It's been almost 5 months since my last blog update. Unfortunately, I've fallen victim to the #1 barrier to adult chess improvement: life. I had a lot more free time when I first started this project. I took a new job in February which severely cut into that. I was already starting to feel the effects of the new job (and the last year of training) when going through the Yusupov manual. The cut into my training and playing has been drastic.
My first OTB games were in April of last year. I played 89 games over the next 12 months. In the next 4 months, I played 14!
In November/December of 2014, I was doing 2500+ tactical puzzles per month! That quickly declined to somewhere around 400-600 puzzles, most of which were just me doing repeats at Chess Tempo. Not much in the way of "new" puzzles during that time.
I read ~1,100 annotated master games in 2014. In 2015, I've done a little over 300.
It's not all bad news though. I got a win against a master in February and followed that up with a win against a 2100 a few weeks later. Also, my workload should be reduced soon which should free up some time for more dedicated studying (knock on wood). I'm hoping for a September comeback.
