How does analysis really make you better - what's the purpose?

Let me start this by saying I understand that you're supposed to take away some understanding of that particular game. You see the themes of the positions you played, the shots missed, the mistakes made. I've started to do it a little bit / all the way on a lot of my blitz games.

My issue is that I still suck and I still lose so many games against opponents that are lower-rated than myself, or against people who don't seem to study at all. I don't feel like analysis has elevated my game at all. I'm still going to continue doing it, but over all I am curious what you have to say:

How does analysis practically make one a better player? What long-term benefits do you have?

I noticed for one that it takes a long, long time before my gears start turning when I analyze a game. For the first 5-40 minutes I might just be staring at it and having all the "wrong" thought processes that don't advance my understanding of the position. In the games I play this kind of analysis is not feasible from a time perspective.

In my analysis I focus on pawn structure, tactical strikes, pieces (activity and comparisons), general imbalances, threats and solutions, attacks, positional stuff (e.g. space and some aforementioned factors).

When I play a game I run into situations that just overwhelm me and then I'm like "how did I fall into this f*&^ing position where everything is great for my opponent and nothing works out for me?"
And I analyse for a while after it's game over, and then the next game something similar might happen. Just memorizing feels like a foolish way to learn.

Is it a thought process I am supposed to learn in analysis to carry into my game? Over all, what's the point and how has your learning experience been with analysis?

Thank you for reading my post and to those who answer: thanks in advance for that, too!

May be some answers there :

new.uschess.org/news/chess-tech-university-philosophy-game-analysis-part-1/

i personally dont analyze blitz games, they are just for fun.
analyzing games makes more sense for me on rapid and classical, there i can better remember what was going through my head when i made a mistake.

@Sholmes49 Thank you for the link. I like the author's thoughts on this one and am reading part 2 right now.

@vio7 how do you feel about analysis, what benefits have you sown from it? How do you go about analyzing your games, and when do you stop? Do you have a specific process that you follow? Do you have specific things that you look for? At what point of position / time do you consider the analysis concluded?

Chess starts with learning the basics, endgame tech, tactics, knowledge of the typical pawn strategies, which piece is good in which position. This basic tech is learned by doing lot of tactics, reading an endgame book, and learning to apply the typical strategical motifs by watching videos or reading books about that topic.

Then, analysis of the games. This is is about grasping where you went wrong. This can mean that you think for five seconds: "Yes, that Ne5 move had no idea, i should have instead played the standard moves Rb1 and b4 and minority attack. My Knight move just lost time, he exchanged it with Nd7 and freed his game and then i tried too hard to win. Ok, that is why i lost." or this can mean that you analyze for five hours, or watch 15 youtube videos or read parts of three different books, in order to find a good setup against that nasty variation against which you failed to get a position which you like.

For the very strong players then it is again about improving the tech, like calculation skills, mental stability, physical fitness, training rythm, visualisation. For example, a strong player can read a game notation and can visualize these moves in his head without having to look at a board. You can learn this by starting to visualize eg. three moves, then five, then seven and so on, until you finally can visualize a full game.

@bak000za
first im going through the game without computer analysis and try to find potential mistakes of my own, pick out critical moments. then im going through the opening with the masters opening book(they play more reasonable stuff as the computer in the opening).
after the opening im going through the game move by move with the computer(i have set it to show me the 3 best moves).
and focus longer on the potential mistakes and critical moments i found previously without the computer.
i think its important to ignore the complicated mistakes which goes for like 8+ moves before they make any sense, i feel like they give u a false sense of intuition if u try to memorize them.
once one side has a +5 advantage without giving it away i skip through the moves quickly.
on average i spent about 10min for analysing a game.

@bak000za

It could be very very boring.. But I could potentially start a YouTube series where I analyze my games. Sometimes the analysis of lower rated players like myself who are not yet titled players could be of some enlightenment to the lower rated players than themselves. Do you think you would be interested in something like that? I know a GM that has done similar to this and he even offers to do free analysis for select few subscribers. That is doable for me as well, but I don't know if my analysis is as good as his by any means. Sometimes offers like that could benefit a few people. Just remember my disclaimer at the start. It could be boring.

:-)

Let me know.

Analysis of lost games is key to improve.
Analysis of blitz games is pointless: you spend more time analysing a blitz game than playing it.

You're playing blitz and expecting to improve - there's your problem

Pattern recognition.

Think of it like expanding your Chess vocabulary.