Paul Brondal wrote on 03/02/17 at 07:02:59:
ReneDescartes, in general I really enjoy reading your comments which are eloquent and full of insight. I also understand your point about the challenge. However, here I find you are a bit harsh. Sure, Aagaard's suggestions for reading the books are at a much faster pace than Yusupov's recommendations as you write. On the other hand, even though Yusupov's books are superb, it doesn't mean that you have to use the books exactly as he points out. In Saddler's review of a Yusupov book, it is clear that he doesn't follow the recommendations but still gives the books a high grade.
Over the past few years, I have teased a chess friend about him having all of Yusupov's books but never reading them. The challenge was an incentive for him to start reading them. He wrote me that I have given him such a bad conscience but seeing the post on QC was what could seriously make him try the challenge.
I find Aagaard a very nice and helpful guy and I have a high regard about his person. When you see what is offered on the market with over-priced videos, low-quality chess books and so on, I don't see a problem here
Honestly, very inventive harsh expressions often occur to me, but I try to exercise restraint because I think that what is negative is usually vain in every sense of the word.
This is just a post in a chess forum, but I have noticed that, even in very great works, what is ultimately negative--for example, masterful sarcasm by Voltaire against the church--is eventually forgotten, while what is of positive inherent interest, though it might be, for example, tragic, is remembered. But these matters are both subtle and complicated. I very much respect Oscar Wilde, for example. Anyway, I aspire to take care on this point whenever I write or speak.
I retract the first two paragraphs of the quoted post--the "Super Yusupov Challenge" and the reference to not upholding professed standards. I would be glad to ask a mod to delete it if other posters would agree to take it out of their quotes.
On the other hand, I stand by the last paragraph, which is not exaggerated with too-clever writing. Aagard
is a tough-talking teacher of integrity--that's no act--as well as a businessman. Though clearly a super-GM talent like Sadler hardly needs to do the material the suggested way to get maximum benefit out of it, and maybe you and some others don't either--readers obviously vary in their ability to visualize without a board, even at the same level, and to hold a tree of variations in short-term memory--I think that for most people a rapid traversal is not as useful as a slow one. And while for someone like your friend doing them in a suboptimal way undoubtedly really is better than not doing them at all, I still don't think it's a positive development for someone with Aagard's deserved influence or authority to encourage the general public to do them in a way that's not the best.