I have personally taken up a challenge after reading an interesting article. It is my goal to read 100 books this year. 50 novels and 50 non-fiction books. I used to be an avid reader, but lately I have been caught up in too many things and maybe watched a few too many TV-shows on Netflix. Every second novel must be what we call a “serious” novel. At least!
In that connection, I propose a reading challenge for those who wants to improve their chess, but have never really gotten around to it. The Yusupov challenge.
Artur Yusupov has written 10 volumes in his series of training material for those starting at 1200-1800, wanting to get to 2200+. They cover more or less everything and received the first ever Boleslavsky medal from FIDE, when they started handing them out. And not without competition. Kasparov was in second place and Dvoretsky in third.
Your goal should be to read one book per month. There are 25 chapters in each book, making it a total of 250 chapters. They take maybe 10-20 minutes to read, after which there are 12 exercises, which should take you 20-40 minutes to go through. Some of you might want to spend more time per chapter, but the point stands. You can do six of them a week and make it easily. In a year, you will have learned an immense amount about chess.
Which order you should read the books in
When we acquired the books, we originally only planned to publish one from each series. We all make mistakes. For this reason, the order which the books are intended to be read is not entirely obvious. The order is:
Build up Your Chess 1, Boost Your Chess 1, Chess Evolution 1 – the orange books (Fundamentals series)
Build up Your Chess 2, Boost Your Chess 2, Chess Evolution 2 – the blue books (Beyond the Basics series)
Build up Your Chess 3, Boost Your Chess 3, Chess Evolution 3 – the green books (Mastery series)
The newest book, Revision & Exam 1 should probably be read last.
So, the order to which I suggest you read the books is:
Spring – The Fundamentals series
March: Build up Your Chess 1
Boost Your Chess 1
Chess Evolution 1
Summer – Beyond the Basics series
Build up Your Chess 2
Boost Your Chess 2
Chess Evolution 2
Autumn – Mastery series
Build up Your Chess 3
Boost Your Chess 3
Chess Evolution 3
Winter – Revision time
Revision & Exam 1
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