Dan Heisman tells his students to keep a “Hall of Shame” notebook. Each time you make a gross error in a game, one that you are determined never to repeat, record the position in your Shame notebook. This way you’ll build up a kind of personal study book.
If you keep a database of your games using ChessBase, here’s an easy way to use it to make your own Hall of Shame. (Ooh, fun!)
First, create a new database in ChessBase. Mine is simply called “Shame.”
Then, when you identify a hall-of-shame position in one of your games in your personal games database, copy-and-paste the entire game into the shame database.
Open up the game in the shame database and delete all the moves before and after the position in question. (If you right-click on a move, you can select “Delete previous moves” and “Delete remaining moves.”)
Finally, add some annotations about what you did, what you should have done, and how to avoid making the same mistake in the future.
Here’s a sample:
The point of starting by copy-and-pasting the entire game from your games database is that the game information (players, date, result, etc.) comes along with it. This makes it easy to find the entire game associated with one of your Hall of Shame positions.
One Comment
I’ve been doing something similar. I keep the game in a database but the critical position I will copy position and open up a new position in my “Etude” data base and past it. I CAPITALIZE a title and add notes etc .
This is my modified version of what I read on Bob Wetzell’s “Chess Master at any age” book where he talks about creating flash cards. Some games I record several key positions. But I like the idea of bringing the game info over. My method requires I enter them manually. So thanks for the tip!