On a mission to better analyze my games
I'm on a mission to get better at how I analyze my own games, and that's what this blog will be about. I'm not sure if it'll just be a few posts or I have something to share consistently, but when I do I will do my best to post it here.
It's also because I am in the infant stages of writing a chess book about how I reached my goal and how self analysis got me there.
I had a sense hardcore analysis of one's own games was the way to get better. After these past six months of using my base current system of analyzing games, it really hit me that this was what I was seeking in terms of finding a way to get better at the game.
I tried a lot of get-better tips YouTubers and top gurus said. Nothing compared to analyzing my own games as thorough as possible. As much as I hear from detractors online and in person, I have found this to work and stick.
I'll be using the blog to share my process and what I'm trying to do in order to better it. Feel free to share what has worked for you in terms of analyzing your own games.
In future posts I'll share experimentation and insights about what is likely an infinite journey.
For starters, today I'll talk about three main takeaways from doing deep game analysis.
1. Analysis will take a long time: I was prepared for this. When I've read posts here and other places about the time needed to analyze a game, there is some pushback because of that time needed to thoroughly go through a game. That tends to be the beauty of it, that one chess game can have quite a few forks in the road, and our goal as chess players is to find out whether the paths we took were as good or better than the ones that were available.
2. I rediscovered my love of writing. In my past life I was a journalist for 22 years writing for newspapers, websites, magazines and my own books. I stopped for various reasons but always had an itch to come back. Journaling my chess analysis has made me love writing once more.
3. I've seen improvement from the studying. At the time I committed to journaling my game analysis (August 2024) I was at 950 USCF and had just played one of my worst tournaments of the year. As I journaled and improved my process, I noticed my analytical mind locked in better during future tournament games. In March 2025 I passed the 1300 mark after going undefeated at a regional tournament in Houston.
This first post is simple because I want to use future posts to talk about all the small and large things I have learned.
By the way, and I guess this will be a topic of discussion if I start posting a lot here: in these months of journaling my game analysis I've only used the engine if I think it's worth it, and it's been rare, and that step comes at the very end of analyzing a game. I'm not sure if I can completely hold off you all from using the engine if I post a position and you comment, but if you can all I ask is that there is no talk of what the engine says because I think it takes away from me having to use my own juice to figure it out.
