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Chess Game Analysis
Using ChessBase Engines
(Part Three)

by Steve Lopez

Someone once said that "the first step toward knowledge is to admit one's ignorance"; that statement is certainly applicable here. In order to profit from having a chess engine analyze your games you'll first need to make the (possibly painful) admission that there's a lot about chess that you don't know but need to learn. Over the years I've talked to more than one chess software user who used analysis features as an "ego booster", admiring the moves which the chess engine deemed "correct" while ignoring the sub-par moves (or outright blunders) which the software detected. That approach might be "chicken soup for the soul" but is a real waste of a valuable chess improvement tool. To derive the most benefit from engine analysis of your own games, you must first admit to yourself that your chess needs improvement - there's no other way.

In fact, the whole process is based on the notion that you've already decided that something is wrong with your chess and you'd like to fix the problems. What we need to do now is clarify the process: how will we use engine-generated analysis to improve?

Contrary to what a few software companies would have you believe, no single piece of chess software is by itself guaranteed to improve your chess results. I realize that more than a few players are looking for a "magic bullet": one book or piece of software that will, all by itself, make the player some kind of "instant master". Sorry, but that's a forlorn hope; it's just not going to happen. What we as players, as learners, need to do is find a way to integrate chess study and chess practice into a method for improvement. In fact, that (and the hard work it entails) is the key to getting better at chess.

Let's look a bit more closely at this idea. Improvement at chess is actually a three-step cycle of processes:

1. Practice
2. Analysis
3. Study

No one piece of software will help you in all three areas. Chess playing programs excel at helping you with practice (you can play games anytime you like) and analysis (you can likewise have engines analyze your games at your leisure). Although some chess playing programs contain tutorials on various aspects of chess, these are usually geared toward absolute beginners or inexperienced players. For higher-level instruction suitable for intermediate players, you'll need to turn to books and specialized chess training software. This brings us to another important point. Chess books and chess software aren't mutually exclusive to each other; it's easy enough to combine chess books and software, using the best of both media to develop an effective training regimen. We'll return to this idea in a little while. First, though, we need to examine the "learning cycle" to understand the three processes.

Practice refers to any chess game that you play. In the context of the learning cycle "practice" doesn't mean just games that "don't count" (such as games against a computer or offhand games you play at a chess club or against a friend). "Practice" refers to the practical application of your existing chess knowledge; i.e. applying what you know under actual game conditions. Anytime you play a game of chess (as opposed to solving tactics puzzles or "mate in x" problems, etc.) you're practicing what you know. That's what we mean by "practice".

Analysis means looking at your games after you play them, reviewing them to discover flaws in your play. While it's always great to look at the three move combination that won your opponent's Rook and enabled you to win the last game you played (and we all like to admire the things we did correctly), it's more important to look at the rest of the game to see if there's anything we could have done better. It's ironic that chess has a reputation as being a game for egotists, because there are few other pursuits which require one to be as harshly self-critical as chess demands.

Study is exactly what the word implies: the process of learning new techniques in order to correct one's deficiencies. "Study" might mean reading a book on positional chess, solving tactics problems from a chess CD, and/or reviewing games of great chess players; it's any action we take to increase our knowledge of the "nuts and bolts" of the proper way to play chess.

In theory the learning cycle works like this: you play a few games, analyze them (either yourself or with the help of a stronger player or computer chess engine), identify the area(s) in which your game needs improvement, and then gear your study toward improving the deficiencies you've uncovered. In practice, though, the three processes of the learning cycle will often tend to overlap. For example, there may be a particular day in which I play a few chess games with friends, have a chess engine analyze a previous game of mine, read three or four pages from a chess book, play through a classic game or two from a database, and solve a half-dozen problems from a tactics training CD. But the "cycle" still holds true either way. We practice our chess by playing, analyze the games afterward to spot areas in which we need to improve, and then study instructional materials to try to improve in those deficient areas.

Although it wasn't covered in these three articles, I've assumed that you already know how to play games against your chess computer (i.e. the "Practice" process in our learning cycle). The first two articles of this series has shown you how to analyze your games using a chess engine (the "Analysis" process). This article will offer some advice on how to bridge the gap between "Analysis" and "Study" - in other words, how to look at your engine-analyzed games to determine where your game needs work. This latter step really isn't difficult - it's just a question of knowing what to look for.

