PART 1 • The art of manual game analysis
in the process. Third, after you annotate a game and then have a chess
engine analyze it, you'll be able to compare your ideas with the chess
engine's variations and evaluations, seeing how well they match up. You
might find out that the candidate move you didn't play at that crucial point
of the game turned out to be the better move after all.
SELECTING GAMES
FOR COMPUTER ANALYSIS
If you play a whole lot of chess (like multiple games every day – gee, I
wish I still had that kind of time myself), you probably won't be able to
manually annotate all of them, nor have a chess engine analyze them all.
That means you're going to have to select which games you'll concentrate
on.
The primary candidate games for analysis should always be your losses.
I know everybody loves to have their egos stroked, but if all you want to
do is have a chess engine confirm how “brilliantly” you played, you're
barking up the wrong tree both by owning a chess program and by
reading this book. The hilarious part is that I've known players who start
out loving the idea of having an engine analyze their wins to verify what
“chess masterminds” they are, then they look at the analysis and discover
that their opponent missed a mate in six right out of the opening – it
always brings those guys right back down to earth in a heartbeat.
If your analysis time is limited and you can't have an engine analyze all
of your games, have the engine analyze your losses – you'll learn more
that way. You'll discover the areas you need to focus on during your
study time. And if you have loads of losses (and thus don't have time for
an engine to analyze them all), go over your games to find the ones in
which you don't know why you lost. If you go over a game and see that
you lost because you moved a Rook to an unprotected square where it
got snapped off the board, don't bother having an engine look at it – you
already know why you lost. If you lost a close game where the material
stayed pretty even and you're not sure what happened, that's the game
to have a chess engine analyze.
If you do have a little extra time for engine analysis of your victories, pick
games that were tough for you. Don't bother with the tournament game
where you beat the eight year old who hung his Queen on the fifth move;
analyze the three and a half hour battle in the French Defense which was
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