Most chess sites let you download a game as PGN from the game page, either through a share or download button or an export panel. Once you have the PGN text, you can paste it into any analysis board to review the game with an engine, including one that runs entirely in your browser.
Your own games are the most useful material you have, and almost every site will hand them to you as text if you know where to look. This is the bridge between playing and analysing.
What you are looking for
You want a PGN: a block of plain text starting with headers in square brackets and continuing with the moves. It is small, it is portable, and every analysis tool reads it.
[Event "Rated Blitz game"]
[White "you"]
[Black "opponent"]
[Result "1-0"]
1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 1-0Getting a game out of a chess site
The controls differ in name but not in function. Look for a share icon, a download arrow, or an export panel, and expect one of two options: copy the PGN text to the clipboard, or download a .pgn file.
- Open the finished game from your game history or archive.
- Find the share, download or export control on the game panel. On many sites it sits next to the move list.
- Choose PGN rather than an image or a link, unless you only need to show someone the game.
- If you get a file, open it in any text editor. It should look exactly like the block above.
- If you get text on the clipboard, you are already done, just paste it into the analysis board.
Analyzing the game once you have it
- Paste the PGN into an analysis board. The board should jump to a position you can step through with the move list.
- Play through it once without the engine, noting where you were unsure. This is the step that makes the rest worthwhile.
- Turn on engine analysis and set your depth. Pick something you are willing to wait for across the whole game.
- Jump to the turning points using the evaluation graph rather than reading every move.
- Save the positions where you went wrong so you can solve them again later.
Common problems
| Problem | Likely cause |
|---|---|
| The game will not load | The result terminator was cut off when it was copied |
| It loads but stops partway | A move in the middle is illegal for the starting position |
| The first moves are wrong | The game did not start from the initial position and the FEN header is missing |
| Faces instead of move letters | Annotations or emoji were pasted that a parser rejects |
Analysing in the browser rather than the cloud
Analysis boards come in two flavours. Cloud boards send the position to a server that runs the engine and returns the result. Local boards download an engine that runs on your own machine, inside your browser.
Local analysis means your games and your positions never leave your device, there is no account to create, and the only cost is your own hardware doing the work. The trade-off is that the speed depends on your device, which is why a local board should let you choose the depth rather than fixing it.