Are you looking for a way to send me your PGN files for a game review? Contact me and send up to 3 PGN files. Please note priority goes to my chess students, and you can sign up at any time or get a free 20-minute introductory lesson.

• Chess.com Game Review
• Lichess Analysis Board
• Self-analysis
• Work with a chess coach
• Bring your games to chess club

Improving at chess involves much more than just playing more games. Improvement comes from learning from the games you’ve already played, especially the games that you’ve lost.

There are a number of ways I recommend for reviewing your games that lead to quick growth and improvement in your chess games, and there’s a popular one that I don’t recommend and think can hurt your game.

Chess.com Game Review

Let’s start with the way that I don’t recommend: Chess.com’s popular Game Review tool.

Although Chess.com quickly shows some fun stats, highlights good moves, and has a friendly “chess coach” bot that explains things, the simplified bot occasionally offers misleading suggestions and tries to provide insights that are just plain wrong. There are a few issues: the bot uses oversimplified language, and it doesn’t always recognize tactics such as a winning sacrifice as a good move.

I hope that Chess.com updates Game Review in the future and makes it more helpful, but right now I can’t recommend it — I believe it gives bad advice and can even make your chess worse. Grandmaster Noël Studer gives a few examples of this, and as a bonus GM Studer also describes what he calls his “3×3 method” of studying games, which is similar to the one I give below.

If you’re still set on using Chess.com Game Review, however, you can try adjusting your settings to make it a little more effective. Under the main Settings, go to Analysis and increase the Engine Max Time (iOS-only for now) and turn on the arrows to better visualize threats and opportunities.

Just be ready to pay to play: Chess.com gives just one Game Review per day on the free tier and even on the paid Gold tier.

Lichess Analysis Board

The online tool that I recommend most is the Lichess Analysis Board. I use Lichess for coaching my students online, and I highly recommend it for both casual and serious play. Lichess is free (no ads, too!) and has an excellent analysis board. Here’s how to use it.

If you have an account:

• Go to your profile and select “Games” to open a past game.
• Select “Analysis” or the microscope icon. Analysis begins, and you can see inaccuracies, mistakes, and blunders.
• You can also add notes directly on the board to better track your progress.

If you don’t have an account:

• Go to the Analysis Board in any web browser.
• Paste in the PGN text of a game.
• There is no step 3!

To get the PGN text of your game from Chess.com, open the game, select the microscope icon, then hit share, and copy.

For iPhone and iPad users, fellow chess nerd “Permanent_Solution” has shared an Apple Shortcut on Reddit that makes importing games into Lichess easier, and you can download it to make getting games into Lichess a lot faster.

Did I mention Lichess is free? It also has no ads or trackers. Lichess is a nonprofit charity whose mission is to help people play and enjoy the game that we love and respect the privacy and digital rights of its users.

Self-analysis

Analyzing games on your own is helpful, but it can take time — so it’s important to pick the most important moments in your games to review.

Focus on positions where you felt uncertain or where you made a mistake. Zero in on the critical turning points, and you can find insights without wasting time or getting overwhelmed by reviewing every single move.

At those key moments in the game, you can ask yourself:

1. Why did I make that move? There might be a good idea here, but what was it?
2. What could I have done instead?
3. What is my opponent trying to do? What ideas are they thinking of?

The key word here is ideas. When considering your moves, come up with ideas based on where your pieces are, where you want them to be, and how to get them there. This process is called inverted thinking: once you’ve figured out an idea and a goal, mentally work backwards from the goal, and then steadily move your pieces to get there.

It might be that you entered a rapid sequence of captures that seemed right at first but were just in the wrong order. Maybe there was a missed opportunity in the sequence to add a pin or attack on one of your opponents pieces. There’s even a word for this type of intermediate move: intermezzo (or zwischenzug in German).

Work with a chess coach

A good chess coach can help spot patterns you might miss, explain positional ideas, and give advice customized to your playstyle. This human approach is more personal and can accelerate your growth and improvement far more than the online tools I’ve mentioned.

One of the techniques I use with my students is asking, “If you could magically move one of your pieces to anywhere on the board, where would it go?” This can be done in the middle of the game or later during game review, and it helps jumpstart inverted thinking by visualizing where a piece can be most effective and logically figuring out the right sequence of moves.

Honorable mention: Bring your games to your local chess club

If you have a chess club near you, consider attending and sharing your games with fellow club members. At the McMinnville Chess Club, our regulars thoroughly enjoy reviewing games together — and here’s where a human approach is better than online tools and chess engines — you can hear different viewpoints, build camaraderie, and make new friends.

If you’d like to schedule a free 20-minute introductory lesson and go over a game or two, you can always find me at the McMinnville Chess Club. This dedicated one-on-one time will help us get to know each other, play some chess, and be able to hit the ground running if you’d like to schedule a single lesson or get a punch pass.