The Abysmal Depths of Chess

  Make your habits so tiny that completing them is faster than debating whether or not to do them. -  Neal Bruce We need to talk about Neal's tiny habit.

Black to play A chesser walking into a stalemate from an overwhelming position is a bit like a batsman getting hit in the box. Just as painful and similarly musing to absolutely everybody save for the person on the receiving end.

White to play Yusupov - Kasparov, Linares 1990 This, as you can see, is a position from one of Artur’s own games. He went on to lose but the game but he certainly went down fighting. If found it in Boost Your Chess, Chapter 9: The Use of Traps . Coincidentally it was the chapter turned out to be next on my list the day after I saw a tweet from Neal Bruce   talking about the importance of resilience in chess ... but that's only half the story.

Do you want to get better a chess but find yourself at a loss for what to do because nobody agrees how to adults get better at this game of ours? If so, this post is for you.

Working your way through Yusupov is what happens to you while you’re making other plans. Fortunately that’s of no importance for would-be adult improver chessers. The only thing that matters is GTFWD. Get. The. Work. Done.

"Being passionate about - or, perhaps better put, a slave to, the achievement of an external result that you cannot control creates a volatile and fragile sense of self-worth." - The Passion Paradox

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.

  @saychess1 At the beginning of August SayChess asked twitter this deceptively simple question.  It looks straightforward enough, but the more I thought it the more I found it impossible to answer.

I’ve not finished this lot yet, in case you were wondering.