Life In 19x19

Surprisingly my win-rate against doge_bot_2 has drastically improved as I started to play ranked games. While I'm not quite at 50% against it yet, I'm winning a lot more than the 25% that I had initially projected, and OGS is giving me a rank at 2k based on mostly doge_bot_2 games.

Today I played ...

I want to know how much stronger I can become if I improve my reading. Here by reading I strictly mean the ability to visualize the board after playing an imaginary sequence. Usually after playing out around 5-6 moves I start to lose track of the stones that I was playing in my head or miss some key ...

If a human plays just a few games against such unevenly skilled bots, he may find himself in a depressing sitation somewhere in the middle game and resign. Not realising that the bot is likely to trip and fall in a complicated fight later in the game.


I don't think it is that likely that a bot ...

Recently I reviewed a game of a human vs KaTrain "calibrated 1d", but that bot didn't play like a 1d human at all. Its positional intuition seems to be high dan level, but it makes tactical blunders more expected in human DDK games (for example this move ).

From that game and the game you just ...

This game felt like a complete beatdown from start to finish. I am not sure why Spectral-1k seemed to have played much weaker than usual. Typically even in the games that I had won I got into some very difficult positions.
(;FF[4]
CA[UTF-8]
GM[1]
DT[2020-09-05]
PC[OGS: https://online-go.com/game ...

I am adopting the principles laid out in this reddit post. https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/5tkxmj/shodan_in_a_year_accomplished_my_advice_to/

The highlight (for me at least) of which is the following

Playing is more important than doing literally anything else. If you want to dedicate a ...

Considering that my record/win-rate has stabilized despite playing an insane number of games in 6 weeks, I can't help but wonder if I can still improve at this point.

6 weeks is nothing at that level. Advancing 1 stone in 6 months would be better than most people do who get to your level ...

Did I hit my ceiling in go? My current record against Spectral-1k is 83 Wins - 131 Losses. It looks like I have plateaued at around a 40% win-rate. I started to play against katrain-2k on OGS as well, and currently I am at 7 Wins - 5 Losses . If my record against these bots are to be believed, my ...

Overall I had a pretty good week. My current record against Spectral 1k is 55 Wins - 93 Losses . I have won 10 out of the last 17 games (and 24 out of the last 50 games). I don't know what is happening but when I first started this Spectral-1k series I couldn't even maintain a 15% win-rate. Somehow ...

I played these two games against Spectral 1k yesterday - I lost the first game and won the second game ( I have a roughly 40% win rate against this bot, and I have been documenting games/positions/stats in the journal https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=17717).

(;FF[4]
CA[UTF-8]
GM[1]
DT ...

Some random thoughts: Some time in July I decided to play go again. Honestly I am not exactly sure why I made that decision; I thought that I had stopped liking the game because it is so stressful to play. I started by making an OGS account and I played some of the bots on OGS. I quickly abandoned ...

I have just improved my record to 40 Wins - 82 Losses; somehow I got a little bit of a winning streak going. I want to share a game that I played last week, which I thought was one of the more exciting games that I have played.

Basically I got to a rough start with some poor decisions. First I ...

I had a very rough week with Spectral. By now I played over 100 games and my record is 36 Wins - 81 Losses (I only won 7 out of 32 games since my previous post). After a bad four game losing streak I think I went on tilt and had something like a 12 game losing streak. I am thinking about playing the ...

I have returned to go recently and I am addicted to playing Spectral-1k on OGS. Although the name of the bot has "1k" in it, its rank on OGS is often 1-2d. Over the past few weeks, I have managed to play 87 games against it. My current score is 29 Wins - 58 Losses. My goal is to get to 50% win-rate ...