You first need to understand that analyzing just one of your own games won't do the trick; in fact, it's not enough to analyze even a half-dozen or a dozen. You really need to analyze a minimum of twenty to twenty-five of your own games to begin the process of spotting your deficiencies.

Which games should you have a chess engine analyze? Most of us play multiple games at a sitting (whether against human opposition or against a computer opponent), so it's usually not possible to have a chess program analyze all of them (unless there's enough of a gap between your chess playing sessions to allow a program to analyze them all). If you play more games than a program can analyze, it's more beneficial to have a chess engine analyze your losses rather than your wins - start with your losses and, if you finish analyzing them and still have time, have the engine analyze your victories starting with the tougher ones (save the twenty move crushes against novices for dead last, if you bother to have a playing engine analyze them at all).

When I pick games for a chess engine to analyze, I tend to look for games in which I'm not sure exactly where I went wrong. If I hang a piece through carelessness (or stupidity), that's not a great game for analysis purposes, since I already know where I screwed it up. But if my opponent wins a piece because of a five-move combination that he executed, I need to look at that game to see what I might have done differently to prevent him from getting the opportunity for that five-mover.

After you've collected a decent number of analyzed games (in the twenty to twenty-five game range as mentioned above), you'll need to look at the engine's analytical output to determine why you lost those games. And you'll need to look at the "big picture", the general things you're doing wrong. Instead of looking at small, specific things pertaining to an individual game, you're looking to spot major trends that seem to occur repeatedly in your play. There are two major areas to look at here: the how and the where. Are you losing games tactically or positionally? And is this generally happening in the opening, the middlegame, or the endgame? These are the major clues you'll use to determine what you ought to be studying.

This is why I personally prefer to use "Bludercheck" mode instead of "Full analysis" mode when I have a chess engine review my games. As described in the previous article, "Blundercheck" provides a more precise measure due to the numerical nature of its output.

We can illustrate this by looking at a particular example of "Blundercheck's" output:

As we learned in the previous article of this series, the first number of Fritz' output refers to the evaluation of the actual position from the game (in this case the one after Black played 17...exd5). As you review an analyzed game it's quite common to see this value swing back and forth a bit between giving White the advantage or assigning it to Black. It's common to see White with a 0.30 pawn advantage after he moves, then Black having a 0.25 advantage after his move, then White getting a 0.25 advantage again after he moves. The value will tend to swing back and forth across both sides of the 0.00 median mark.

But then at some point in the game things will start going badly for you: your opponent will gain the advantage and keep it. It's important for you to look at how he accomplishes this. Is your position being eroded a little at a time? Does he start with a 0.25 pawn advantage which then becomes a 0.40 advantage, then a 0.50 advantage, then 0.70, then 0.90, and then he suddenly wins material which puts you a pawn and a half or two pawns (or more!) behind?

If that's the case, you need to concentrate your study on strategy or "positional" chess. You're allowing your opponent to "accumulate small advantages" (as the great Wilhelm Steinitz termed it) which eventually lead to an overwhelming position, one in which he was able to find or create a tactical shot that put you behind in material (and kept you there).

On the other hand, you might be cooking along with a decent position when WHAM! - you get hit with a move or combination which costs you material (and the game). Your opponent's numerical evaluation suddenly jumps to a 2.00 or 3.00 or 5.00 advantage, meaning that he's dropped a tactical bomb on you. This means that you need to study tactics to learn how to prevent your opponent from getting in that shot (i.e. to learn to "see it coming" and react before it's too late).

Now let's turn this around. Let's say that you're the one who's accumulating small advantages, whittling down your opponent's position 0.10 or 0.30 at a time. But then the evaluation starts going against you, dropping down closer and closer to 0.00 with each move. This means that you're "sitting on your position" too long - you've gained a 1.00 advantage (or better) positionally but you fail to deliver the tactical shot that will sew things up in your favor. This in turn allows your opponent to squirm out of the net your woven. If that's what's happening, you probably need to study tactics problems to recognize your opportunities to deal the crushing blow which will ice the game (in fact, you'll probably see this pointed out in the chess engine's analysis. It evaluates the actual board position as being 0.90 in your favor, but provides a variation which is valued at something like 2.05, meaning that you could have won a pawn had you played the combination which the engine shows in its recommended variation).

