Chess Game Review Checklist

One of the best ways of improving your game, is to review your chess games afterwards. You can then use your game as a springboard to additional learning by identifying your weaknesses and any missing concepts that caused you the game. One of the problems I have encountered, is that I haphazardly go over the game, and I always tend to run through it quickly and let my chess engine do most of the work. The problem with this approach is that most of the learning comes from when you ponder over the chess game and come up with questions about moves and ideas that you had at the most critical moments.

I have created a chess game review checklist that breaks down the analysis of the game and gives you ideas of what to look for while you are reviewing and annotating it.

I have broken down the review process into three distinct phases:

• Phase I – Manual review with no engine help. These should be done on a chess board.
• Phase II – Engine review, or if you have a chess coach or stronger player to review the game with you this is where they would come in.
• Phase III- Identify Lessons Learned. Identify all of the things you need to work on based on your analysis and the engine / stronger player analysis. You should then add these to your chess notebook or chess database.

Please feel free to give me any feedback, and I will consider updating the checklist to include your advice.

If you follow this blog, you probably noticed that I haven’t posted in 6 months. The reason has been that I have been very unhappy with my progress, and I decided that I would not post until I felt that I had “improved”. I have tried new chess training methods as well as committed to older training methods, and I feel that in the past few weeks I have started to make some progress again.

I have a couple of ideas that I want to write about in the coming weeks, and a tournament in July that should measure the level of improvement that I have attained.