Knowing Me Knowing Yusupov 5: Progress?

My Yusupov bus has entirely ground to a halt this week. After the last post (KMKY 4) My holiday ended at midday on Friday. By 8pm on Monday I’d clocked up 44 hours at work. Not much space left for serious chessing. And not much energy left for it when I had the day off on Tuesday.

This is one of the reasons why it’s so hard to improve your chess as an adult. Consistency is the key - do little every day - but it’s hard to be regular in your habbits when you have work/family/insert-whatever-your-grownup-stuff-is-here getting in the way.

The break at least allowed me to reflect on the three-digit improvement in my blitz rating that coincided with me making a start on the Yusupov Challenge.

I resumed my Yusupov journey on 26th July. I began playing blitz again the following day. Precisely two weeks further on my LiChess blitz rating had increased by 130 points. What more proof do you need that the Yusupov books are an incredibly effective training method?

Well.

Yes my blitz rating did go up quite a bit during my first fortnight with Yusupov, but I’d been studying chess more or less daily for several months beforehand. Undoubtedly my Beat the Masters training and all other things I did before I started playing online again has a lot to do with my rating improvement.

Also, I quit blitz chess after a really bad week during which I tossed away over 200 points. That was back in April this year and if you widen my rating graph to take account the whole of 2020

things start to look a little different. I may have gone up a lot recently but I’m not even back to my highest yet. I’m 40 points away from where I was months before it occurred to me that having another crack at the Yusupov challenge might be something that I wanted to do.

When you take account my "improvement " being from a low baseline, the impact of the Yusupov books looks somewhat less impressive. That’s even assuming I’ve actually improved at all.

I’m sure an awful lot of us have had the experience of making decent rating gains over a long period before tossing it all away in a matter of days or even hours. Gradual improvement followed but short term crash followed by gradual rebuilding of rating followed by … and on and on it goes. 

That’s how it goes for me, anyway. So it’s not at all out of the question that I’m still on the first side of the hill and I haven’t  achieved one little bit of long-term improvement.

So what have we learned today kids?  For a start it pays to take stories of rating improvement and the causes thereof with a pinch of salt.

Second, and most important. Why care about the impact, if any, that Yusupov has had or will have on my rating? At the end of the day, I'm enjoying working through Build Up Your Chess. Anything that comes from it is going to be a bonus.