Manual de Chess King 2015 | Page 96

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. 96 chessking.com