According to Mark Dvoretsky the analysis of one’s own games is the main means of self-improvement. In Secrets of Chess Training Dvoretsky offers the following guidelines:
- Find the turning points – Decide where mistakes were made, where the evaluation of the position changed or an opportunity was missed.
- Seek the reasons for your own mistakes – The objective realization of your own weaknesses is a necessary first step in the work of correcting them.
- Seek new possibilities, which you did not notice during the game.
- Ponder over the opening stage – Approach the problems you faced during the opening to increase your knowledge and outline new plans.
This is pretty much the main reason I blog my chess games: it gives me a motivation to analyze them and write them up in enough detail that someone who isn’t really a chess player could follow my thinking process. I rarely bother to annotate anything faster than G/45 though, since those games are basically all tactics (which certainly has value) but little to talk about in the way of plans and ideas.
Interesting goals for analyzing, I’ll try it.