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First analyse without engine, then check your analysis with the engine to see if your thoughts were "correct" (considering that stockfish is the strongest chess entity and can be seen as somewhat close to a chess god, or the absolute truth about chess).
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When you analyse without the engine your goal is to try and find improvements over your gameplay. These improvements can be really anything, as long as you find an improvement over the way you played, as long as you learn something from it, its a success.
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You can start with looking at the opening phase of your game. Check how far you followed your preparation, when your knowledge of the opening ended. You can compare what you played with a resource on the opening. For example if you use christofs 1.e4 course then you can compare how you played in the game with what he gave in his course and his comments in the course about the line. Cause often times we dont remember our opening or dont play it correctly. You can also check out games in the database played by masters (i hope you know how to see such games?), from those you can also learn a lot about the opening and middlegame of ur opening.
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Try to identify so called critical moments. These are moments in the game that you think are important, which had a big influence on the outcome of the game. Important decisions basically. Because in most cases your losses come down to a few bad decisions right. You can try identifying these without the engine, just go through your game move by move and identify the moments where you think something went wrong for you. Then look for improvements. The way you do this is you simply pause at the position and treat it like you would have this position in a game again. Just try to analyse it a bit and see if you can find something better than what you played in the game. In case you won the game and think you played fairly well you can also try and analyse and understand the opponents mistakes.
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After this if you still have time and energy you can look out for smaller moments in the game which werent that important maybe, but it can still be nice to find improvements over your gameplay. Thats what chess is about, you are striving to find the best move on every turn, but this process of finding it is very difficult so you just have to practise it and analyse a large number of positions so you get closer to being able to analyse and play good moves.
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You can also look at things like move times, if you spent your thinking time well, if you took too long on not so important decisions and stuff like this. Because sometimes it can happen you think way too long on a move which isnt that crucial anyways and then you burn all your time and get in time pressure and big trouble. Identify such moments and why they happened and how you can avoid it and use your time better. ____ ____
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Then what you want to do is let the mighty chessgod, the beast stockfish out of its cage. Turn it on and enable like 2 lines at least (you can change in settings how many stockfish lines it shows, if you set it to 1 it will only show the top engine move and the top line, but if you set it to 2 it will show the top engine move and the second best engine move. This can be useful for practical purposes. Because often times stockfish will not just say there is only 1 good move right, it will say there is multiple good ones, so it can be nice to check out multiple of its suggestions, even if some are slightly worse. The reason is that we are humans and the stockfish eval isnt our number 1 priority, sometimes the second best engine move looks humanly way more pleasent than the top engine move).
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You then compare all your previous analysis and thoughts you had about the game with what stockfish says. This can be pretty enlightening because it shows you how flawed your thinking process is sometimes. Its important to be a bit persistent here. You wanna try to really understand the moves stockfish suggests, and you want to understand why it thinks your moves were not optimal. Figuring out what Stockfish means isnt always so easy, but u get better at it over time and if you need help just ask a stronger player
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Finally what you can do is categorize your mistakes in the game. You can do smth like a note, it can even just be a mental summary, about what you did wrong in the game. For example "I lost this game because I missed a fork and misvisualized a sequence in my calculation. I also played badly in the opening, i shouldnt allow my opponent to give me an IQP like this. My time management wasnt ideal either, i was always down on the clock compared to my opponent". Something like this. Basically you wanna draw a conclusion, a lesson from ur games
By Max