Episode 71 - The right mindset for game analysis
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. I finally realized that I didn't put my intro music. So, hope you enjoyed the intro music again, and then at the end, there is a small outro as well. So let's jump right into today's episode. And I've talked a lot about how to analyze your games. And today I don't want to talk about like step-by-step game analysis, if you wanna check that out.

I made a video on YouTube that has got a lot of attention. People like it a lot. So it's called "The 3x3 Method" that I present there. I will put the link to the video in the episode details. You can also just find my YouTube channel, GM Noël Studer. And [00:01:00] then click to the video that is about game review.

So today I want to just talk about the mindset of the game review because I've realized even after sharing the method that I think many people want to get too much out of their games, and that's what makes it complex. That's what creates overwhelm. So today I wanna share a super simple mindset that avoids this overwhelm and can help you just figure actionable things out from your own games.

And to understand why this is important, let's talk about what can create this overwhelm that many of you feel. Because the key component is that in chess you have these super strong engines. And so when you play a game, especially if you're not super high rated. Then nearly every move seems like there is a improvement opportunity.

So the engine kind of says, you could do something better here. You could do something better, and so on. And that's [00:02:00] just a lot to take in. And yes, my three x three method helps with this because I say that you should focus only on three moments. And the method I show in my Simplified Chess Improvement System course is still a little bit more sophisticated.

So if you have that course already, the three question method is definitely still what I also recommend if you are getting a bit more used to analyzing your games. But still a problem can happen that I see a lot in the Simplified Chess Improvement System community. And also with people commenting on YouTube, subscribing to my email newsletter is that people want to get something new out of their game.

They wanna learn something that I don't know yet and use the engine to get there. So kind of, I play this game now, I want a new takeaway from this game. And I try to do that by analyzing the game with an engine or an AI coach will talk about this shortly later. And then I want to have this [00:03:00] takeaway that I can implement in my future game.

So I got better. I know something more about chess. The problem is that this is super, super tricky. So what I recommend, and we'll get to why this is important, what I recommend is that instead of trying to look for new things, the mindset you should have when getting into game analysis is to only analyze the implementation of knowledge you already have.

Okay, I'll repeat that because that's super important. When you analyze your games, only analyze the implementation of knowledge you already have. So you're not searching for new things, but instead you are looking for things that you know. But you might have realized by now, just knowing doesn't mean that you implemented in your game.

A big part of improvement is to start being able to implement what you know already into your games. So you just want to focus on these moments. So for example, if you are working on one or two move [00:04:00] tactics. You focus on these one or two move tactics, especially if I work with lower rated players, I usually just set the focus early on, on hanging pieces.

So that means is anything capturable or is anything attacked more than it is defended? And you might realize if you're, I would say below 1500 online, that a lot of your mistakes still come from these hanging pieces. Somewhere in the game there was a piece that wasn't defended enough and you could have captured it, or you gave something to your opponent, right?

And then you have the space to go deeper instead of just saying, this is a mistake, right? We know that from the three x three method as well. 'cause you ask three questions. You wanna really deeply understand of like what is going wrong in the implementation? What can I do better in the future so I can implement this better?

This is super important. This is less interesting than realizing, oh my God, there was this super deep idea that I didn't know before. But the problem is with these deep ideas, if you didn't [00:05:00] know something before. The problem is probably you have a wrong takeaway and that will mess up your chess so much more.

So first of all, doing it too complex will get wrong takeaways. And second, you will not use the time, space, and energy that you need for the things that really matter the most, which is understanding your basic mistakes and how you can avoid them in your next games.

And yes, there is space for learning more from your games, but I highly recommend that you don't do it alone. You don't do it with an engine, but you will do that with a human, with an expert, with a coach, with somebody that is stronger than you because this just avoids or at least minimizes the chances of a wrong takeaway.

And how you can do that is, for example, in my Simplified Chess Improvement System, I call this a curiosity study. So what you're doing is, you're analyzing your games and you're looking at the lens of what do I know already that I didn't implement correctly? So you analyze [00:06:00] this and then maybe by going through your game, you have a few moments that you're very interested in, but you don't fully understand.

So you mark those moments. You write a note in there. You're saying, okay, on this move I saw that the engine said this other move, but I just don't understand why. Or on this move, what is a plan that is good for white or black? So you have these notes, and if you have a coach that makes coaching sessions so much more effective because you already have directed questions instead of just, let's go through a full game.

So that is already great, but if you know a stronger rated player, that's also great, right? And even if you don't have anyone at the moment, you can still keep this curiosity study maybe in the future. First of all, you might be strong enough to then understand these things.

So you can go back and see these things, or you might at some point get a coach. You might at some point have time with a stronger player. And if you already have 10 positions that you have clear questions about, it's going to be so much more beneficial for [00:07:00] you to have these sessions with a stronger player than if you just ask:

Hey, how can I get better at chess? So you can do this curiosity study on the side. These things you can leave for now, but you focus on what you know already and how you can implement it better. And I'm sure that for everyone listening, that will be quite something already because nearly nobody really manages to implement everything that they know already.

