Guides
How to work on your own chess
Five articles on reviewing the games you already played, finding what is actually going wrong in them, and telling whether the work is paying off. They describe a method you can follow anywhere; where they describe Mikhail, they describe what it really does.
- How to find your chess weaknesses from your own games Your weaknesses are already written down - in the games you have played. Collect real games, check every move against an engine, keep only the moves that cost something measurable, group them by what the position was asking for, and rank by how often each group happens. What is left is a training list you did not have to guess at.
- How to review your own chess games and what to look for A review is not an engine reading out better moves. It is you finding the two or three moments where the game actually changed, recovering what you were thinking at each one, and writing down what the position was asking for instead. The engine is there to keep you honest about which moments those were.
- Why drills built from your own mistakes beat random puzzles A puzzle set tells you a tactic exists before you look. Your own games do not. Drills rebuilt from positions you actually misplayed keep the one thing a puzzle throws away - that you did not know anything was there - and so they train the skill that decides real games: noticing.
- How to know when you have actually left opening theory "Out of book" is a fact about a database, not a verdict on your move. What is worth knowing is the exact ply where your game stopped matching a named line, which side left it, and whether the move that left was bad or merely unusual. Those are three separate questions, and most players answer them as one.
- How to tell whether your chess is improving - measuring instead of guessing Rating is a slow, noisy instrument, and it is the only one most players own. Three faster measurements exist: errors per reviewed game, where in the game those errors live, and per-concept mastery from clean solves. All three move before rating does, and all three can be counted rather than felt.
- Why do I keep hanging pieces in chess? Hanging a piece is almost never a failure of calculation. It is a failure of description: your opponent's last move was never read as a question about your own pieces. That has a shape you can find in your record, and three different mechanisms hide under the one complaint.
- How to analyze your chess games with an engine without copying the top line An engine answers one narrow question very well: what is the best move here, at this depth, from this position. That answer is not a lesson, and reading it out is not analysis. What turns an engine into a teacher is asking it where the game changed, and then doing the describing yourself.
- Chess puzzles from your own games, and how they differ from a puzzle set A puzzle set is a supply of positions somebody else selected. Your own games are a small, slow supply of positions selected by your mistakes. They are different instruments: one has volume and no information about you, the other has information about you and almost no volume. Knowing which is which decides how you use both.
- How to build a chess opening repertoire from the games you already play Most repertoire advice starts with a choice of opening. Start with the positions you already reach instead: count which families your games actually produce, write down what you intend to play in them, and only then decide what is missing. A repertoire is a list of positions you have committed to, not a list of moves you have read about.
- What to do after losing a chess game: a review routine The hour after a loss is the worst hour to analyse in and the best hour to collect in. Save the game, write down what you thought happened, then stop. The analysis is a separate job on a calmer day, and it is short: two positions, three questions, one sentence you can carry into the next game.
- AI chess coach: what it can and cannot do Software can measure your games, count where the mistakes fall, name the line you left and rebuild your own positions as drills. It cannot see why you played the move, watch you think, or promise you rating points. The useful question is not whether it is intelligent - it is which of the two lists a given claim belongs on.
Do it with your own games
The method works with a notebook. It works faster when something else runs the engine pass and keeps the count. An account is free and takes a username, an email, a password and a birthday.