[dragon96]

One piece of advice I hear a lot is "review your games", but how do you actually do that without a stronger player? I'd sometimes use an engine and it'll point out moves I hadn't considered before, but without understanding the plan or positional ideas behind them, I often find this pretty opaque.

[nescioquid]

I found that bit of advice similarly daunting. However, in trying to understand where things go wrong in a game, you might notice patterns emerging after you've analyzed several of your own games, which should give you something concrete to work on for improvement.

At my level, that basically amounted to identifying blind spots I'm a prey to (at one point it was discovered attacks along a particular diagonal). A master, expert, or higher level class player will be concerned with entirely different things when they review their games.

[webnrrd2k]

One thing that helps me is to play a better chess engine, dialed down to close to my skill level, and play for a bit until I really get stuck. Then I take back a bunch of moves and figure out where I went wrong and why, and then play the game out until I get stuck again. Or I'll go back and try to see if I can find a better way to accomplish my goals. In general, creating a low-risk environment to learn, where I try to compare my original thinking to my later thinking has been key.

I haven't played more than a handful of games since pre-covid times, so I'm back to being pretty clumsy, and just started "rewinding" games again. It seems to help a lot.

[webnrrd2k]

I forgot to add that simply writing down the moves when I play someone else makes a huge difference in my play. I'm much less likely to blunder, for one thing.

[jdkenney]

Before internet chess it was very common to analyze games either at the tournament with a group, or a club later also with a group, both usually having some stronger players around.

To do it yourself, the best explanation and framework I think is found in Yermolinsky’s “Road to Chess Improvement”. It’s very helpful in systemizing this and also has thorough explanations of his experience in analyzing his own games.

[adgjlsfhk1]

My general strategy is to review with a computer, and if I don't understand the move the computer is suggesting, I follow the PV (principal variation) 3 or 4 moves deep. Generally that is enough to either tell me what I should have seen or "oh, the computer is thinking way above my level and I can probably ignore this"

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

at least on lichess there is a "learn from your mistakes" button where you need to guess a move that doesn't lose points. Try not to just randomly make guesses but think hard when you don't see it.