This book makes me feel like I'm doing serious chess work. It was largely review so that's nice although there were some very hard chapters that I outright failed. The book is a great mix of familiar tactical motifs, principles, and even exact positions I'd seen before but most everything still requires some level of calculation...and I didn't always nail everything perfectly. Yusupov's grading system helps you quantify your strong areas and your weaknesses. It should be noted that this is nowhere near comprehensive since it's only the first book in a nine-book series. My goal is to eventually finish the three orange books.
About the book
The book is tactics-heavy, which makes sense as it's the first book in the series and newer players are always told to hit tactics hard. I've done my share of beginner tactics and so I was able to perform well in those chapters. Ditto with the endgame.
- 11 Tactics
- 4 Endgame
- 3 Positional Play
- 2 Opening
- 2 Strategy
- 2 Calculating Variations
There were a few puzzles, especially endgames and tactics types, that I'd even seen before. No surprise there. I'd have to assume that as the series progresses, there might be a better balance with the Positional and Strategy chapters. As an aside, I couldn't quite figure out how Yusupov differentiates Strategy and Positional Play.
My Results
Here's a summary of how I fared. Red indicates my worst chapters. After you tally scores, Yusupov provides a remark based on your totals for the chapter. Best to worst, these are: Excellent, Good, Passing, or Not Passing. If you didn't reach a Passing Score you are told to re-do the chapter. I only quickly reviewed those before moving on (more on this later).
Strengths
As expected, I excelled at the tactics, endgame, and calculating variation chapters. As far as the tactics and endgame chapters, there wasn't much I hadn't seen before. This series of books intends to fill in gaps, and I think I can safely say that I don't have a gap in understanding of the basic tactics and endgame knowledge. And of course, calculating variations is generally a matter of finding the forcing moves. I assumed I'd do well in these areas and it's nice that I did perform well. However, I'm more interested in the chapters of the book with which I struggled.
Weaknesses
I had a hard time with most of the the positional and strategic chapters (in my opinion, the opening category is vague and the puzzles seemed to be either slightly tactical like the Gambits chapter, or strategical like knowing where your pieces go). Even with the themes categorized, these chapters seriously tested my positional understanding and thus my major weaknesses were made clear, as Yusupov claimed the book would do. The chapter on Weak Points is the one most clearly in my memory and it is a good example. I would take large amounts of time for each exercise and miss half of them. This experience is completely opposite to the simple tactics chapters.
A large reason is that I've spent countless hours looking at tactics. I've been looking at pin tactics for years and it was one of the first things I learned after hearing the term "chess tactics." So if Yusupov gives me a chapter on pins, I'll spot the pin-motif in every example almost immediately. In contrast, when Yusupov introduces Weak Points/Squares and gives examples, everything took longer and I lacked the clarity to know how to solve. I can find a pin in a second, but seeing positional weaknesses would take me at least a minute or two. I'd even spend 30-45 minutes on some positions when I was determined to figure it out. I'd inevitably see the move at some point in my calculation, but often I'd revert back to the more forcing move that I thought was nearly working aside from one defense I couldn't see past. In spite of this, I still wrote the forcing line down as my solution only to see the answer was a different move I'd considered but hadn't concretely calculated.
If you look at a position long enough, the "right" move will probably come to your mind as it did to mine, but I kept wanting to go back to the forcing lines even if I didn't see all the way to the end. I just thought it had to be right since it was so forcing and I could at least see the future up to a point. The lack of clarity I found in the other moves (that were often the beginning to the correct solution) led me to eventually give up on them and return to my other candidates. Perhaps because my mental energy had been spent on the move that I'd been trying to force to work, I'd rarely follow that analysis fully and just assume it had to be right. This is a major pitfall and a big source of frustration due to spending 30 minutes on one idea when it had been another move I'd barely looked at.
I think my tactics training has helped me to the point which, if given a basic tactical position, I can spot three or four forcing moves immediately then a few seconds later, I then can sort to the most forcing, and I start to see the key motifs in the position. Then it's a matter of calculation, visualization, move order, and a check for counter-play and safety. When given a similarly basic strategic position, every aspect takes me longer: it might take a few minutes to find a handful of weak points, then a few more to find the best one to attack/exploit, and finally it may take ten to twenty more minutes to come up with some line that appears best. Then I check the solution and half the time my execution was still off, either a little bit or a lotta bit.
So as a positive, I can see the ideas usually if given enough time, but executing the right plan to exploit it was not always accurate. I think the ideas themselves are simple: I can explain outposts, open files, weak squares, and color complexes to anyone, but learning to apply them in the examples given was a difficult task. To me that means I don't fully understand them. At the least, this minor hardship most surely means I'm learning since I'm not very comfortable in solving these types of exercises. I need to push myself a lot harder in these positions.
Re-doing My Worst Chapters
Yusupov provides a scoring system at the end of every chapter and if you score below a threshold, he suggests the following:
- Ch. 3 Basic opening principles (14/31)
- Ch. 6 The value of the pieces (10/19)
- Ch. 8 Centralizing the pieces (11/27)
- Ch. 13 Realizing a material advantage (13/21)
- Ch. 20 Weak points (9/23)
- Ch. 24 Gambits (13/20)
July 2021 Edit: I've completed my review of this and wrote about it here.
Final Test
On April 16th, I completed the final test. I did score above the Passing Mark which is nice to see, although it wasn't totally smooth sailing. I ended up with 33/47 points. 36 points would have been in the "Good" category but oh well. I surely would have done better if the puzzles were provided with a category but that is not a true test and it's honestly a major hint/crutch when solving the chapters one at a time. The final test does its job at finding your true standing. Yusupov did provide the category of each puzzle in the solution. Here is a breakdown of those along with my cumulative scores in each of the categories:
Conclusion
More than any of my other serious chess projects--like Part 1 of The Woodpecker Method, 1001 Chess Tactics..., or analyzing a game a day for a month--completing this book feels like a BIG accomplishment and the start of serious chess work. My problem-areas are becoming obvious and I'm excited to start seeking out methods to work on them. I'm nearly ready to jump in to the second book with the realization that any non-tactical chapters are going to be very difficult. I want to try to focus most of my energy on those sections and I hope that, overall, I start to see an improvement in the harder chapters.
