How to analyze master games!

Hello evrone.

My coach gave me a task to annotate 3 games with the kan it has to be my own annotation.This is not homework so i am not asking you to write it but it got me to think how do you annotate master games.Almost evrey game i have looked at has had a commentaytor or annotation(not that i havent looked at chessgames.com).People are always saying you have to analyze master games to improve.And i want to improve i work really hard i  work evrey day on chesstempo my rating is 1800 at the moment(far from my strenght) i really focus on endgames now i am reading capablacas 60 best chess endings and soon dvoretsjy endgame manual.But what i think i am missing is analayzing master games can someone please tell me the method they analyze master games (like first i then i also afther which i).

Thx

Just note down your thoughts about the plans for each side, candidate moves, why you ruled some out, what you think will be played next etc.

With all do respect i think annotating master games on your own is a waste of time, you won't learn anything, how would you? you're only commenting on the game the things that you already know, you're not suddenly gonna come up with an interesting chess concept, and most likely the important key points of the game or ideas that are higher than your rating strength will pass by you unnoticed.

Having said that i think your coaches approach of annotating 3 kan games is interesting in the way that it will help you get to know the kan variation a bit better, but the truth is there are better ways to do this if that's the objective, and also trying to learn some openings at this point of your chess journey let's say is not very productive.

Disagree. It helps just to be thinking about chess positions and being exposed to plans that masters take in different scenarios.

Also, his coach is asking him to do it, so he'll learn from what he's told that he's missed, errors in his thinking etc.

@Scottrf: the method doesn't seem very efficient, in any way, he can put this to the test and do many analysis of his own of master games and then his coach correcting, after some time if he looks closely enough he'll notice he didn't improve much given the time he spent.

Anyway i didn't tell him not to try it, but it's his time that he is wasting. he's free. I may be wrong but i don't think i am, let him try and his game results would speak louder than words anyway.

First replay the game slowly several times.Try to determine why one of the 2 players won.I will give you an example:

if you replay that game it is obvious why Black won.He gained a q-side pawn majority from the opening which he converted in a powerful passed pawn.That was the reason of his win.It is important to understand the reason of the win before proceeding with the analysis.

The second step is to find key moves or plans that helped the player that won to exploit his advantage.In the above game it is relatively obvious that Black's domination of the only open file(d-file) was a key strategic plan.In fact it would be rather impossible to exploit his q-side majority if white managed to double rooks on d-file and invade.Now it becomes also obvious that one of the key moves for Black was 19...Bb3!.That move prevented white from challenging the d-file.

3rd step is to determine where the losing side went wrong.It is again fairly obvious that White never had the chance to create counterplay with his e4 pawn.A possible counterplan maybe would have been f4-e5-f5 with f6 or e6 following .On move 29 White misses that chance.

How about the immediate e5?Was that possible at any point?This is indeed not easy to find but if you check white's 16 move , he could play 16.e5 which leads to an equal position.That was a key tactical/strategic mistake that lead to a position that soon become very passive.

Where there any other defensive posibilities lost for white?After 26...c4 , White gains a nice outpost for is knight(d5) but it proves not usefull. But could White play Nd5 sooner?Seems that  White could indeed play 30. Nd5 and have better chances than those at the game.

4th step is the move by move analysis trying to determine if there were small tacical strikes that helped the winning side to execute it's plan.

So the analysis can be something like this.

I want to add that the 3 games gave by your coach possibly have something in common.Your coach wants you to understannd a key strategic plan occuring in the specific pawn structures.Once you find that it will be easier to do the analysis.

thx for all your help even this is Y i think chess.com is slighty better than chesscube it has a nice forum where on chesscube no one is active.And in a year or so i will tell you if this concept helped me or not.

edit

he didnt give me three games he gold me three games of that oppening and what you said about the ideas are still true and i find that it helps to look at games of that opening in OTB chess.

@david210 : what would be a better way for him to learn about his opening ?

@hicetnunc: Well before one is 2000 rating minimum, he can basically play openings by general principles, above that he can start studying different variations more and more.

I have beaten 2000+ rated players otb, and i can tell you i haven't got to studying openings yet :), i know some lines ofcourse but not bcz i studied them but bcz of seeing annotated games played in that line.

I'm not saying openings are not imp, they certainly are, but when a person is a begginer, if he study's openings he will see that he is getting great positions in his games easily without much effort and might be fooled into thinking that he actually learnt chess, so it is deceptive kind of.

And im sure in your own games you have encountered this thing many times when playing lower rated players, when you play against them theory line they get good positions easily, but when you deviate from theory they start getting into trouble.

