How to Analyze Your Chess Games in Five Steps

An engine shows you the moves where the evaluation dropped and what you could have played instead. Here is an order for analyzing your chess games on chess.rodeo: import a game, find the moves that cost the most, go through each of them, and see which mistakes come back from game to game.

Step 1: Import your games

The home page has one field. It takes:

• A username from Chess.com or Lichess. You do not choose the site: the name is looked up on both at once, and your recent games are pulled from wherever it turns up.
• A game link from Chess.com or Lichess. That game opens directly.
• A PGN, pasted as text or uploaded as a file. This is how tournament games and games from other sites get in. A file can hold several games, but you have to sign in to see the list of them.

You can analyze games without an account, and the site never asks for your Chess.com or Lichess password.

Step 2: Run the analysis

Open a game and the analysis runs on its page. The engine is Stockfish 18: for free it searches in your browser at depth 15, and with Pro you can raise the depth to 22 or hand the work to the server.

What the analysis shows

• An evaluation bar beside the board: who is better in the current position and by how much.
• An evaluation graph of the whole game. Its sharp swings mark the moves that decided the game.
• Engine lines: the best continuations in each position, five by default.
• Move labels, ten of them: Brilliant, Great, Best, Excellent, Good, Book, Inaccuracy, Mistake, Miss and Blunder.
• The evaluation after every move, in the move list. The change from the previous one tells you what the move cost.
• Accuracy for each side, as a percentage.

Step 3: Find the critical moments

You do not have to go through the game from the first move to the last. Start with the graph: click a swing and the board jumps to that move. The other way in is the Accuracy block, which counts the moves each side made under every label. Click the number of your blunders and the move list shows only those.

Then work out what kind of mistake you are looking at.

Opening mistakes

At the starting position the analysis panel names the opening and gives its ECO code. If an Inaccuracy or a Mistake turns up within the first ten moves, find out what happened: you walked into a trap or you forgot the line.

Blunders and misses

A Blunder is a move after which the evaluation fell sharply: you left a piece hanging or overlooked a threat. A Miss means your opponent went wrong and you did not take advantage. Both are reviewed the same way: go back to the position before the move and look at the engine’s first line.

Positional mistakes

Some games have no blunder in them, and the evaluation still goes from equal to lost over ten moves. The graph has no swing, and the move list shows one Inaccuracy after another. A single inaccuracy changes little, but a run of them points to a wrong plan. Find the first one and see what the engine wanted to play there.

Step 4: Go through each mistake

For each mistake, answer three questions.

1. What is wrong with my move? Look at how the engine replies for your opponent. Usually it is the reply you did not see.
2. Why is the engine’s move better? Play its line a few moves forward, until you can see what it wins or what it defends against. You can also play your own idea on the board: a trial line opens and the engine evaluates it.
3. Have I made this mistake before? A mistake that repeats matters more than a one-off, so start your training with it.

Step 5: Open Game Insights

A repeated mistake is easier to spot when your games are gathered in one place. Game Insights does that, and you have to sign in to open it. It shows:

• Opening Statistics: your results and average accuracy in each opening. The Weaknesses tab lists the openings where your win rate is lowest.
• Mistakes by Game Phase: how many you make in the opening, the middlegame and the endgame, and where the average loss is highest.
• Accuracy Distribution across your games.
• Worst Blunders, each shown with the best move.

Worst Blunders and Mistakes by Game Phase are built from analyzed games, and a game is analyzed when you open it. Pro adds Study Moments and Opening Mistakes. In Opening Mistakes, the same mistake made in several games is collected into one card.

How to get something out of a review

• Review fewer games and finish each one. One game in which you understood every mistake you made does more for you than ten you skimmed by the labels.
• Start with your own moves. Your opponent’s mistakes come second, and only the ones you failed to punish.
• Write each mistake down in one sentence. “I miss knight forks” or “I play rook endgames badly” is a ready-made training topic.
• Come back to the most expensive mistakes. A few days later, set the position up again and find the move yourself, without the engine.

Common mistakes in analysis

1. Looking only at blunders. A blunder tells you which move you overlooked. A run of inaccuracies tells you that you did not know how to play the position, and positions like it will come up again.
2. Memorizing engine moves. You are unlikely to get the same position again, so remember the idea behind the move: what it attacks or what it defends against.
3. Skipping the games you won. They have mistakes too, and your opponent did not punish them.

Where to start

Import your games and open your most recent loss. Find the move after which the evaluation dropped the most, and work out what you did not see at that moment.