Recording your tournament games: yes/no/why?

[TMark]

I am from the generation that used to record games on paper and I also would then go over the record again, when I got home, to make a cleaner record and study the game. One of the best memories I have after I started using a laptop was of recording nearly all of three games in a tournament on the train going home afterwards. There was no room on the table at the tournament during the games. It is very good practice to try to remember your games.

Best wishes.

[Fedya]

From my experience, if you can't replay the game right after, most of your moves aren't going to be worth recording.

But won't you keep making the same mistakes then?

I wish that not recording or going over bad moves meant that I'd simply forget them. Perhaps it would help me play something better the next time.

[lindentree]

From my experience, if you can't replay the game right after, most of your moves aren't going to be worth recording.

But won't you keep making the same mistakes then?

I wish that not recording or going over bad moves meant that I'd simply forget them. Perhaps it would help me play something better the next time.

I meant it usually shows you didn't think very hard about each move; it's not hard to remember even the terrible moves if you had some reasoning behind them. ("I played that empty triangle to try and split his stones, but it didn't work" etc)

It's even easier to remember if you spot the correct move right after during the game, and spend time kicking yourself for it.

[EdLee]

RBerenguel,

Of course, yes. Because review is very important.
For Go, I don't use any smartphone, iPhone, iPad, or any other computing device.
I still use a very simple point-and-shoot digital camera and take photos of the board
every few moves (fast-forward in josekis; slo-mo for messy fights, ko, yose).
When I get home, I transfer the photos to SGF by hand, using MultiGo.
I've been recording all my serious in-person games this way since 2007.
At around 100 games a year, averaging maybe 100 photos per game,
that's about 50,000 photos.

I disable the flash, all beeps, sounds, or other annoying features in my camera which has no zoom lens.
It's no more distracting than when chess players record their moves with paper and pencil,
or when someone sips water from a paper cup, or walks around in the tourney room.

Good luck with your tourney.

[Jedo]

I recommend not recording your games. First of all, I think it's a little distracting for most people, as has been said. More importantly though I think it hurts your memory. I think it's better practice to try and remember your games by trying to record them afterwards. It will seem very hard at first, but it gets easier and is an important skill. Also, I think it helps illuminate what moves you made without putting a lot of though into them. On the other hand, it is nice to have a perfect record of a tournament game for review purposes. Perhaps trying to remember most of them and just recording one is best.

[Joaz Banbeck]

At the DC Congress, one of my opponents set his laptop next to the board and tilted the screen downwards a bit so that the camera mounted above the screen recorded the whole game. It probably took a little more work afterwards to construct the game, but it did not interfere at all.

As I recall, he beat me.

[gowan]

Back in the days of colored pencils and paper, I used to record my tournament games. I followed the suggestion -- IIRC, it came from Botvinnik --, of recording my move before playing it on the board. I have no regrets.

When I used to play in tournaments, during the time Bill mentions, I also made a point of writing my move in the record before I played it. I, too, have no complaints and, in fact, I recall catching a number of mistakes before actually playing the moves

[Laman]

When I used to play in tournaments, during the time Bill mentions, I also made a point of writing my move in the record before I played it. I, too, have no complaints and, in fact, I recall catching a number of mistakes before actually playing the moves

this is also a reason why writing your move before playing it is a little bit controversial - because you visualize the move for yourself but can still change it as you wish, so in strict interpretation, it is against tournament rules (at least as i remember them for Europe and specifically Czechia, and i could be wrong). in comparison this practice is not problematic for chess players because the algebraic notation doesn't really give you anything significant about the move

[Uberdude]

I've just got back from a weekend of tournaments and am now going to record my games from memory. I've never recorded during a game, other than occasionally take a photo with my phone. In fact at the EGC when I got some kifu to show my game to a pro sitting next to me in a lecture I just put red and black circles without numbers and didn't remember that's not how you are supposed to do it until she pointed it out!

I agree with Laman, recording before playing seems a bit wrong to me. It's like getting another board and playing out the game in parallel on it, playing your potential move, looking and reflecting on it, and then changing your mind possibly. I'd call that cheating. Then again when someone I know says he doesn't think the Euro Teams games should be rated as they are online and you can cheat by playing out a ladder with a mouse I tell him I don't think that's a big deal, and online you can see you potential move as a ghostly superposition on the board, so I'm being rather inconsistent (or at least applying different standard to online and real-life play)...

[Phelan]

I recorded 4 of 5 games in the tournament I went to this weekend(I think it was the same as RBerenguel) on my Android phone, and I don't regret it. I used to do it on paper, and it was much more distracting than it is now. I don't think I lose that much time on it, since I was generally playing faster than my opponents.

I usually can remember only part of the game afterwards, mostly because of tenukis. I (and my opponents) are generally not sure to which area we tenuki'd first. Having the game record solves those issues.

P.S. - A word of thanks to mdobbins, AnDGS is a great program for recording!