How To Annotate Your Games To Improve At Chess

"How do I get better at chess?" It's probably the number-one question people ask to more experienced players, along with "Want to play a game?" There are many things you can do: review your games with a better player, consult Game Review after your games, purchase Chessable courses or watch free instructional videos on YouTube, read books, and so on. The 2025 Chess.com Chess Improvement Challenge is our pledge to help you in your journey.

This article is about how to analyze—and specifically, annotate—your chess games as a method of improvement. 

• What Is Chess Annotation And Why Do It?
• Chess.com Features That Help: Game Analysis, Game Review, & Library
• Personal Tip: Review Without An Engine First
• Compare Your Thoughts With Analysis/Game Review
• Identify Why You Made Your Decisions
• Over Time, Identify Patterns In Decision-Making

What Is Chess Annotation And Why Do It?

There are many reasons to annotate your chess games, but we are focusing on it as a method of chess improvement. Chess annotations consist of the following elements:

• The moves of the game, of course
• Words to explain, narrate, justify, defend, etc., the moves and decisions made
• Variations and side-lines branching off from the game moves
• Evaluations at the end of lines (equal, one side is better/winning, one side is slightly better, etc.)

Chess annotations put the game into words: they let us tell the story of the game. The key point, of course, is to walk away with an accurate story of what happened.

The sixth World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik famously wrote in his book One Hundred Selected Games, "chess is the art of analysis," and in the next paragraph, he wrote that you have to analyze games to become a strong chess player.

Home analysis has specific features of its own: you are not restricted by time, and you can move the men freely. Despite this difference between home analysis and practical play, there is much in common between them. It is a well-known fact that almost all outstanding chess players have been first-class analysts.

The deduction is irresistible: anyone who wishes to become an outstanding chess player must aim at perfection in the realm of analysis.

GM Alex Yermolinsky, in the introduction to his book The Road to Chess Improvement, writes about the "stagnation of my development" at the age of 28 and a "sad realization" that he'd been stuck at the same level for seven years. Here's what changed on his road to the grandmaster title:

In search for inspiration I decided to follow the most common advice one can find in the works of Alekhine (my most favourite player) and Botvinnik (one of the least favourite ones), which can be put in simple words — study your games [sic]."

The purpose of analyzing our games, whether we win or lose, as he writes, is "to find out what really happened."

I would add that having chess engines these days helps in many ways, and it hurts in others. On the one hand, it's easier than ever to see what your mistakes are. On the other, the ease that engines provide can be a conduit for laziness, and we can stop asking critical questions when we're too quickly shown some answers.

Should I annotate all of my games?

The more effort you put in, the more you get out of it. I generally annotate longer games (25 minutes or longer per side) and only do a quick check for blunders and mistakes of games faster than that. What matters is that you are aware of and learn from your mistakes in every game—and you decide how exactly you want to reach that awareness.

How long should it take?

Again, the more you put in, the more you get out of it. The process of learning should be enjoyable, too, and this should not feel like a seven-hour chore. It should be an adventure looking for answers and new ways of thinking. For me, analyzing a chess game is like diving into a fantasy world, exploring what could have been. I am almost always amazed by what I find.

Chess.com Features That Help: Game Analysis, Game Review, & Library

There are three features on Chess.com that will help you analyze. 

If you go to Chess.com/analysis, you get an empty board. You can load games in a variety of ways or just input the moves manually. Once you do, you can use Stockfish to assist your analysis.

From here, you can also access Game Review (also accessible immediately after a game). Game Review gives you quick feedback and, in a simplistic way, "annotates" the game for you.

After you finish analyzing and annotating your games, you can collect them in your personal Library, which you can also share with others. You can read more about how to use this feature here.

Personal Tip: Review Without An Engine First

Not everybody recommends this, but when time allows, I analyze all of my games without an engine first. Getting my lines and thoughts on paper initially makes it impossible later to lie to myself about what I saw and didn't see. 

How many times have you seen an engine line and convinced yourself, "Oh, that's so easy!"? Once you see an answer, it's just about impossible to willfully "unsee" it. Have you ever said this: "I did see that during the game, I have no idea why I didn't play it!"?

