How to Use a Chess Analysis Board
Nearly everyone walks around with a chessboard in their pocket. Don't worry this is not some dystopian chess future, today every new chess player is just a few taps away from having a chess analysis board pulled up on their phone, ready to learn. Every chess player has this tool in their chess toolbox, so how do we use it best?
What is a Chess Analysis Board
A chess analysis board is a tool you can use to play chess, analyze your chess games, look at chess positions, and study openings. Online analysis boards are full of features that can help you improve your chess. If you have played chess online and reviewed your play post-game, you have used an analysis board!
Improve Your Chess with a Chess Analysis Board
The best way to improve your chess and have solid chess development is by reviewing your own games! The one tool that most chess players have used for their chess development is a chess analysis board. A chess analysis board is just a chess board where you can set up positions, play out games, load in games you have already played, and look at opening explorers and engine evaluations. You can find examples of an analysis board on any chess website. Both Chess.com and Lichess have helpful analysis boards that you can use.
Set Up Any Position
One of the best parts of an analysis board is that you can set up positions quickly and easily. The benefit of using an online chessboard is the ease of setting up new positions, and with current online resources it's as easy as clicking and dragging pieces on the board.
Load up positions from previous games you have played
It is also incredibly easy to import positions from other games using a PGN or FEN. This way you can look at new positions quickly and analyze them. So if you have been recording your chess games, you can bring them into an online analysis board and share them with others.
What is a PGN?
A PGN is a Portable Game Notation. It is a standard way to format games using standard algebraic notation. This is the best way to keep and share full chess games. If you are interested in just sharing a single chess position, then you could use a FEN.
What is a FEN
A FEN (Forsyth-Edwards Notation) is one chess position. It does not contain the context of the chess game as a whole but has the current position. Try importing this position into an analysis board and see if you can solve the puzzle! White to play: r3r2k/ppp3pp/1b1N4/3QPn2/7q/2N5/PPP3PP/2KR4 w - - 6 22
Ways to Utilize a Chess Analysis Board in Your Chess Practice
If you want to get better at chess, a chess analysis board may be the best tool to familiarize yourself with. At first, it may just seem like a chess board where you can move the pieces around, but take a deeper look at some of the features.
Using a Chess Analysis Board for Opening Study
Studying openings is a daunting task for most, but one of the simplest ways to do it is with a simple analysis board! If you want to play better openings, both Lichess and Chess.com have opening explorer tools attached to their analysis boards. These tell you the moves most often played in those positions by masters and their success rates with those moves.
The best way to use the opening explorer is when you review your game. Even if you played a blitz game, looking afterward at the moment you deviated from what masters played and adding a move to your memorization is a great training method. Your opponents may immediately play an odd move not covered in the masters database. On Lichess you can also tab over to the Lichess database, where you can see how all players on Lichess have responded in a similar situation. The opening explorer is one of the best tools you can learn to use in the analysis board.
Using a Chess Analysis Board After Chess Matches
Most people’s experience with a chess analysis board is after they finish an online game, furiously looking through the game with the engine to find their brilliant move or blunder. How can we better use and understand this tool? For starters, the engine can be a helpful part of the analysis board, but try not to rely fully on the engine for your own analysis! I recommended reviewing your game without the full engine lines telling you what you should have played, but just with the evaluation bar turned on.
What is the Evaluation Bar?
The evaluation bar is the bar on the side of the board that moves up and down as moves are made on an analysis board. This can be turned on or off, but it's best to understand what it is telling you. The eval bar is a quick way to know the evaluation of the position. Are you better than your opponent? If you are in a better position as white the bar will be filled up more for the white side and vice versa.
Should You Use the Engine?
If you have the settings turned on to either show you lines from the engine, or an arrow indicating the engine's best move, that will give you more information than just the engine evaluation. A chess engine is designed to find the best move in the position, but just knowing doesn’t help you improve. Having the eval bar turned on during your analysis though, can be a shortcut to helping you identify where your big blunders were without the engine telling you what you should have played already! Whether you later decide to look at the engine's best moves is up to you. Most “Game Review” type features very quickly tell you what the engine thinks you should have done. Try to think for yourself before resorting to those features.
After Your Game
Here are some ways you can use a chess analysis board right after your game for chess improvement.
- Look for your blunders using just the evaluation bar. This can be a great way to train yourself to find your mistakes, and if you don't have a chess coach this can be a great way to help yourself without giving yourself all the answers in the form of the full chess engine.
- Examine the opening explorer. Try to add another move to your opening knowledge, or just understand your opening a little better by looking at the opening explorer. Don’t feel like you need to spend all your time here, but every game adding a little to your openings goes a long way.
- Next, I would add comments or notes to your game. Annotating your own games is a great practice to get into. What were you considering at certain key moments? Did you even see this move your opponent played coming? What was your own evaluation during the game of certain moments? Adding comments to your game forces you to review the whole game, but it can also help you to see the areas you need to improve.
- Lichess studies are a great feature. If you played the game on Lichess, or take the PGN from another source, you can move the game to a Lichess study. Here you can collect games, save your analysis, share with others, and more. I recommend adding games that you have analyzed to a study for better organization.
Chess Development with Chess Books and Analysis Boards
You can also make a Lichess study for a chess book you are studying. I love to have an analysis board open alongside a chess book and play out the positions that way. And if you add them to a study you can quickly return to that position later as well. You don’t just have to visualize the moves in your head, play through them on an analysis board. You could also use a vertical chess board for training with a chess book. Vertical boards can be a great tool for chess training as well.