From Analysis to Annotation

Playing, recording, and then analyzing your games is a crucial part of improving at chess. The playing and recording used to be done by hand, and the analyzing in the form of an oral post mortem with your opponent or yourself jotting in a notebook. But now, with apps like lichess and with the pandemic limiting in-person gatherings, these activities are mostly carried out online. This means that the app you used to play your game will also conveniently record the moves and analyze them for you, even offering you the opportunity to replay the moves that it deems problematic. If replaying them proves too challenging, you can ask for a hint or to see the solution outright.

This computer analysis is a great feature, and one that can lull the beginner into thinking that she doesn’t need a teacher—it seems like the app can tell her all she needs to know.  Although some of the things that it labels as blunders or mistakes are readily understandable, she doesn’t always see why the app is saying that one move is better than another, which is troubling. Eventually she gets a teacher and learns that the computer analysis is based on a chess “engine” that can calculate moves practically into infinity. Those chess players you see competing for the world championship may be able to find the moves that the engine labels as “best” or “brilliant” but the rest of us cannot. Nor do we need to, if our goal is simply to enjoy chess as a hobby.

But other than the opportunity to replay selected moves, this kind of analysis is passive on the part of the player. The app decides which moves are problematic, and you get to see the solution and nod sagely, thinking you have learned something. But have you? What happened in the game leading up to that move? If what the app labels as a mistake did not involve losing a piece, would you have caught it had you been reviewing the game on your own?

Enter annotation, something I don’t think is talked about enough in chess study materials. We review annotated games of the masters from books, but what about annotating our own? I hadn’t heard about it during the first six months of my chess journey, but serendipitously both my chess teacher and my training plan mentioned it in the same week, and that got me started. 

Annotating a game online means that you go back to the app and review the game from the beginning (without using the analysis tool first) and make notations about moves that have significance for you, mistakes as well as remarkably good moves. You can also note moves about which you have questions. 

Fortunately, the “create a study” feature in lichess lets us enter these comments alongside the game notation, save them, and share them. (I will explain how to do this in a future post.) Doing this made a revolutionary difference in my chess lessons. I used to painstakingly make screenshots of each position in a game that I wanted to discuss with my teacher. Now I simply share my annotated lichess study with her, and we are able to review the entire game, paying extra attention to my comments. 

The app can still play a role here—after you complete your annotation. Lichess allows you to analyze the game within from your annotated study, and its comments are labeled and entered in alongside yours (in the graphic above, lichess’ analysis is in orange, mine in all caps). This gives you the opportunity to compare your analysis with theirs and enter a comment on it, as I do in the example. The computer analysis will still highlight some “inaccuracies” that only a top player would find, but you can check to see if you have found the more blatant errors. If you have missed some, you can examine them and discuss them with your teacher. But in the process you will have taken a deeper and more productive look at your game, which will make you a better player.

For me, annotation has had another great benefit. I continue to lose far more games than I win, but instead of wallowing in feelings of failure, I now look forward to the chance to go back through the game and discover where I went wrong. Recently I was able to convert a tough loss to a classmate into a chance to isolate the three places I had gone wrong by annotating them, making lemonade out of lemons. I saved them in a study and can review them as needed, including before I face that person again. No doubt I won’t be running out of lemonade anytime soon.