How do you begin reviewing your own games?

[tezza]

Hi,

David Ormerod suggested, in a recent Gogameguru posting, that players should review their own games regularly.

But I'm not sure how to begin . Any advice?

Thanks.

[judicata]

[Bill Spight]

Going over your games afterwards is good.

You do not necessarily have to reach a conclusion to learn something in the process.

Going over your game with your opponent is better than doing it by yourself.

Beginners should play stronger players.

Every game a teaching game.

Try to find the game losing move.

[moonrabbit]

This is a great question. There are many ways to get started, but here are some things I think about.

1. Look for obvious blunders that you (or your opponent) made during the game.

2. Were there any life-and-death problems during the game that you had trouble analyzing? Any capturing races? Any endgame situations you couldn't count? Now is your chance to calculate as carefully as you can.

3. Were there any corner situations where you were dissatisfied with the result? Consider consulting a joseki dictionary or a game database to see what the pros did.

4. Practice counting the board. When were you ahead in the game, and when were you behind?

5. What were the turning points of the game? If you got yourself in trouble, when did it happen and why? Were there any urgent moves that you neglected to play? Any shape weaknesses that you left unprotected for too long?

Finally, you don't need to put pressure on yourself to find every single mistake. The important thing is to learn from the mistakes you do find. Imagine how quickly you would get stronger if you found five mistakes in each game and never made them again.

[ez4u]

Going over your own games alone is extremely difficult at any level. It is much more effective to do it with someone else - either your opponent, a friend, or a teacher. We are all too reluctant to look closely enough at our mistakes. We are also overconfident about how many mistakes we made! This is human nature. Finally, at all levels there are any number of possibilities for both sides that we did not consider during the game and that we will probably just not imagine during a postmortem if we try to do it alone.

Also at least in my case, it is amazing how quickly I get sleepy when trying to analyze my own games alone!

Three standard resources are:
* Our own Improve your game --> Game analysis forum
* The ASR league, and
* The Go Teaching Ladder

[Mivo]

My self-reviewing is fairly informal. I look over the games I've lost, browse through them and try to pin point some situations that I feel contributed to the outcome of the game. If there were fights, I look at them more closely and try to determine at which point I should have seen where it was going, and what I could have done differently. I also try to loosely identify decisive moves made by my opponent and I. I don't spend more than fifteen minutes on a self-review, though. (And I try to let a few hours or a day pass before I look at the games, to gain a bit distance.)

Occasionally I'll also use MFoG12, load up a game I lost, and then use the software's analysis tools. It is somewhat verbose about what it thinks of a move, what the expected continuation is and which alternative moves it would have taken a closer look at. It will also make blunt comments like, "I would never consider this move." The main benefit of this is to think about moves (or even areas where to play) that I might otherwise not have pondered. It's probably a bit like having a stronger player to review games with.

I think actually sitting down and looking at your lost games is what really matters: the willingness to do it. The details of how exactly you do it may not be as important.

[Chew Terr]

I try to find three moves that I would change if I could... and then next game, change them. But I agree with ez4u, it's easier and more fun with someone else tagging along, even if they're a few stones weaker than you are. Even with a strength distance, seeing the board as an outsider can make some mistakes obvious, and if nothing else you don't get stuck asking yourself the same questions you don't know the answer to (at least you get different questions instead).

[tezza]

Thanks guys. Reviewed some of my games. Most obvious mistake: not ensuring my groups have enough eyes. Sigh, basic .

[dfan]

I have a log where for every serious online game I make a list of a few moves that were stupid (that I should really have known better than to play at my level) along with the obvious reasons I shouldn't have played them. Here's an example from one game:

- 10: Balance
- 22: Make opponent approach from uninteresting side
- 30: Remove base if you can!
- 34: Don't push from behind
- 42: Prevent tiger's mouth
- 124: You're allowed to back off
- 146: Don't push from the dead side