how to analyze FICS games
I play chess on freechess.org. Sometmes I like how I play. But the sad truth is that my good play is illusion. Thanks computers to reveal me a lot of mistakes.
Here is how I feed the games to the computer.
Step 1: get the game
In FICS console, say (to get the games in the PGN format)
fics% set pgn 1
To get the list of recetly played games:
fics% history olpa
In the output, the first number is the game number. To get the game by e-mail, say:
fics% mailstored olpa game_number
Step 2: analyze
Just use your favourite chess program. I use crafty.
At the moment, I use the command:
annotate game.pgn wb x-999 .1 10
Details are in the documentation.
After annotating is finished, I use gvim or XBoard to see crafty comments:
$ xboard -lgf game.pgn.can
March 20th, 2008 at 7:43 am
The step 1 can be improved:
fics% set pgn 1
fics% set automail 1
Anf the games will be mailed to you.
January 6th, 2011 at 10:17 pm
On Linux, eboard can automatically save your games to a PGN file.
http://www.bergo.eng.br/eboard/
Then, you can import the PGN in to SCID:
http://scid.sourceforge.net/
In SCID, you can analyze it with Crafty or any other compatible chess engine (I prefer Gambit Fruit).
Having the computer analyze your games for you is not nearly as helpful as spending the time analyzing the games yourself. Only once you’ve given your own analysis your best try should you ask a computer (or, better, a stronger human player) to point out what you’ve missed.