Yusupov and the Older Lower Rated Player

Thanks Roley_Poley.

I sat down and did the exercises for Chapter 17 on stalemates. I found this chapter to be quite easy. I got 14 of 15 points for an excellent.

I did struggle with Ex. 17-10, a ** problem. I looked at it quite a while without being able to make it work. I decided to skip it and come back. When I did, I saw that I had misplaced the Rook that was supposed to be on e7. Doh! This time around it clicked rapidly into place.

Sometimes a problem strikes me as particularly pretty. Exercise 17-8 was one such.

Next up is Forced Variations, his 2nd chapter on calculating.

Well done on chapter 17.

Did you notice the similarity between exercise 17-7 and the chess.com daily puzzle two days ago? Having completed that chapter of Yusupov, I recognized the solution to the puzzle immediately. Pattern recognition does go a long way.

Mike:

I don't normally look at the daily puzzle so I didn't notice. But that is pretty cool. I did have a tactics problem recently that fit well with this theme.

https://www.chess.com/tactics/490018

I've been working through Chapter 18 on Calculation at a somewhat more leisurely pace this past two weeks. It is the 2nd chapter on calculation, and I have to say I enjoyed this chapter far more than the first. The first was all composed mate in two problems and I pretty much loathed it. These were real world positions.

I got 16 of 23 possible points. That scored a good.

I had another tactics problem today where I saw the idea very quickly because it was similar to a Yusupov problem I had done recently.

I played in a simultaneous against GM Simon Williams this past week. I was pretty happy to hold out 35 moves. It is interesting that one of the moves I was actually pretty happy with in the game turned out to be the losing turning point upon analyzing it afterward. It took a while, but he methodically just ground me into the dirt. It makes you realize just how good these guys really are.

You really need to follow Yusupov's advice and analyse *without* an engine. Spend at least as much time as you both did on the game to analyse this. 

Your g4-G5 move was terrible, and GM Williams' response was exactly right. You locked up the k-side, the side you were attacking, and he closed it up the rest of the way with h6-h5. From a computer's perspective, e5 mayhave been even better, but after Williams' move, you no longer had an attack and he could focus on he center and a Qside at his leisure.

Learn to analyse your games without an engine and only use it as a back-up tool to check your analysis.

Thank you for looking at the game. I did not think of the g5 move that way, but once you say it, it is kind of obvious.

I actually did go through the game without doing an engine analysis first. I actually went through in three stages. 1) My own analysis. 2) Going back to critical moves with the engine turned on in Kibitzer mode to see what it said about those critical moves. 3) Then running the engine (Komodo 12.1.1) as a blunder check.

But the spirit of your comment is still quite right, and I need to take it to heart. I didn't spend enough time doing my own analysis, and I still rely on engine analysis way too much.

The few daily games I have played here are great learning tools because I do spend a lot of time doing analysis on them as I play, and I have all that analysis saved in ChessBase.

 Thanks Klauer. That is very generous of you.

@madratter7, You're definitely on the right path, studying DEM carefully, keeping track of your progress, and sharing the information! 

I've been taking on Komodo a lot at home and here on the site. Recently, I've been tackling computer10. Here is a game I played today where the computer made zero blunders according to this site's analysis and only one mistake. I still ground it down and beat it. This is the kind of game I never would have won before I started studying Yusupov.

It was long-play (45/45) and I was using a real board to study and make my moves. I have a tendency to play faster than the time control and there were a couple spots in this game I forced myself to slow down and take my time.

I continue to plug away at this. This week, Chapter 19 was on combinations involving promotions. This was the 9th chapter on tactics.

I found this material fairly intuitive and I did quite well. I missed only one exercise (19-10) and ended up scoring 18 of 20 points. That was enough for an excellent.

Next up is a positional chapter on weak points.

Good going! Keep up the good work. 

You're going to catch up to me: I just finished chapter 16 of book 2 and am setting Yusupov aside for a while. For a change of pace, I'm switching to Baburin's book on the IQP for at least a couple of weeks.

Thanks for the encouragement Mike! And I wish you well with Baburin. That is not a book I'm familiar with. Not surprising given the openings I play.

