACTICE
The term “practice” refers to any time you're playing chess. It might be
a casual game with a friend on your lunch break, an online blitz game,
the final round of a weekend tournament with a cash prize on the line,
or solving chess problems in a chess software program. Any time you're
looking at a chess position, analyzing it, weighing possibilities, using
your noodle to find a good move, you're practicing chess – that is, you're
putting your chess knowledge to a practical test.
Nobody gets better at chess without playing chess (as we learned
in Chapter Three). That applies to pretty much everything in life: you
can read books and magazines about skydiving all day long, learning
everything you can about how to do it, but none of that study means a
thing until you step out of the hatch at 14,000 feet. Acquiring knowledge
for its own sake is nice, but it's even better when you put that acquired
knowledge to practical use.
And, in this case, it means playing chess – as much of it as you can (again,
see Chapter Three). When you play a game you're not just competing
against an opponent, you're also testing yourself (some would argue that
you're primarily testing yourself), pitting your accumulated knowledge
and skills against those of another player (whether it's a human player or
a machine makes no difference).
Practice leads directly to the next stage of the learning cycle...
ANALYSIS
When we talk about analysis, we're talking about the process of reviewing
the games you played during the “Practice” stage. This was also
mentioned in Chapter Three: you should always review your games, as
soon as you can after you've played them, and especially review your
losses.
Analyzing your games means looking at them carefully to figure out what
you did right, what you did wrong, and (most important of all) how you
could improve upon what you did. When you won that last game, was
it because your opponent blundered in time pressure? Did he make a
mistake or have some positional weakness (say, a backward pawn) that
you recognized and capitalized on? Or, best of all, did you force him to
create that weakness with your own good move(s)?
Conversely, when you lost a game, was it because you lost on time? Did
you have a positional weakness which your opponent exploited? Did your
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