While everyone prefers to learn from the mistakes of others, this is not very realistic when it comes to chess - Annotate Your Games!
A chessplayer’s strength is measured by his or her successes in tournaments. Sport has a single criterion - the result. Should we disagree with it, or bring in some other criteria, the very essence of sport is nullified. Comments such as this guy is more talented,but :
- blundered in a time trouble
- lost a won position
- incredible error
- accidentally, etc.
are for the fans (and media ). No “incredible” events occur. If something happened it was possible! It is necessary to try and understand the cause of what happened. You must analyze your own games in greater detail to identify the types of mistakes you made and to find out in which situations you need to improve your decision making process.
From childhood one must get used to analyzing and annotating every game played. Analysis of games, conceptualization of their content, explanation, assessments, motivations behind moves played, threats and what caused them create a powerful incentive for a chessplayer’s growth! Analysis is necessary for rapid chess games as well.
I consider that rapid chess gives even more information about the merits and drawbacks of a chess player. When there is more time to think, these drawbacks can be concealed by longer thinking, whereas in rapid chess and in blitz games all the pros and cons reveal themselves more vividly. A. S. Nikitin, Garry Kasparov’s coach, wrote that the future world champion even annotated his blitz games. Timing is of great help in identifying weaknesses of a chessplayer. It assists in understanding and explaining the chess player’s drawbacks and their causes, and is particularly demonstrative as it rates the time required to make this or that decision.
After each tournament it is necessary to report on all games played by a player in the Chessbase special Database.
Spend 10-15 minutes after each game writing brief notes, including thoughts, variations and assessments that were going through his mind during the play, and compare these with the results of subsequent calm analysis.
The five critical goals that you are trying to accomplish in your deep analyze are: Checking your Opening preparation. The opening part should end with a brief theoretical reference pointing out the best variations for continuing the struggle and with an “exemplary” game of this variation played by grandmasters.
Discovering the turning points and assessing your decisions making at those points. Particular attention should be drawn to the phase when the game passes from the opening to the middlegame, and it is worthwhile showing the extent to which the middlegame events correlate with opening structure logic.
Finding and classifying your own mistakes and other problems (Tactical, strategic, while attacking, defending etc, psychological problems etc); Develop your analyzing skills by uncovering new ideas and better moves, which could have happened if they were played.
The comments of each game should be finalized with an assessment of one’s own play and conclusions (reasons for win or loss, including non-chess factors; what to do in order to avoid these).
Showing your game to the coach for reviewing your analyzes.
Such work on the annotations should last for 4-5 hours. At a higher level, it is useful to annotate other players games, though it is more complicated due to a difficulty of understanding motives behind moves without observing the playing process directly.
Contributed by : A.Vaysman Honored coach of Ukraine
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