Know Me Knowing Yusupov 3: Voulez Yu?

If you’re going to start out down the Artur Yusupov road, it makes sense to listen to what the guy himself has to say about the series. Here’s a Vlog from Quality Chess from March 2017.

 

A few of the things that stood out for me are:-

The strength of reader at whom the books are aimed

I’d forgotten that 1500 for the first series isn’t the supposed starting point but the standard Yusupov thinks you’ll reach once you’ve finished his first trio of books. Aagaard’s pithy response of this assessment as "wrong" is quite amusing.

What the books will give the reader

Yusupov’s reminder that the knowlege his books give is just one factor in playing strength and not even the primary one is well worth remembering.

A documented example of somebody completing the course

Aagaard has a story of a young student finishing all the books at an astonishing speed

Art’s opinion on the use of his points scoring system

This is something that I want to come back to another time

The suggestion that attempting to tackle positions that are much too hard for you
Which is Yusupov's way of talking about The Abysmal Depths of Chess

If you haven’t seen it already, this video is definitely worth a watch.

In terms of my progress, by picking the low hanging fruit of Build Up Your Chess - focussing almost entirely on the tactics chapters and those on basic endgames (not that all the test positions of the latter are non-trivial) - I have reached a point where I'm nearly halfway through reading each chapter and just over halfway on completing the end of chapter tests.

I'll be slowing down soon as soon as I get on to material that I've not covered before, but not a bad start at all.

* Photograph taken from the Chess and Bridge website