THE REAL REASON YOU BOUGHT A CHESS PROGRAM
Every so often over the years I ' ve been in a discussion with a chess software user who ' ll say to me,“ Why should I bother analyzing my games? Who cares what I should play in a particular position? I ' ll never have a game with that exact position again anyway!”
That ' s a classic textbook example of“ missing the woods for the trees”. The important things you ' ll learn from a chess analysis engine aren ' t what you should have played in particular positions; by using a chess engine to analyze many of your games, you ' ll discover recurring problems in your chess play, mistakes you make regularly, bad tendencies which hurt your results. Only by analyzing a lot of your games and identifying these problems can you learn what areas of your play need improvement.
In fact, you might not know it, but the ability to have a chess engine analyze your games is the real reason you bought a chess program in the first place.
KEEPING A RECORD OF YOUR GAMES
Multiple chapters of this book have already mentioned this, but I ' ll say it again: save your games! Save them all. Write down the moves of the games you play face to face, save the games you play online, and( if your chess program doesn ' t save them automatically) save the games you play against your chess computer program.
Most chess playing programs allow you to input and save“ outside” games, that is, games you didn ' t play against the program itself. Create a new database for your games and save all of your games into it. For games you play online, you can very often click a button and have the game e-mailed to you as a text file or in PGN format. Some programs allow you to copy a PGN format game to a database directly. If not, just open the PGN file( after all, it ' s just text) in a word processor, print it out, and then add it to your database manually.
The important thing is to create a database of your personal chess history; it will potentially be your most valuable tool in your efforts to become a better chess player.
93 chessking. com