That's the hard thing. That's the hard part of chess. That's the hard part in any other sport. And speaking of other sports. As so often is the case, this is exactly the same mindset that you should implement, or coaches in other sports are trying to implement with their students as well. So for example, I recently started playing more paddle.

It's a form of tennis. It's very, very fun. And when I try to analyze every single shot or if I try to watch a video and work on seven [00:08:00] different things at the same time, I get overwhelmed, play absolutely horribly. So what is the way to work on your paddle tennis? It's like focusing on one or two aspects of the game, saying, okay, today I focus on my return.

How can I return better? And it's very likely that, still, even if I know how I should return, I won't stand perfectly. I won't hit the ball perfectly. There are so many things that can still go wrong. So instead of focusing on 10 different things, I focus on this. I still play the whole game.

I still do everything, but what I'm focusing on after the fact is like, okay, how could I have returned even better? If I had a coach, that would be even much, much more beneficial, right? They could just say me, okay, this is what you do, this is what you do, this is what you do. Hold the racket like this, hit it like that.

So you focus on one or a few shots. And if I wanted to know more, if I want to have a full overview of my game, then I should definitely go to a private coach and just play in front of them and they [00:09:00] can single out maybe two, three things that I can work on. What you will realize with these coaches in other sports is they don't give you as much feedback as a chess engine obviously gives you.

It's not on every single move. Not on every single hit that they give you feedback because that will be so incredibly overwhelming. That's what in other sports works, even if you would send, let's say a video footage of one hour of me playing paddle. If I would send that to a coach, no coach ever would say, okay, here are the, I dunno, thousand shots that you hit, and here is a correction on every single one.

I would never watch that. Maybe what will come back is like, work on your positioning. Work on your forehand slice and whatever. There would be a few tips that the coach kind of realizes a pattern. That's all they give us, and that's the problem in chess. That with the engine, with the AI, there [00:10:00] is an illusion that we have this coach in our pockets.

That you guys have access to this super powerful computer that is way stronger than any chess coach. Or that now it's coming up and I'm getting, so, you know, I'm not a fan. Let's put it like this. I'm not a fan of chess AI tools. That seems like, oh yeah, you can just have an AI coach and this coach is understanding your mistakes and giving you feedback.

The problem is that in reality, in my personal opinion, these tools at the moment, these kind of AI game review stuff. I also made a video on this, or actually it's in the same video as my three x three method, is why game review on chess.com, in my opinion, is not really good for use right now. So they create more damage than they actually help because the problem is that the AI coach doesn't understand positions.

It just knows what the best engine continuation is, and based on [00:11:00] that continuation tries to give a takeaway, but that can often be quite random and simply wrong. And it's the same with large language models. Things like chatbots, like ChatGPT. You might have realized that sometimes they just give you with full conviction, and that's the problem, with full conviction a totally wrong answer.

And that's what makes it so much more painful and so much worse for your chess, because there is this full conviction and it seems like, oh yeah, that's so logical. And then you end up one or two years later, you end up actually being completely stuck. Maybe you go to a coach, happens to me for so, so many times already, students come to me and they say, I'm stuck.

And then slowly, slowly we realize that they have so many wrong takeaways about positions just because they trusted the engine, just because they trusted some kind of form of game review. And that's just not good. So, use these things only carefully [00:12:00] and only focus on what you know already, and then you can understand the implementation, what you can do better.

This is way less likely to cause problems in your chess and you can still have takeaways instead of trying to understand something you didn't understand yet, where you have to rely on the engine, where you have to rely on these AI coaches. That, in my opinion, at least currently, are just not up to the task.

They are just not what they are presented to be. So this is just good marketing, to say, yeah, you have your AI coach, this and that, but currently as a chess coach, I don't see that this works. And actually I'm even a skeptic on if this will ever be the case because of how AI works. How this language model works and how complex chess is, I'm not sure we will ever get to a moment where you can have an AI coach that actually understands the position and [00:13:00] actually understands how much feedback is good for you right now, and how many moments they should just ignore.

Even if there were way better moves because that's one of the key things a coach is doing, right? Because a paddle coach, again, is so much stronger than me that probably they could hit every single shot better than me, but that doesn't mean that they should comment on every single shot.

Everything comes at its right time, and for the AI to understand that. Think at least it needs a lot of work. Or maybe we won't get there. I dunno. And in case we get there, then at least if you create your curiosity study, you already have a few questions, you can ask this super powerful AI coach.

But I'm kind of skeptical. Let's see how this works. But yeah, as a summary, when you analyze your games, just focus on what you know already. Focus on the implementation, focus on the skill improvement. And if you have somebody that's actually stronger than you, then look [00:14:00] at the games with them and ask them specific questions that you don't understand yet.

And like this, you can improve your game without learning things that are just not true.

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