I've selected my most recent game because it's short and includes big misevaluations I made. You can check out my pre-computer annotations below—wrong or right, this is what I saw during the game and remembered to write. This took me about 10 minutes to jot down.

Compare Your Thoughts With Analysis/Game Review

Now here comes the fun part. I turn on the engine and go through all of the notes I made, verifying how accurate they were. Truth be told, most of the time, I'm making mistakes.

I will go through my annotations one diagram at a time, but you can find the entire game annotated at the bottom of this section.

I always start with the opening. Even if things go well, I identify at least one other plan I could have gone for so that I can expand my knowledge. In this game, 13...h6? was a clear mistake early in the game, but I also identified the early 10...Qa5 plan that delays castling.

Note that I also identified an alternative plan for White since it was one I feared during the game: the early 12.f4 and 13.f5. Now I know how to meet it from the black side.

There were two very critical moments, where I was worse or lost. The first one was 13...h6?; and notice that in the original, computerless annotation, I didn't even mention how this might be risky for my king, something that is obvious in hindsight. I found the improvement: 13...Rc7! but also noticed that one of my candidate moves, 13...Bd8, was a second-best option, even if it objectively gives White an advantage. It's certainly better than what I played.

The second was 18...Be8??, which could have lost the game if White played the move most beginners would make. Why did we reject it? Of course, we saw White wins a pawn, but "we underestimated the importance of the d5-square for the knight too," as I wrote. Notice I still analyzed the other mediocre white moves 20.a3? and 20.e5? since I was thinking about them during the game.

Lastly, the win was smooth after 21...b4 in the game, but I noticed a BIG blooper in the winning line I put down. If my opponent traded into the endgame, there's a good chance I would have played 23...Rxa2? and thrown away the entire advantage. It's important to see I was still miscalculating, even if the mistakes never materialized on the board.

You can see the entire annotated game below:

Identify Why You Made Your Decisions

It's important to identify not just what the mistakes are but also, to the best of your ability, why they happened. And no, "because I suck at chess" is not an answer!

Some of my big learnings from the game shared above were:

• I learned the alternative 10...Qa5 delays castling, which is an option if I'm scared of these aggressive lines for White.
• "I really wasn't sure how to meet e5 in this position." After reviewing the lines, I now know I have to defend the e7-bishop and identified two ways of doing it. My 13...h6? didn't meet this requirement.
• The biggest moment was on move 19: "Both my opponent and I didn't seriously consider [or evaluate correctly] the most obvious candidate move, which is winning."
• I missed some obvious responses for my opponent in my calculations, like in the line 21.Rd6? Qf2? or, worse, the line with 22.Qxb6 I planned 23...Rxa2?.

Over Time, Identify Patterns In Decision-Making

Over the long term, you will notice that you're typing similar sentences when analyzing your mistakes. Two examples I've found myself writing are: "I didn't consider an obvious candidate move" and "I went for the passive defense when there was an active option." They crop up over and over again.

Some people love spreadsheets, and if you're one of them you should start keeping track of recurring patterns that way. I'm not one of those people, so I have a notebook where I write sentences like "Thought for too long on obvious move, time management" and keep a tally mark for each entry. After about three or four months, I flip to a new page and start over again and, as I work on these areas, the tally marks should be going down. Every time, new kinds of mistakes and patterns arise.

I started doing this after reading GM Davorin Kuljasevic's How to Study Chess on Your Own, though over the years, I've forgotten what exactly the book recommends and what parts of it I've developed on my own. He gives many other useful tips in his book that go beyond the scope of this article.

Instead of sharing a picture of my messy handwriting, I've converted my notes from the last few months to a table below. On the left, I write things I do well, and on the right, I write things I can improve. The "#" column shows how many games that's happened in.

I only give one tally for each entry per game, even if I made the same mistake several times in one game.

As with any advice, you don't have to take my word on everything. You should take the parts you find most relevant and apply those to your own practice. I hope that this helps you in your improvement journey!

If you want to read more about game annotations, specifically historic ones, check out the following piece that won our "Blog of the Month" distinction. 

In the comments below, feel free to share your best annotated game!