How to Find Your Weaknesses in Chess (Using Your Own Games)

Updated October 2026 · 7 min read · Every position checked with Stockfish

Most players guess their weaknesses. They remember one painful endgame and decide they need endgame books, when their games are actually being decided by hung pieces around move 20. Memory is biased towards dramatic losses. A tally of your real games is not. This guide gives you a repeatable method you can run in an evening: collect a sample, find the turning points, categorise them, check openings and time use, then turn the top pattern into a training plan.

1. Collect a fair sample of your own games

Pick one time control, the one you care about most, and pull your last 30–50 rated games. Mixing bullet and rapid muddies everything, because time pressure creates different mistakes at different speeds.

Include wins, losses and draws. Wins often contain the same blunder your opponent failed to punish, and those count too.

Fewer than about 20 games and one bad evening can dominate the picture. More than 50 and you will probably stop before finishing. Aim for a number you will actually get through.

2. Find the turning point in each game

Run every game through an engine (the free Lichess analysis board or Chess.com's analysis both work). Don't read every suggestion. Look for the first move where the evaluation swung clearly against you: roughly a pawn or more, or from winning to equal.

That move is the turning point. Write down:

• the move number
• what happened in one plain sentence ("left my knight undefended", "missed that f7 was only guarded by the king")
• how much time you had left on the clock

One line per game. If you also had a second huge swing, note it, but the first is usually the most informative. Our guide on how to analyse your chess games covers this step in more detail if you want a fuller routine.

3. Tag every turning point by phase and type

Now give each turning point three tags.

Phase: opening (roughly the first 10–12 moves), middlegame, or endgame.

Type: pick the closest one.

• Hung material: a piece or pawn left undefended or attacked more times than defended
• Missed tactic for you: a fork, pin or mate you didn't see
• Allowed a tactic: you didn't check your opponent's forcing replies
• Opening trap or unknown line: you got into trouble before the game started
• Wrong plan: no tactic, just a slow drift into a worse position
• Endgame technique: you had a won or drawn ending and misplayed it
• Time trouble: the mistake happened with very little time left

Clock: plenty of time, moderate, or under pressure.

The board below is a typical opening-phase entry. If several of your losses look like this, your weakness isn't "tactics" in general; it is not checking which squares near your king are defended only once.

4. Check your openings and colours separately

Split your results by colour and by opening. You are looking for lines where you consistently come out worse, not just lose. A loss at move 40 after a fine opening isn't an opening problem.

Ask two questions:

• In which openings is my position already bad by move 12?
• Do I lose noticeably more as one colour?

The classic case: a player who plays the Two Knights with Black but has never studied what to do when White's knight jumps in to attack f7. They don't lose to it every game, but when they do, it is quick.

How Chessy helps: connect your Chess.com or Lichess username and Chessy imports and analyses your games automatically, then shows your win rate by opening and the move numbers where your results drop, so this step doesn't need a spreadsheet.

5. Look at time use and playing conditions

Some weaknesses aren't about chess knowledge at all. Go back to your clock column and check:

• Do most turning points happen with little time left? Then your real weakness is time management, often caused by spending far too long on early moves.
• Do they cluster at a particular stage of the game, such as just after the opening when you have to make your own plan?
• Do they happen in the third or fourth game of a session, or late at night?
• Do losses come in streaks, where you queue up again straight after a defeat?

If a big share of your mistakes come from tired, tilted or time-scrambled play, more study won't fix it. A rule like "stop after two losses in a row" might fix it overnight.

6. Rank the patterns and pick one or two

Count your tags. You will usually find that one or two categories cover most of the damage. At club level that is very often hung material and allowed tactics, which is uncomfortable but good news: it is the most fixable weakness in chess.

Pick the top one, maybe two. Then match the training to the weakness:

• Hung material / allowed tactics → a blunder-check habit before every move. See how to stop hanging pieces.
• Missed tactics → daily puzzles, ideally built from positions in your own games. Here is why puzzles from your own games work better than random sets.
• Opening losses → learn the main ideas of the one or two lines that keep hurting you, not a new repertoire.
• Endgame technique → basic king-and-pawn and rook endings.
• Time trouble → a time budget per phase.

Greed is worth its own category. If you keep grabbing material without checking what your opponent gets in return, the board below is the textbook warning.

How Chessy helps: it turns your own blunders into puzzles and its AI coach can answer questions like "why do I keep losing with Black?" using engine-checked moves from your games.

7. Re-test after a few weeks

Weaknesses move. Once you stop hanging pieces, the next layer appears: maybe weak plans, maybe endgames. Run the same process on a fresh batch of games every month or so.

Compare the tallies. If your top category has shrunk, the training is working, so move on to the next one. If it hasn't, change the method rather than the topic.

Common mistakes

• Diagnosing from memory. The games you remember are the dramatic ones. A tally of 30+ games often shows a completely different picture from the one in your head.
• Relying on the accuracy score alone. Accuracy tells you how well you played overall, not why you lost. Two games with the same score can be lost for completely different reasons. Use it as a trend line, and read our note on what a good accuracy is before reading too much into one number.
• Logging every inaccuracy. If you record every small engine complaint, you drown in noise. Only the turning point decides the game; start there.
• Analysing only losses. Your wins contain unpunished blunders. Leaving them out hides exactly the habits that will cost you against stronger opponents.
• Studying what's fun instead of what's frequent. Opening theory is enjoyable, but if most of your games are decided by a hung piece in the middlegame, new theory won't change your rating.
• Copying the engine without understanding. Knowing the engine's move isn't the same as knowing why yours failed. Write one sentence in plain words for each turning point, or the lesson won't stick.

FAQ

Finding your weaknesses isn't a talent. It is bookkeeping: a fair sample, one turning point per game, honest tags and a count. Do it once and you will know what to study for the next month. Do it regularly and your training will always aim at what is actually costing you points.

Sources

• Lichess analysis board — Free engine analysis for finding turning points
• Chess.com Support: What is Accuracy? — Why accuracy scores describe overall play rather than specific weaknesses
• Lichess: how accuracy is computed — How evaluation swings feed into accuracy figures
• Wikipedia: Blunder (chess) — Definition of a blunder and its role in deciding games
• Chessy: How to analyze your chess games — Detailed routine for reviewing individual games