Reviewing Master Games

Stronger players often recommend going through master games quickly in order to improve. Can anyone offer more detailed advice on that?

I started looking through games that open with queen’s gambit since that is the opening I play and the one I’m most familiar with. I quickly click through all the moves in the game, but I don’t feel like I’m really learning/absorbing anything. I’m interpreting “quickly” as meaning like 5 minutes per game, but maybe “quickly” just means less than an hour per game? Should I be trying to guess what move will be played before looking to see what was chosen by the master?

Thanks!

Question: What does it feel like when you are "learning/absorbing" something?

I've been looking at a bunch of master games using a pgn viewer (chesspad). I arrow through quickly looking for moves that speak to me. Then I go back and review if I have questions and want to look into it further.

"Why didn't he just take the rook? ohhhh"

"Why did he resign? ohhhhh ok."

"Now why did he move the knight there?"

"Gee look at that formation of pieces."

The advice I was given when reviewing master games is to treat it like you are playing the game yourself. If you breeze through one game in a few minutes, you aren't going to learn anything. It should take you min 45 minutes per game to really get the knowledge. Try to guess a move from a side, and if you are right try and make sure you understand the plan. If you get it wrong, play through the variations you choose and figure out why the GM didn't play it. It will be hard and slow, but the more you do it , the better and faster you will get. 

Working through books with alot of minatures games with punishing tactics and vicious checkmate themes you'd never dream of from Marshall Morphy Napier and Alekhine many other players can definitely help you improve once the idea is burned in your brain you never forget it. I work through about 650-700 games a day in Chernve's book then I start solving tactics problems with different themes with all kinds of different checkmates.

I read logical chess by Chernev and felt like a learned a lot from it. It’s definitely a lot easier for things to click when the games are annotated. I guess the difficult thing about looking at master games is that I can’t tell which moves I guessed wrong because my move is bad versus moves I guessed wrong because it doesn’t match the style of the master I’m watching. @BhomasTrown, I like your advice about looking for moves that speak to you. I will try this when I go over games tonight.

Also, in a 16 hour day there are only 960 minutes.  Which means, provided 8 hours sleep, the longest possible time per game for him is 1 minute 28 seconds :p

In my experience, GM games never did much for me until I started understanding there are certain ideas involved depending on nature of the position.  Especially pawn structure.

Reviewing GM games quickly will hint certain patterns to you though right?  e.g. in this opening I usually see Nd7, c6, f5 with center kingside ideas.  Or I usually see a minority attack, or black holds an e5 strong point or etc etc.  As for actual understanding or analysis, I tried it when I was new, and it was just confusing / frustrating.

I thought I was the only one reviewing master games (shows how much of an amateur I am...). I agree with BhomasTrown. I do that also. I've got a list of GMs that I'm going through to see which style of play I like (not finished with the list heheh). But I' ve found if you want to improve by watching GMs, find one that you enjoy watching and find games with that GM's annotations to get into the player's head. PS (Morphy is one of my favorite players, but I saw a game where he just says "that was a bad move", I don't mean those type of GMs...). For example, I like Nimzovich's style of play and he has annotated games where he says why he played a certain way. 

I pray that helps...