So you'll need to look at the "ebb and flow" of your games by examining the numerical evaluations to determine how your opponent is defeating you. You'll likely see "trends" here: the same general thing will tend to happen game after game. This in turn will show you whether you should study mainly strategy or tactics (as discussed in the examples above).

Both of these examples tend (generally, but not always) to apply to the middlegame. But there are obviously other parts to the game of chess. Let's say that you see the words "last book move" appended to one of your opponent's moves somewhere around move five or six and, after your move, you see the actual position evaluated as being significantly to your opponent's advantage (say 0.50 or better). Obviously this means that you need to study your opening more thoroughly; you went "out of book" too early (and very poorly) which gave your opponent the advantage entirely too early in the game. This is especially crucial if you frequently play a particular opening and see this sort of thing happening all the time (and, as I've often harped in my tutorial writing over the last ten years, this often isn't a matter of memorizing particular variations and move sequences but rather a matter of learning the ideas behind your favorite openings - what each player is trying to accomplish. Knowing the ideas is generally much more useful than the simple rote memorization of variations because you'll then know how to punish your opponent's mistakes when he "goes out of book" in the early going).

In fact, this latter point is also applicable to your own mistakes. Let's say that either player goes "out of book" early, the engine says you subsequently start with the advantage but then you lose it over the next couple of moves. This means that you definitely need a better grasp of the ideas behind that opening because you're playing moves that run counter to the opening's underlying "theme".

The same thing applies to the endgame. You might be playing a good opening and middlegame, but then gradually (or suddenly!) see the engine's evaluation going against you when there are few pieces left on the board. Obviously this indicates that your endgame technique needs work - you should study endgame manuals and practice endgame positions against your chess computer (and/or solve endgame problems from books and CDs).

I hate to plagiarize from myself, but I wrote a similar article on this topic back in 2000 and I can't think of a way to improve on my summation from that article. So I'll present an excerpt and repeat that summation here (with a few edits):

It all boils down to this: study a lot of your losses and see if any patterns are present. Look for where in the game you're doing badly (opening, middlegame, or endgame) and look for how you're doing badly (the sudden tactical lightning bolt that ruins your day or the slow positional python-like crush that gradually does you in). Play through your old games, follow Fritz' analysis and suggestions, and take careful note of the where and how. This will tell you the area(s) of your game on which you need to concentrate your study.

It's that simple - and that hard. I've discovered that it's not very tough for me to look at a group of games and see how I'm screwing up. The hard part is doing the grunt work -- cracking the books, firing up the training disks, and busting my brain to learn the things I don't know. Nobody can do that but me. Fritz can't put a gun to my head and force me to study; I have to do that on my own. I can buy all the books and software in the world, but my game will continue to be deficient unless I read them and use them.

If you buy a chess book, read it. If you buy a training CD, study it. You can sleep with them under your pillow, but the process of osmosis is bound to fail. If you need some motivation to study, just head down to your local chess club. Every club has a real jackass - the guy who smirks and makes some belittling remark when he beats you, always loud enough so that the other players can hear. Go play a few games with him. I guarantee that you'll get motivated pretty quickly. It always serves to motivate me. Trust me on this next point - revenge is highly underrated. There's nothing in the world quite like seeing the smirk disappear from an arrogant player's face when he realizes he's busted. That moment alone makes all of the hard work worthwhile.

However there's always the old cliché about how the journey is the reward. There's a lot of truth to this, too. The hard work one puts into improving one's game is in itself a major source of pride for many people. Forget the end results for a moment. Just adding another bit of chess knowledge to your mental arsenal can be a rewarding experience, even if you seldom have occasion to use it over the board.

What we've done over the course of these three articles is learn how to use the most valuable, yet oddly most underrated and underutilized, feature contained in chess playing programs: the game analysis functions. Learning how to use these features and, more importantly, how to interpret the results are arguably the most valuable skills you can acquire as the owner of a chess playing program. It's my hope that these articles have served to point the way for you.

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