What Is A Blunder in Chess? What Can You Learn from Them?

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games.” Michael Jordan didn’t address how many times he has hung a queen in a blitz game, and he may have been talking here about basketball, but his ability to bounce back after blunders on the court put him at the top. This leads to the millions dollar question: What Is a Blunder in Chess, and can you recover from one?

What is a Blunder in Chess?

If you spend any time around chess you will likely hear the term “blunder,” thrown around. And if you spend time playing chess you might even have some first-hand experience with them. But what is a blunder in chess? Is it any move the engine doesn’t agree with? Is it any move the regular at your chess club scoffs at or disagrees with? Not exactly.

A blunder is an incorrect move that swings the balance of the game. 

That swing in the game, the plot twist in the story being told on those sixty-four squares, is what can decide a game.

When Can a Blunder in Chess Happen?

A blunder can happen at any moment in chess. At any moment, a careless move can decide a game. Blunders can take a completely won endgame for one side, and change it to a draw, or even worse, a loss. 

Blunders don’t just happen in the endgame, they can also happen in the opening. One of the reasons that openings are studied so much by chess players is to avoid a game-deciding blunder early. There is little worse in a game of chess than falling for an opening trick and blundering away the game before it even feels like you started!

What Is a Blunder in Chess?: A Classic!

When I was first playing over-the-board chess, one of my worst blunders came out of the Caro-Kann.

Most experienced players will see the position and know what blunder I played, but see if you can find the move here for white to take advantage of the classic blunder here by black.

Here I played the game-deciding blunder, Nd7, allowing the smothered mate of Nd6#. And then, I almost decided to retire from my short chess-playing career.

What Makes a Blunder in Chess?

This could be a move where a win is thrown away, like the knight fork earlier, or a blunder in chess can be a move that swings the game from a win to a draw. What move can black play here that makes whites’ previous move a huge blunder?

That change in evaluation, the swing of the result, is what makes a blunder. 

Giving away a pawn in the opening may be inaccurate, but for there to be a blunder there must be a large error that, if played correctly, could decide or change the outcome of the game.

Not All Bad Moves Are the Same

Just because the move that you play is not the top engine move does not make that move a blunder. Actually, even if the move is not a good move, that isn’t necessarily a blunder. Most online chess websites will put an incorrect move into a couple of different categories. These websites do not advertise exactly how they algorithmically determine what type of move these moves are, but generally what sorts your moves into these categories.

Inaccuracy

Generally, an inaccuracy is a move that is not one of the top moves, but ultimately does not negatively affect your position a great deal. This might be a move that changes the evaluation of the position around .5 to 1 point.

Mistake

Many might think that blunder is just another word for mistake, but the game review or computer analysis telling you all of your errors has a different use of the word. In chess, a mistake is not as bad as a blunder. Just like with inaccuracies, this really just has to do with the amount of deviation from the best move that you could have played. Did your last move lose you around 1-2 points of evaluation? Then it probably was a mistake.

Miss

Chess.com has an additional term they use called a miss or missed win. This is an opportunity you had to win or play a faster win. While a blunder can also be a missed win, with a miss you are not suddenly losing so much as you are not currently playing the next game already after your win.

Blunder

Then we have blunders. The dreaded double red question mark. A question mark that seems to ask, “Why?” Why did you make this very bad move?

What Can You Learn from Them?

There are two ways we can learn from blunders in chess. The first is learning from the blunders of those who have come before us, and the second is learning from our own blunders. 

Learning From Famous Chess Blunders

If we don’t learn from the blunders of the past, we are doomed to repeat them. And we may still, anyway. Blunders can be demoralizing and demotivating, but realizing even great players have blundered can put us in a better headspace after making our own brutal errors.

In this position, GM Ju Wenjun, the Women’s Champion, played the unfortunate blunder of Kg4 against GM Aleksandra Goryachkina who was then able to escape with a draw. What move should she have played here for the win?

Games like this can remind us of areas of our game that need improving and that are difficult even at the top levels.

GM’s Hang Pieces Too! 

Here is a position from a game with Peter Heine Nielsen playing against Sergey Karjakin in 2005. Karjakin here played Kg5 and received the double question mark blunder. What did he miss?

So you and I play like a grandmaster occasionally.

Learn From Your Blunders in Chess

Ultimately the best reason to even know you blundered at all, is to learn from your own mistakes. Hopefully, you annotated your own game if it was a classical game, now you get a chance to do your own game review. 

How to Review Your Own Games and Blunders

I would recommend before you have the engine tell you where your blunders were, to see if you can pinpoint them yourself! Here are a few questions to ask yourself during that game review to try and find those pivotal moments:

• Did the game shift after one of your moves? Make a note at that moment.
• Did you hang any pieces or make any obvious errors? If so, mark those moments down. 
• Did your opponent make any moves you thought were mistakes?

Now, once you have gone through the whole game, it can be helpful to have another source look at the game and tell you where those game-changing blunders occurred. This could be with a coach, or use a chess engine to see if your assumptions about where your errors occurred were correct. It is likely that the engine will find blunders in your games of the “missed win” variety if you are low-rated. Missing a checkmate or a hanging piece may cause the engine to indicate that as a blunder.

How do you Stop Blundering?

If you review lots of your games and you keep finding lots of blunders, that can be a bit disheartening. But don’t be discouraged! There are proven ways to get better at chess and blunder less. Now, doing thousands of tactics puzzles online might improve your ability to find basic tactics, but if the two thousand tactics rating isn’t translating to fewer blunders, here are a few questions you can ask yourself:

“What Will My Opponent Play?”

It is very easy to have “tunnel vision” in chess where you only think about your own moves. Your opponent gets to move the pieces too! Asking yourself what your opponent will play after their move can greatly reduce the number of blunders you play. If the answer to that question is “They take my undefended queen,” then maybe play a different move.

“Does My Opponent Have Any Checks?”

Most tactics in beginner games revolve around a check. So, look to see if your opponent has any checks in the position, what do they accomplish? These are the types of questions that will help you greatly reduce the number of blunders in chess.

Recovering From Blunders in Chess

Unfortunately for you, we are not chess bots. We will blunder. 

Michael Jordan missed 9000 shots in his career and lost almost 300 games, but he finishes that quote by saying, ”I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Sure, I lost three hundred bullet games last week, but we can still bounce back and learn from those blunders in chess.