Why the Game Review is Not Very Helpful

There are quite a lot of people out there who use game review, whether it is to analyze their mistakes, or... just to check if they had brilliant moves. In this blog, I will be discussing about why game review isn't that helpful/accurate.

1. Game review might count a normal looking move as a blunder

You might be analyzing your game, when you stumble across this blunder.

This may be at most an inaccuracy to the average chess player, but no one would think this is a blunder. Do you know why? It's because the engine that analyses the game can calculate more than 15 moves of variations. Because of this, it might see a tactic for black or a possible attack by white being ruined. This would be very hard to calculate for a human, especially in the <2000's range, but there are even more obvious blunders that many people may not see and exploit.

2. Game review might count a normal looking move as a brilliancy

You might be analyzing your game, when you stumble across this brilliant move.

This here, is a normal move. For some reason, it got counted as a brilliant move. This move threatens the pawn on h6, and limits the king's movement, but it is an obvious move especially for >1500 players. There could be a brilliant combination, but it is probably not noticeable to your average opponent. Then, there are the brilliant rook sacrifices which are brilliant, but sometimes a random move like h5 can be counted as brilliant too.

3. Game Review Engine calculates many moves

As we discussed earlier, the game review engine can calculate more than 15 moves. If you are playing against <2000 rated players and when analyzing the game you see your opponent had missed a 13 move combination, it counts as a missed win for him, but in reality, think about it. Will a 1800 rated player really calculate 13 moves? I have played games in the 1600-1900 range, and some players may not even realize a 2 move tactic.

Still, if you don't care about analyzing the game, game review is basically pointless, other than finding brilliant moves and feeling so good at chess, but you can also do a self-analysis, and analyse the game on your own, after all, there was a time when there were no chess engines, and people would analyse their games either with another person, or by themselves, on a real chess board.