About your question how best to study openings, i do have some ideas or theories about that, but i haven't tested them in practice since in my opinion that can be saved for later stages, so i cannot with certainty say which method is the best way, i have to test some of my ideas in practice and see which is seeming more effective and build on that.

You seem a good player yourself, how do you study openings if i may ask?

Well, you're in my video lessons group and Lesson 001 on my YouTube channel explains how to maximize your time. Every coach has suggestions how to improve, but my method suggests it's more time effecient to study your OWN games. This can be done after you play a live game, or during an online (correspondence) game. You will get more out of your time investing in your efforts rather than trying to figure out how a master played the moves he did. I have countless students reporting back to me this method works.

Join my video lessons group here, over 7,100 members: http://www.chess.com/groups/join?id=14246

@david210

I have my methods, but I don't intend to share them here.

However, the OP's coach method looks sensible, provided the games are well-chosen and the OP does the job seriously. It's certainly better than only learning a bunch of opening moves by rote (which is useful too btw. )

people i sad how to analyze games aww-rats yes i watched your videos this is not about the oppening.people stop posting here i just want to say this to aww-rats youre method is great but its f***ing useless on chess.com people on online chess play it like blitz let me tell you my story.

I played my first game 5 days my opponent  played fast he was just wating for me to move while i analyzed 4 days a month passed i decided to play vs someone else i had a other game going so it was 10 days he got mated in the first day  the opponent in the first game either he saw he was in trouble or he just wanted to by some time and played really slowly.So i got mad and searched for other game and i got a big advantage and i joined a tornament not sure it was on youre page or justice 3 days two games and now there wear to many games on and it got with my other obligations those games on the tournament he lost a qeuuen in the one in the other one he got mated the first game i was to tired and with online chess so i started to play like it was blitz and lost in the finale one.I have tried giving it a other go but the same problem i will give up online chess proably.

Other thing my coach gave me to analyze 3 games on a opening that has almost no theory i am not focusing on the theory right now more on the endgame(mostly reading books about capablanca and some theory)but a big tournament is coming so some oppening better then no oppening.

And the question was nothing with the oppening it was just a little detail in the question which i got a answer so people i hope this will make you stop posting.   Thx

ok

hmm

The point of the exercise is not to learn about those three games. It's to learn about the proper method of thinking.

Following

I see David's point. This is something I've often wondered myself. Of course you can use an engine and it can teach you certain ideas by comparing engine evaluations between different lines you can slowly reverse engineer the meaning behind the moves. However I'm baffled as to how people ever learnt subtle new ideas in the opening prior to engine analysis. For example, I will try to study some nimzo indian lines and after 3 hours I will determine that the difference between 2 moves was that one allows a gain of tempo in like 10 moves assuming you go down a very particular line. There's no way I could have found that without engine help. 

So yeah, I see the point, how do you learn new ideas just by poking around on your own. It seems incredibly difficult. Either you know the idea or you don't. Unless there is some systematic way to create the ideas. 

I guess it's possible that training your investigative abilities would make you more able to adopt new ideas when you eventually do discover them though, for example by reading a book or being taught by someone. If you have gotten into the habit of self-reflection and investigation then you will immediately recognize the value of the idea. 

I think one problem is that people talk a lot about beginner analysis methods but neglect more advanced discussion. If you teach someone a beginner analysis method, then they will plateau at intermediate. 

There is a computer game I play Speedrunners (a racing game), and learning the maps is a lot like learning a chess opening. Except in Speedrunners I can create ideas by brute force. I.e. the evaluation function is obvious because when you do time trials there is a ghost of your character, and you can see when you are doing a lap faster than your previous lap. This makes it much faster and easier to brute force different ideas and slowly evolve them until you find the best line. 

I wanted to apply something like this to chess in order to create and evolve ideas, however in chess the tree of possible moves in lines becomes vast extremely quickly making it difficult to know whether you missed a key refutation by one side or the other. The evaluation of the position is also much much more difficult, since even if you have positional understanding, the evaluation also depends on tactical possibilities which are easy to miss. Therefore it's almost impossible to be sure of your own analysis and thus very difficult to create new ideas. Still I feel top opening theorists and chess super grandmasters must employ some kind of systematic thinking method for idea creation, whether consciously or subconsciously and I would like to know more about these systems of thinking. 

I find it hard to believe that a super grandmaster could have learnt all their ideas from books or from teachers or from other master games. They simply know too many ideas for this. They must have some systematic method of idea creation.