The personal mistakes notebook

By the end you can

• Classify mistakes over a season
• Build training from them

The lesson

Collect every serious mistake from your tournament games into one notebook (or the app’s mistake deck). Classify each: calculation, evaluation, opening knowledge, technique, time, psychology.

Every few months, review the counts. The largest category becomes the main training focus for the next period. This turns random improvement into targeted improvement.

Key points to remember

• One collection of all serious mistakes
• Six categories
• Review quarterly
• Train the biggest category

Examples

Homework

Classify the mistakes from your last ten tournament games.

More game analysis lessons

• Your first game review (Novice)
• Annotate first, engine second (Class F)
• Tracking your mistakes (Class E)
• Learning from model games (Class D)
• Critical moments in your games (Class C)
• Full annotation of a tournament game (Class B)