The books get a whole lot harder in the second series. One of the legit criticisms of Yusupov's books is that he really doesn't seem to understand the different levels of lower rated players. He's fantastic for players rated ~2200 who want to strive towards GM strength, but not quite as useful for the 15xx player trying to reach 2000.

I'd suggest taking a break to study some well annotated game collections after the first series. 

Baburin's book is a true classic. 

In case anyone is wondering, I think that the intention is that, after Build up your Chess 1, the reader should proceed with Boost Your Chess 1.

"... When we acquired the books, we originally only planned to publish one from each series. We all make mistakes. For this reason, the order which the books are intended to be read is not entirely obvious. The order is:

Build up Your Chess 1, Boost Your Chess 1, Chess Evolution 1 – the orange books (Fundamentals series)

Build up Your Chess 2, Boost Your Chess 2, Chess Evolution 2 – the blue books (Beyond the Basics series)

Build up Your Chess 3, Boost Your Chess 3, Chess Evolution 3 – the green books (Mastery series)

The newest book, Revision & Exam 1 should probably be read last. …" (2017)

http://www.qualitychess.co.uk/blog/?s=yusupov

http://www.qualitychess.co.uk/ebooks/QandAwithArturYusupovQualityChessAugust2013.pdf

"... [Chapters] take maybe 10-20 minutes to read, after which there are 12 exercises, which should take you 20-40 minutes to go through. Some of you might want to spend more time per chapter, but the point stands. You can do six of them a week and make it easily. ..."

Anyone want to agree? Disagree? What does that work out to? ~130 chapters in 5 months?

I disagree. In the words of Colonel Sherman Potter, "Horse hockey". If you want to grasp the point of the introductory section of each chapter, you don't "read" it. You set the positions up on a real board, study them, and work them out the best you can. Then you see what Yusupov has to say, playing his analysis through on the board. The intros vary in length; it takes anywhere from 30-60 minutes to get through one.

Then you have the 12 examples, or test positions. Analyzing them and writing down your variations takes an average of 10 minutes each. So it's two hours to take the test. Now you look at the answers. Set up the positions on a board again and go through Yusupov's variations, making the moves on the board. There's another 5-10 minutes for each position. Let's go with 5, making this phase another hour.

That's a minimum of 2.5-3 hours for each chapter. Sure, you can race through and finish an entire book in a few days, but what are you really learning?

Admittedly, I might just be a slow learner, but that's been my experience through the first 40 chapters.

I read the entire first book, doing all of the puzzles in ~3 hours. 

It depends on whether the material you are reading is familiar to you. There are some chapters even in the first three books, that really do take hours to plow through. And some that stump even GMs. 

But then there are other chapters that don't take nearly that much time or effort. 

My experience as a lower rated player is that you better set aside 4 hours plus per chapter. And with some chapters 4 hours doesn't begin to touch it.

To some degree, the amount of time is going to highly depend on how much of the suggested process you actually follow. Do you actually try to work out the introductory material yourself or do you just play through the given moves trying to understand it?

Do you actually set up the positions on a real board, or do you simply work off the diagrams?

Do you actually bother to write down the lines in full, or do you write down just what you think is the most likely line?

Also, how willing are you to skip a hard problem and just take the fail?

I try to follow his process fairly completely. And it is not a fast process, at least at my rating. There have been times where I had to take over an hour just on a single problem. There have been a few where even after spending considerable time I knew I didn't have it. I skipped them, and then came back to them later.

Of course, SmyslovFan is well above the rating that the 1st book is intended to be teaching. So he could do the first book that quickly. (That is a scary thing from my point of view and shows just how far I have to go).

I think for those actually at the level the books are trying to help, they are going to take a significant amount of effort. I couldn't do a chapter a day unless I essentially made it my job. A pace of a chapter every week to two weeks is far more realistic, especially since this isn't the only chess material I study (I do tactics problems every day).

Using assumptions similar to those of quality chess, I think that works out to about 36 chapters in 5 months.

Well, I think 4 hours works out to about 24 chapters in five months (using apparent quality chess assumptions in other respects).

Bear in mind that the books get exponentially harder. Yusupov really didn't make things easy. His books are brilliant, but very few people work all the way through them. These books are best used with the guidance of a coach who can reinforce the key elements of the lessons.