Birdsell's Yusupov Intermediate Study Plan

W2D3 - OTB Prep

Completed day?
Daily games (2+)
Tactics (6+)
Rapid/Classical game	(Two 15|10)
Game analysis
Study Yusupov/Master game	(Yusupov)
Day grade?	A

 

A solid day of chess. I actually had my ‘worst’ day of tactics in a bit, going 3/6, but two that I missed had motifs I never saw before. Anytime that happens I count it as a win; how the heck else am I going to learn unless I get surprised on occasion? 

Both games were solid as well, though I went 1-1-0 with a really bad miscalculation on a minor sacrifice. Whoops. 

W2D5 - OTB Prep

Completed day?
Daily games (2+)
Tactics (6+)
Rapid/Classical game	(One 30|0)
Game analysis
Study Yusupov/Master game	(Yusupov)
Day grade?	B+

 

Good day in general, though I rushed through the Yusupov. I’ll be reviewing that chapter again tonight. I also went 4/6 on the puzzles.... one of them I mess up the continuation badly enough to not allow myself an A for the day. I got lazy and ignored a mate in 1 to grab the queen. It’s why we do these puzzles, though, to uncover rushing, calculation errors, and see tactics we haven’t seen. 

Onward.

Week 2 is in the books! I would call it a good, not great, week of chess. My weekend was a hot mess of running around doing non-chess stuff. I put in about six hours of driving, which just about burns through all of the available time I have for study. My rapid rating is now 1315, an all time high. My classical rating over on xxChess.org is 1679, which is a drop of about 10 from last week. I took a couple of REALLY bad losses there this week.

I did manage to play in the first round of the ChessGoals May Classical tournament. Not a great result, but what can you do. It was fun. Those that haven’t joined the Discord should. It’s well worth it. My goal for this week is two Yusupov chapters and two master games.

Congrats on the all time high rapid rating!

All that non-chess stuff definitely gets in the way sometimes

Nice rapid rating!

Week 3 finished! Not a great showing on my part, but it’s the journey not the destination, right? I hit a losing streak in all time formats, drop into to 1287 in Rapid and continuing my drop in xxChess.org Classical to 1651. Whoops. It’s the one move mistakes/blunders that seem to grab me right now. The solution is likely exactly what I’m doing already; study chess, play slow games, grind it out. Goal for this week is to fire up my ‘Lunch with Yusupov’ series/challenge. I’ll be talking with SmarterChess about getting a bounty published for it!

Week 4 done. Good work/bad (terrible?) chess. My ***chess.org Classical rating has continued to drop and now sits at 1643. My chess.com Rapid rating dropped as well to 1287. My ego is... bruised.

I *THINK* the problem is that I am learning a decent amount but everything is jumbled, if that makes any sense. I have new openings I’m working through, I’m learning strategic ‘stuff’ that will eventually be great but right now is getting me in trouble, and I’ve been working on my thought process while playing. 

The combination of all of these things has made my play less sharp than it was a couple of weeks back. Or I’m just in a slump. Onward!

I feel it, I'm around there myself I think, sometimes it seems like I was playing better 3 weeks ago. 

Week 5 complete! Pretty good stuff all around. At the urging of NM SmarterChess, I added the blitz games back in. My ratings have stabilized, though blitz (1155), rapid (1281), and classical (1653) are well below their highs. My play feels like it’s better. We’ll see how it goes.

Week 6 done. Halfway through the program but the blunderfest continues. Blitz is down to 1105, Rapid is down to 1271, and Classical is down to 1646 (on the other site. Thankfully rating is just a number. So from the start of this block of training I am slightly down from my start of 1285 in Rapid and 1656 in Classical. Six weeks to go.

Week 7 finished! Blitz is up a whopping 102 points (1105 -> 1207). Rapid is slightly up, inching to 1276 while the Classical carnage continues with a drop to 1633 (other chess site that actually has classical time controls). The increase in Blitz is nice, but expected. It’s below my rating high of 1282 which I reached back in February. The losses still really tend to occur on really bad blunders. Until the blunders stop, there isn’t going to be any ratings gains.

It looks like I somehow never hit the ‘Post’ button on last week’s update. Whoops! So weeks 8/9 are now done. Classical is sitting at 1636, Rapid at 1241, and Blitz at 1136. Basically the slide down seems to continue. Part of the issue is quality vs quantity. I was doing my bounty challenge (all aspects of the plan, including maximize) and I was rushing to get games in. Also rushing to get analysis done, rushing to do study time. Just a lot of rushing in general. 

I’ve had this issue in other activities that are metric based. Read xxxx number of pages a day, run 40 number of miles a week… that sort of thing. For my personality, it leads to burnout and injury. I’m better with time-based goals, like “Do tactics for 30 minutes a day”, “do one run a week that lasts 90 minutes”, or “read for 15 minutes before bed nightly”. 

Three weeks left in this training block, then I’ll be re-evaluating my approach, but nine weeks in I think I’m starting to come to some conclusions.

Can't you change the metrics to time-based right now for the rest of the program? You can still do the same activities, just try shifting the focus a bit and see how it feels?

A lot of the plans I've built mention a specific number of tasks that approximate the number of minutes per week. Time-based is a great idea.