Reviewing Yusupov Book 1

I did a poor job of reviewing the hardest chapters in Yusupov's first book when I went through it the first time so I decided, before fully diving into book 2, to do a review of the six chapters in which I scored the worst. These were the following:

Chapter 3 - Basic opening principles
Chapter 6 - The value of the pieces
Chapter 8 - Centralizing the pieces
Chapter 13 - Realizing a material advantage
Chapter 20 - Weak Points
Chapter 24 - Gambits

I think most fans of the book series remember some of these chapters as being among the most difficult in the book. 

Method

What I decided to do was to go back over and try each chapter a second time, taking just about as long as I did the first time. Then when one chapter was through, I'd immediately go back over that chapter again using what I could only call a bastardized version of the woodpecker method. I thought this would help instill the basics of the positions into my mind so that when I do the final review, I would have an easier time of it. My goal was not to remember the starting move and all variations, but to have my mind more quickly jump to the right area of the board and the right strategic elements and then fully calculate the forcing lines. I read a member of ChessDojo's Discord server describe it in this way:

It's not so much about remembering the specific position as it is about relegating identification of strategic factors to a background process.

I love how that describes the reasoning for going back over problems again and again. By reviewing these hard problems, I hope that I can train my eye to start spotting the most important factors in the position by way of a background process. I seem to be training it to become a memory process in some ways and I'm not sure if that's the idea or not. In other words, let's say I see problem 6 from chapter 3 and think "Okay this is the one where I attack the queen but I do have to watch for that tricky knight-check intermezzo that complicates things." I hope that as long as I'm still calculating the full lines, it's still beneficial in some ways. And that relegating these strategic factors to memory is indeed a form of background process. In the future, perhaps I might more easily take into account things like the tempo on the queen and the intermezzo move by my opponent. 

Funnily enough, I began with reviewing chapter 20 and then I started back at chapter 3, so my order was a bit off but overall it's taken me about a month and I have just wrapped up my final review of all chapters. Here's my general schedule:

May 26-27: First Review of Ch. 20

May 28: Second Review of Ch. 20

Jun 1: First Review of Ch. 3

Jun 2: Second Review of Ch. 3

Jun 3-4: First Review of Ch. 6

Jun 8: Second Review of Ch. 6

Jun 14-15: First Review of Ch. 8

Jun 16: Second Review of Ch. 8

Jun 16-17: First Review of Ch. 13

Jun 17: Second Review of Ch. 13

Jun 18: First Review of Ch. 24

Jun 21: Second Review of Ch. 24

Jun 30: Begin Final review of all chapters

Jul 2: End Final Review of all chapters!

You can see that this took about a month. I basically reviewed each chapter in a day, maybe two, and then immediately went back over the problems. Clearly my scores are going to be much better after that second review. The final review consists of beginning with chapter three and solving/grading all the problems a final time--now that some time has passed since that second review--to see how well I do with each chapter. I think I'll finally feel that I sufficiently reviewed everything soon enough!

Results
As expected, I did far better upon my second and final reviews. Here's a nifty little graph I made:

The "Original" score was my first time through each chapter ever. Some of those were over a year ago at this point--I took quite a break last fall before completing this book! Scores from my first review were about the same as my original pass. However, there were clearly huge jumps between my first and second review which I knew would happen since I basically did the first review one day and the second review the next day (see schedule above), so all problems were very fresh in my mind. I put more time between the second review and the final review and I maintained my score pretty well for the final. The time between the second review of any given chapter and my full final review ranged from twelve days to over a month.

Conclusion
I think I've gone above and beyond Artur's suggestion to re-do the chapters you failed. I remember skipping over this advice during my original pass through the book and feeling bad about it, so I'm very happy I've re-visited these sections that took me hours and hours on the first pass. As usual, tracking progress keeps me motivated and without tracking this stuff, I surely wouldn't have been so diligent in completing this comprehensive review of the most challenging chapters in Build Up Your Chess. Even though there is some straight-forward memorization of first moves, I still did most of the calculation necessary and I hope that my mind can more quickly spot the important elements in positions like those I saw in these chapters when I play my games.