THE ART OF MANUAL GAME ANALYSIS
Before you have a computer analyze your games, you should do it
yourself. As soon as you can after a game (sometime in the next day
or two), you should open the game up in your chess program and add
some notes to it. The notes don't have to be anything elaborate, just a few
thoughts and ideas you remember having during the game. Most chess
programs allow you to add text commentary to particular moves, as well
as variations (alternate moves which could have been played).
Keep in mind that these comments aren't for publication (although they
can be; I've used chess software to annotate literally hundreds of games
which have been published in print and on numerous web sites over
the years). The comments you write will typically be for your eyes only,
so you should treat your personal database as a “chess journal”. If you
remember being confused at some point in a game, you should make a
note of it: “I wasn't sure here whether to retreat the Knight or counterattack
with my Bishop”. If you had a sudden epiphany during a game, note that
too: “I realized that my 'bad' Bishop was outside my pawn chain, so it
wasn't quite as bad as I'd first thought”.
If at some point in the game you'd been horribly torn between two
candidate moves, you should absolutely add a new variation which starts
with the move you didn't play. This kind of move is a prime candidate (no
pun intended) for engine analysis or for playing the game out against
a chess engine starting from that position (we'll learn more about this
technique later, in the chapter on setting up positions).
If your chess program allows you to use graphic commentary (colored
squares and arrows), feel free to make liberal use of them. I often use
them to show overprotected pawns or as a reminder that a piece is
protected by a Bishop or Rook far off on the other side of the board.
Why should you annotate your own games? First, your comments are
a record of your thoughts during a game. I wish I'd had a computer
back at the start of my tournament career so that I could have added
comments – when I replay games from over twenty years ago, I often find
myself saying, “What in the world was I thinking there?” If I'd been able to
annotate these games and save them to a database, I'd know. Second,
when you're annotating a game you'll often see things you missed when
you were playing it. I can't tell you the huge number of times I've gone
back over a game at the quiet of my desk, away from the pressure of
playing the game itself, and suddenly spotted something I'd missed
during the game. While it's true that I've often felt like a real horse's patoot
when I later spot something simple that I'd missed while the game was in
progress, it's equally true that I usually learn something pretty important
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