Chess: how can I best review and learn from my PGN notated games?
April 28, 2012 4:47 AM Subscribe
Chess: how can I best review and learn from my PGN notated games? I've been playing games on my phone, and I've got the option to export the PGN files. Is there a program I can use to import the games, that will give me easy to follow analysis or suggestions, or is there a forum where people give feedback on uploaded games? I'm not the most advanced chess player, so I'd rather something quite user friendly. Thanks in advance.
My husband recommends to upload them to RedHotPawn. There are forums there where players will comment on the games.
posted by CathyG at 8:35 AM on April 28, 2012
posted by CathyG at 8:35 AM on April 28, 2012
Computer analysis is good for finding your tactical errors, but it won't be able to give you meaningful advice along the lines of "you should have developed the rest of your pieces instead of trying to attack" or "you shouldn't have exchanged the Knight, it was your best piece in this position" or things like that.
There are good free chess engines like Stockfish, but you need to learn how to get them working with a separate GUI.
posted by thelonius at 4:06 PM on April 28, 2012
There are good free chess engines like Stockfish, but you need to learn how to get them working with a separate GUI.
posted by thelonius at 4:06 PM on April 28, 2012
If you want to improve your game you could do much worse than buying a membership at Chess.com. The highest level is only like $14 a month. With that I get to play live online chess 24 hours a day as much as I want (which you can also do for free if you don't want to pay), I can play an unlimited number of simultaneous correspondence (turn by turn, time controls like 3 days/move or week/move) games. There are a zillion tournaments to sign up for for all skill levels, now finally there are tournaments running all the time over in the Live chess, which is a lot of fun.
But the learning tools on the site are fantastic. They have a Tactics Trainer with 10's of thousands of chess problems from beginner to grandmaster. It is an adaptive algorithm and feeds you problems based on your long term and short term success in the problems, so you are always being challenged but not overwhelmed. With the higher memberships you also get access to the Chess Mentor. Which is a massive database of chess lessons from many grandmasters and teachers like Jeremy Silman. Many, many thousands of these. They are arranged by theme and difficulty, and there are a lot of many-part 'courses' in there like 'Checkmating with Rooks' or 'Pawn Structure.' Every wrong move you make in Chess Mentor gets a (kind) refutation, so you understand why it was wrong.
AND, in actual reference to your question, you can send (with membership) any of your games from live chess or correspondence chess to get a powerful thorough computer analysis. I have only tried it once, but that's mainly because I didn't have any games where I didn't just blow it at least once that I was proud enough to submit for analysis. But it was pretty cool, the one I got.
There are a lot of these services available for free other places, but I just like the simplicity of having it all in one place. It is worth the dollars to me.
It's important to note that you will only get from analysis what you put in. A computer analysis is just going to be a bunch of double-columns of axb Qd4 Ra6 Ke4. The only way to make it useful is to sit down, take your time, put it on the board and play through all the variations. It seems tedious (to me too, a lot of the time), but that is how you really improve. That and doing tactics.
There is a free (but upgradeable with $$) tactics module at chesstempo.com. If you start working on tactics you will start slaying your friends who were previously on equal footing.
I realize that was more answer than you asked for, but I caught the chess bug a few years ago and all this stuff is the stuff that helped me out.
Oh, and YouTube has more chess instructional and otherwise videos than you could ever need.
posted by TheRedArmy at 4:33 PM on April 28, 2012
But the learning tools on the site are fantastic. They have a Tactics Trainer with 10's of thousands of chess problems from beginner to grandmaster. It is an adaptive algorithm and feeds you problems based on your long term and short term success in the problems, so you are always being challenged but not overwhelmed. With the higher memberships you also get access to the Chess Mentor. Which is a massive database of chess lessons from many grandmasters and teachers like Jeremy Silman. Many, many thousands of these. They are arranged by theme and difficulty, and there are a lot of many-part 'courses' in there like 'Checkmating with Rooks' or 'Pawn Structure.' Every wrong move you make in Chess Mentor gets a (kind) refutation, so you understand why it was wrong.
AND, in actual reference to your question, you can send (with membership) any of your games from live chess or correspondence chess to get a powerful thorough computer analysis. I have only tried it once, but that's mainly because I didn't have any games where I didn't just blow it at least once that I was proud enough to submit for analysis. But it was pretty cool, the one I got.
There are a lot of these services available for free other places, but I just like the simplicity of having it all in one place. It is worth the dollars to me.
It's important to note that you will only get from analysis what you put in. A computer analysis is just going to be a bunch of double-columns of axb Qd4 Ra6 Ke4. The only way to make it useful is to sit down, take your time, put it on the board and play through all the variations. It seems tedious (to me too, a lot of the time), but that is how you really improve. That and doing tactics.
There is a free (but upgradeable with $$) tactics module at chesstempo.com. If you start working on tactics you will start slaying your friends who were previously on equal footing.
I realize that was more answer than you asked for, but I caught the chess bug a few years ago and all this stuff is the stuff that helped me out.
Oh, and YouTube has more chess instructional and otherwise videos than you could ever need.
posted by TheRedArmy at 4:33 PM on April 28, 2012
Chessbase is great for analyzing your game based on historical games as well as with chess engines. This will help you with your openings. Their website is a bit of a mess, but look for Chessbase Light. You can also buy large historical databases from them or grow your own database from free PGN files off of the internet.
posted by stp123 at 7:03 PM on April 28, 2012
posted by stp123 at 7:03 PM on April 28, 2012
Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition (I believe around $10-$20 through Steam) allows you to import PGN games and will analyze them with regular human language (ie, "You were ahead - but with that last move you are now losing badly"). It's useful to see what the Engine percieves as a turning point in a game - and for me it's usually sooner than what I was expecting. It's also good for finding opportunities that were missed - I've blundered my way through games where I actually had a forced Mate but just didn't see it or more commonly I could have forced a very favorable exchange and didn't see it. There are plenty of free engines you could also use for this, and plenty of other good SW packages - I just like Chessmaster's ease of use, and it's fine for my lowly level of play.
Chess.com is also great - but does not offer PGN import.
posted by machinecraig at 12:51 PM on May 1, 2012
Chess.com is also great - but does not offer PGN import.
posted by machinecraig at 12:51 PM on May 1, 2012
This thread is closed to new comments.
I've used Fritz for this, but it's probably overkill.
posted by pompomtom at 7:05 AM on April 28, 2012