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

Categories: chess