PART 1 • Selecting games for computer analysis
a cut and thrust maneuvering battle that you won by the skin of your teeth
when you promoted your pawn a move ahead of your opponent. (Yeah, I
had a tournament game just like that once, 4+ hours long, sweat literally
pouring off of the two of us by the endgame – my wife showed up just in
time for the last half-hour and she said she felt like calling an ambulance
for both me and my opponent, we both looked so bad. She thought I was
going to have a stroke). Any game in which you were confused or for
which you remember some “crisis point” in which you were confronted
with a difficult decision (“Should I swap Bishops here or keep my Bishop
for the endgame????”) is a good candidate for analysis.
So start with your losses; then, if you have time, use the chess engine to
also analyze your tough wins.
Why do I say “if you have time”? Don't chess computers analyze games
instantly?
No, they don't...
WHEN IT COMES TO CHESS ENGINE
ANALYSIS, LONGER IS BETTER
Many chess playing and analysis programs have all kinds of tweaks
and toggles and ways you can configure an analysis session, and your
best bet is to consult your program's documentation to learn what all of
the settings can do. But a setting common to all chess programs is the
analysis time – the amount of time the program will spend analyzing either
the whole game or each individual move. In every case, one common
rule applies:
The longer you let a chess engine analyze, the better and more accurate
the analysis will tend to be.
While it's possible to have a chess engine analyze a game at, say, one
second per move (which for most games means that the program will
finish a game inside of two to three minutes), the analysis you get back
won't be as good as if you set the “time” parameter for sixty seconds per
move. Although this means that your chess engine will take two to three
hours to analyze a game (instead of two to three minutes), the evaluations
and suggestions you'll receive will be far better and more accurate than
the more cursory analysis you'll get back from a quicker analysis session.
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