One of the most important things that you could do to improve your knowledge and skill in the game of chess is to analyze how other people play in general – and how you play in specific. If you take the old-school approach, you can put a board with chess figurines in front of you and retrace the moves from your last game, taking notes during the process.

Working with Chess Engines or Chess Databases

Many of the world’s greatest chess grandmasters have used this exact approach, often focusing on a single position in chess for hours on end, endlessly analyzing the smallest of details and potential moves. Well, as admirable as this approach is, there is a better, more efficient option to do the same thing – and it’s to let the computer do the analysis for you, with the help of a chess engine or chess database. What is what?

Analyzing the Stages of the Game

Every chess match starts off with the opening game. These are sets of moves with both immediate, tactical and deep, strategic implications. The reason why the chess engine wouldn’t be as useful in this phase is because the openings set in stone, so to say. What you want to rely on here is the chess database such as Opening Master that can give you insights into the exact positions you’re trying to examine. It wasn't long time ago where chess databases were recorded in the books. Imagine 30 million human chess games in a single Chess Informant (Sahovski Informator) book. Even these famous books loved by our fathers are now online available for downloading.

The middlegame and the endgame in chess is where you’ll find the greatest use from working with the chess engine. However, there are some things that you need to have in mind as you use the chess engine. First off, the worst thing that you could do here is just wait for the engine to calculate the best move that you could have made in a position and then carry on.

Working with chess engines should never be a thing that you with a lack of focus. You need look deeper beneath what the chess engine suggests you could have done. What was the exact nature of your mistake? Why does the chess engine qualify your move as a mistake and why the move outlined by the chess engine is the correct one? The bad approach here would be to learn by pure memorization and while you may experience some results in the short run, in the long run this approach would stunt the growth of your chess skillset.

It's also important to note that you may find that a certain move works better than what the chess engine suggests. This is entirely natural and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the player is in the wrong and that the chess engine is in the right. We can marvel at the miracle of the modern chess engine’s computational power, but we can never idealize the chess engine’s suggestions as completely flawless. We are still humans, the highest form of being on this planet (A.I. - Hold my beer)

Improving Your Game with a Chess Engine or Chess database

So, if you use the chess engine in the proper way in which it was meant to be used, then you will be able to extract the biggest value from this incredible modern piece of technology. You will improve your game by leaps and bounds and you may find that working with a chess engine is one of the best, best most effective things that you do to get better at chess. There are modern online applications based on clouds which can guide you through the complexity of decisions whether to use engine, chess database, when is the chess opening and when the middle games plus tons of other supportive materials by chess grandmassters. One of these killer apps can be found on www.gchess.com

Check it out.

Which one to use?

Both. For openings the best way to follow steps of great players before you is to set the board and analyze your future path. Who played it before you, what is the score / chance of winning and for beginners trying to remember all the ECO codes of openings. Sicilian Defense, Sicilian Defense, French Defense, Caro-Kann Defense, Pirc Defense, Queen's Gambit, Indian Defenses, English Opening, Réti Opening etc. We have prepared for you free 52 best killer openings including free PGN and Chessbase formats to download, PDF reports, chess board screenshots. Learn these and your ELO will improve by 500. Promise. All free.

You can download the PGN and start analyzing it on GCHESS app.

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