Engine Analysis

Good chess analysis goes broad before it goes deep, considering carefully at each stage the possible alternatives and the objective demands of the position. Never take the "We are too deep!" advice for granted. When one decides to follow a certain path, one should keep in mind what the alternative, unexplored paths looked like based on one's preliminary judgments. One should generally abandon, provisionally, exploration of a path as soon as it looks worse than an earlier, as-yet-unexplored alternative. If one has the self-discipline, it is best to proceed only a limited distance down any given analytical path, form a preliminary judgment or simply suspend one's judgment, then go back and follow another path a similarly short distance. When one has surveyed many paths in this limited way, it may be time to go deeper along some or all of them, but by a similar process of halting and retracing. One will thus avoid a great deal of wasted time that comes from too much consideration of excessively deep positions. A benefit of working in this way is that parallel themes and motifs will be seen in different variations, and these will inform each other.