Analyzing Students' Games

My big coaching innovation this year was to have the players use score sheets with carbons at their Thursday afternoon matches so that I could take a copy to analyze over the weekend. With the help of ChessBase and Fritz, I would run through the games and try to come up with some helpful comments which I would print out and give to players on the following Tuesday. This seemed to be a useful tool for several reasons, not the least of which is that I no longer had to worry about players losing their score sheets .

The best thing about writing up my analysis is that it gives me a chance to provide every player some feedback. Some players are always eager to ask me a question or to play a game. Others never want to. These tend to be the “natural” players who have never looked at a book and don’t know (and don’t particularly want to know) whether they are playing the Scotch, the Dutch or the French. I think they are somewhat self-conscious about having their play scrutinized. Often these players have very respectable tactical skills that are hampered by some bad habits. By writing up my analysis, I can point out some basic principles like development and central control that can give them the chance to reach a position where they can put their natural talents to work.

When writing up comments, I always try to focus on principles that I think the game illustrates well. If I sit down with a player to go over a game that I have not seen before, I am usually tempted to comment on every move (especially when many of them are poor). However, many of the poor moves never lead to any problems so pointing them out probably makes little impression. If a player fails to get his king to safety, but his opponent never exploits it, the player is unlikely to appreciate the risk he was taking. Even worse are those bad moves that end up working out well. For example, I might chastise a player for moving a knight repeatedly in the opening only to find that the knight ended up capturing a rook or a queen when the opponent overlooked a simple fork. By focusing only on those errors that really influenced the course the game took, I hope I can offer some insights that the player might actually recall and apply the next time out.

By and large, I try to accept a player’s idiosyncrasies insofar as reasonably possible. For example, some players have an irrational affection for knights and will swap their bishops for their opponent’s knights at the first opportunity. I could point out (and probably will) why the bishop is considered the superior piece in the endgame, but their games are usually decided long before the ending is reached. Moreover, when they do reach an ending, they are usually in such time trouble that the likelihood of overlooking a fork makes the knight a very powerful piece. Under a minute, I think a knight is often as strong as a rook. So I accept their predilection for the horse, and I talk about things like keeping the position closed and creating outposts for the knights, and I suggest waiting for their opponent to spend a tempo on the a-pawn or h-pawn before swapping the bishop for knight.

On the other hand, some players like to invent their own openings and these are usually quite dubious. They may get away with them on the lower boards, but sooner or later they are going to get punished. I try not to be too harsh, but as a wise man once told me, “if there were gold in those moves, someone would have mined it already.”

The possibility of efficiently communicating some opening theory is one of the things I like about my approach. Teachers often advise students to use an opening encyclopedia like Modern Chess Openings (MCO) or Nunn’s Chess Openings (NCO) to determine where their games diverged from the “book” lines. While this is clearly a good practice, it can be frustrating as well. MCO and NCO often don’t deal with the move the student played and he will be left wondering why his move is considered inferior to the book move. I can let them know whether their move was tactically flawed, whether it violates some positional principle, or whether it is simply less fashionable than the book move.

As tempting as it is to take credit for every suggestion I make, I try to be reasonably honest about my use of Fritz. If there is a tactic that I think I would have had a decent chance of finding myself at the same time control, I probably won't mention Fritz’s contribution. On the other hand, sometimes Fritz points out a tactic that I would not have seen if I had stared at the position for days. Then I have to be honest in admitting that I did not find it. Moreover, I try to be honest with the students about what tactics I think they could reasonably be expected to find in G60.

Naturally I cannot force the players to go over my analysis and it is clear from repeated blunders that some do not. However, most of the players do go over the games including some who never seem to be interested in discussing their games individually. Moreover, some who ignored my analysis at first eventually started looking at it as the season went on. In any case, by posting my analysis here, it is available to potential opponents and the players who insist upon repeating the same mistakes will do so at their peril.