Analyzing your own games
We all know we should analyze our own games. In his interview, European Champion Ivan Šarić mentioned it as a tool on the road of chess improvement. Several other grandmasters and chess authors, like Alex Yermolinsky, Jacoob Aagard, Rafael Leitao and Jesse Krai have emphasized its importance. To say nothing of the godfather of the analysis – Mark Dvoretsky himself.
However, few of us know HOW exactly we should do it.
Oh sure, there are articles all over the Internet offering us with general guidelines. Write down your moves. Search for ideas. Don’t use the engines. Never play the London System. 1 Even the author of these lines wrote a heavily researched paid article for the website International Chess School where he included several of them.
However, even though these tips are useful, all these articles miss the most important point.
It is well-known that strong chess players 2 have huge egos. Whether it is Garry Kasparov storming off after a 13-year-old draws with him, Robert James Fischer accusing Russians and Jews of conspiracy or a local National Master saying me to go fuck myself because I swindled him from a position where I was two pawns down 3, all chess players „lose it“ from time to time.
And behave like assholes.
This tendency is especially apparent when they analyze their own games. I am sure you have had at least one post-mortem analysis where your opponent just couldn’t shut up. Where you felt like a completely inferior player. Irrespective if you have actually won the game.
This leads us to the REAL secret of acquiring chess mastery – learning how to analyze your own games like a pretentious asshole. Only if you manage to inflate your ego will you be able to reach unprecedented chess heights.
Being a pretentious asshole does not come naturally to us all, though. It is a skill to be acquired through due diligence and constant practice.
In the remainder of the post, I will present you with a detailed step-to-step tutorial of this craft. In the very end, I will provide you with the sample asshole analysis of one of my own games.
Analyzing your chess games like a pretentious asshole
Here’s how to analyze your chess games like a pretentious asshole in nine steps:
1. Overestimate your strength
A general rule about chess game analysis states that the stronger a player is, the better analysis he will produce.
We also know that know-it-alls are the most annoying kind of people you will ever meet. Especially if they only pretend they know it all, whereas in reality, they are more like Jon Snow.
They know nothing.
If we put two and two together, the first step toward analyzing your games like a pretentious asshole is clear – vastly overestimating your chess playing strength. Being self-aggrandizing will allow you to approach your games from a completely different aspect. And lose your objectivity more easily (see tip number 4).
Now, you might think playing good moves is something that happens to other people. But don’t let that discourage you. There are many 1500 rated players who think they should be 2500. There is no reason for you not to become one of them.
Besides – half of the self-help industry, shitty books like the Secret and motivational speakers on Instagram are telling you that „You can“. To „Believe in yourself“.
Who are you to doubt them.
2. Underestimate your opponent
Unless your name is Magnus Carlsen 4, you will encounter players who are higher rated than yourself. You might be inclined to think they are more capable of analyzing games than you are.
Forget all about that. If you have implemented step number one correctly and overestimated your strength, underestimating your opponents should come naturally. You will very quickly realize they can only beat you if they get lucky.
A technique that might help you in achieving this goal is the following. Grab the nearest pen. Open a notebook. And write the following a hundred times:
„The patzer didn’t see anything…
The patzer didn’t see anything….
The patzer didn’t see anything…“
3. Ignore your weaknesses
Let’s be frank – all chess players have weaknesses. That includes you. When it comes to chess game analysis, there are two ways of dealing with them:
- You can admit you made them and then try to work hard in eliminating them
- You can ignore them and convince yourself you don’t actually have them
I hope most of you guessed by now that our recommended option is the second one. It is not one of the ingredients of becoming an asshole, but it is also much easier to achieve.
And way more practical. Imagine you are analyzing a game you won. Do you really want to spoilt the perfect picture of your awesomeness by focusing on minor trifles, such as ‘imprecisions’ or ‘blunders’? It is really important if you could have converted the game more quickly in the endgame? Your win was inevitable from the moment you sat at the board, anyway.
Of course, ignoring your weaknesses when it comes to the games you lost is more difficult. That is where good excuses come in handy. „I didn’t feel well that day“, „We played on different chess set“, „The noise level was unbearable“ or „I would have seen that if I really tried“ are rather popular ones.
4. Lose your objectivity
Throughout the history, there have been two types of approaches toward game analysis. One was to search for the absolute truth in the position. The other was to not.
Every pretentious asshole should adopt the latter, because the absolute truth has the potential to destroy the image of you being a perfect player. In order to maintain your delusions, it is essential to content yourself with your good (or bad) moves and not to search for a better one. In order to visualize success, you need to ignore all the doubt.
Now, this might be difficult to do in the era of chess engines, which make the search for the absolute truth easier and faster than ever before. That is why losing your objectivity is crucial. If a chess player confronts you with the engine evaluation that contradicts your own, you need to dismiss it as soon as possible.
Arguments such as: „Engines don’t understand anything“ or „Engines can be wrong“ are also popular. Alternatively, you can – just like politicians – outright ignore the facts and keep repeating you were definitely better during the whole game.
5. Talk, don’t listen
Look, it’s simple – your opponent can’t challenge your ideas and your logical presentation of the game if he doesn’t get the opportunity to talk. The point it to focus on the quantity, and not on the quality of our own variations.
Just look at Vladimir Kramnik – the master of this approach – absolutely demolishing Ding Liren in the post-game conference:
Be more like that.
Be like Kramnik.
6. Oversimplify, overgeneralize and use cliches
Not an essential step toward analyzing your games like a pretentious asshole, but it might add that extra flavour to your comments.
Evaluating positions too dramatically, relying on general chess principles without taking the concrete position into consideration and using cliches such as „The rest is a matter of technique“ might be a small step for the quality of your analysis.
But a giant leap on your quest toward being a pretentious asshole.
7. Name drop as often as possible
Is there anything more pretentious than using the names of famous players and refering to their games when analyzing your own?
Don’t hesitate to describe your exchange sacrifice „Petrosianic“, your endgame as „Smyslovian“ or an attacking game you played „Tal-like“.
How will the people know about your erudition if you don’t display it as often as possible?
8. Watch CM Radio Jan
The ultimate pretentious asshole and my personal role model. You can start with the following video. He does get crushed by a grandmaster, but at least he handles it properly – with zero dignity.
9. Take everything too seriously
Last but not least, it is well known good chess players (and pretentious assholes) have zero sense of humour. Whether we are talking about high quality George Carlin jokes or low quality Chessentials shitposts, you have to treat them all equally.
You have to take everything too seriously, laugh as little as possible.
And preferably get offended along the way.
This concludes are detailed and heavily researched step-to-step tutorial that explains how to analyze your chess games like a pretentious asshole.
Hope you found it helpful and that you will successfully annoy all your opponents and lose all your friends!
Good luck!