If you play chess regularly, there is a high possibility that you would have to play a game in the lost position. Does not matter how strong or weak chess player you are, you will have to defend the “weak” end of the board one day. There are plenty of information available (in various chess bibles and online recourses) on how to play chess, but they rarely talk about playing chess in the lost positions.  They assume that if position is lost the game is over. It’s not quite true. The point of my little writing is to prove that there are exceptions to this rule.  If you apply some basic principles you may be able to join that “exception” group, replacing you “0” with “1/2” or even “1” on the score sheet.

I already talked about the subject of elo rating but decided to expend previous article with more information and some technical details about elo. This article is not recommended for people who take statistics/predictions way too seriously since this information can ruin their chess results. So read it at your own risk!

The ELO chess rating system is a method of estimating the strength of two players. ELO system isn’t an IQ score. ELO rating does not show how smart you are, how well your memory is, how fast can you calculate chess variations or recognize chess patterns (it is a topic of a separate discussion, how well the IQ score reflects all of the above).

I have previously talked about evaluating of chess position. Today’s topic is a little different even though it may seem to be similar: analyzing chess game. The main difference is that we’ll concentrate on a whole game analyzes which occurs immediately after the game, in contrast, to the evaluation of a chess position which happens over the board, during the game.

Before telling you how to analyze a chess game, I’d like to tell you how not to.  Do not plug a game into a computer engine to see where it went wrong.  In fact, you will learn hardly anything that way. It is like solving the tactics problems by using a Fritz engine.