Studying your losses is important. They show recurring patterns, habits and mistakes.

But it’s also worth looking at the games you’ve won, especially the games where you beat stronger players or at least made them work for it.

Put a few of those games side by side and you might start noticing common threads: the positions you handle well, the decisions that feel natural, the parts of your chess that are already holding their own.

And when your confidence is a bit shaky, going back through some of your best games can help too. It reminds you that you’ve played good chess before.