Reinventing the wheel. Just another average go journal.

lobotommy · #1

It all started from one tweet:

Hegiel:
Today was a second day in a row that I woke up earlier to study go. Two days in a row! Can you believe it? I can't. But it's true. #power

Then comes the rest

Ben:
Awesome man! Keep it up! I'm rooting for ya!
Hegiel:
I like when I do my cardio workouts and trainers on dvd shout "push harder!". There should be similar dvds with tsumego
Ben:
"Vital point! Shortage of liberty! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! HANE HANE HANE!!!" xD
Diego:
tenuki you idiot! It's already dead!
Ben:
*flips the board* HOW DID YOU NOT SEE THE ATARI?! Drop and give me 100 snapbacks!
Diego:
now that is training!

So...

So, I have started this training journal.

A system.

Finding a correct way of training is not that easy.
First: no theory studies. At least for now.
Just games, problems and quick pro games reviewing. This is how I'm going to gain my "over 9000" power.

Tsumego and tesuji - 25 minutes session. For reading improvement and better shape/kyusho intuition.
5 minutes break.
Quick pro games review - 25 minutes. For pattern recognition improvement.
Which pro? How dare you ask! Rui Naiwei of course.

Tsumego/tesuji once again.

Why 25 minutes intervals?
Why not?
But seriously - it is a part of so called "pomodoro technique" in doing things. 25 minutes of high focus on a subject. Then 5 minutes break. Which means real break - you go make a tea, meditate, water your flowers, relax and rest. Then start a next 25 minutes session of high intensity mind exhausting activity. Then do a break, and start it all over.
Then playing a game: one game daily over internet, one hour total time. And once a week three hours sessions with a friend of mine.

Tsumego, review, and a game. It is a two hours needed to be found through a whole day (and night).
How to get that? How to find a time? It's quite easy. Just stop waste it on other things.

First - you need to be prepared. Need to prepare yourself one day earlier. You need materials from which you want to learn. Close to you. Not in the other room, nor far far away from the reach of your hands when you wake up early in the morning.
It can be a book, printed pages, a tablet with apps. (I keep it close to my bed.)
Wake up 30-60 minutes earlier than usual.
Open eyes and do your first tsumego/pro games session right off.

So what are you waiting for? Let's get it started.

lobotommy · #2

Long story short: silence, tranquillity, attack, attack, big mistake, all out attack. Double kill.

A second game with Japanese player from Kanto prefecture, who hides under 110ki nickname. In fact we were playing two games in exactly the same time thanks to iOS app called Boardz.
My other game is discussed here http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8940
I lost it by a half of point.

They were supposed to be a correspondence games but we played them in a real time in three or four 40 minutes sessions. Instead of weeks and months of waiting like in a normal correspondence games we just sat down and played simultaneously two games in four consecutive days.
I must admit that because of his calm and steady moves I felt he is a stronger player. Maybe it's just an illusion but it got a big impact on how I played. We didn't asked each other what is our real/internet strength. Because Boardz is a very niche server and there are no kyu/dan informations we both played like a blind musketeers, searching for something we could cut, but doing nothing risky.

At first we just played very safely. We didn't knew what to expect form the other side so it was like two tigers circling around. Boring? Not at all. I couldn't find any weaknesses in his positions, or a slack move which could reveal me if he is weaker. This is very important lesson about psychology of go.

I played :b37:

trying to force him to reveal himself, to show me, if he got a blood in his veins. Then all the hunting begun. I almost overplayed when instead of careful reading I played some stupid sequence on a left side. But in terms of territory we were even I think and I decided to fight more.

Killing a group in a right upper side made me proud after a so ddk playing on a left side. His R17 was quite unexpected, but my response at Q14 do the job.

Enjoy.

lobotommy · #3

Hello anonymous viewers.
Try to solve this problem. Black to play and save yourself.
I was unable to pass through this one several times. It is not that hard, but I found it very irritating and tricky while doing it in my mind.

Below is sgf, where you can try to check your solution, however you need to find it by yourself first...

jts · #4

Here is what I'm reading... (sgf isn't working for me, though)

lobotommy · #5

jts wrote:

Here is what I'm reading... (sgf isn't working for me, though)

Yes, good! combination #1 works beautifully.

For a good start of a day here is another one, simple kyu problem:

Time for my "system report".
Just completed 80 tsumego, and going to work through 2 pro games now.

Later today I will teach go to kids which are participating in some kind of "Summer in a city" program. I prepared for them 12 pages of very simple tsumego and two hours of playing go. Wish me luck

lobotommy · #6

Working with kids is fun, and they love tsumego more than playing. Few months ago I wrote a longer piece about teaching kids which was published on go.art.pl but it's in Polish, so probably only two persons on this forum could read it. I'm thinking about translating it to english, but it will be a tough task for me.
Anyway - teaching kids is very interesting experience, and after teaching the rules of go to almost 750 kids in my city I can say I could do this as my daily job.

Ok. Time for little study data.

Currently on a phone and tablet I have over 46 000 go problems. This is madness...
Doing 100 a day will give one year and a half of intensive tsumego training. It's impossible to do it in such tempo, but I'm trying to do 50 at least. 80 today. Maybe instead of writing this post I should do next 80...

Thanks to all kind of go sites with pro games (badukmovies, go4go, gokifu, tom etc.), books and and apps like SmartGo, MoyoGo, or GoGoD we got almost infinite number of games to study. Too much!
In this ocean of goodies one need to choose wisely, choose one or two players and follow them.
Currently player of my choice is Rui Naiwei and I study her games daily. 900 games to complete...

Playing with pro games one need to use some kind of pattern. You need to say that you'll going to study some particular opening or particular pro player. Otherwise you'll lost (except when you are one of the few peoples with absolute memory).
I think this way of study is better than looking every possible game of random players and random openings.

Playing a games... A lot. Well, this is hard. If I want to improve I should play more than one or two games a day. Blitz games are maybe a solution, but I like to play slow games. So maybe 3 days a week - blitzes, and two days just slow games. Of course they should be reviewed by stronger players.
But where can I find them?

Just for the record, here is the list of my tsumego sources with numbers of already finished problems since January. It does not look too optimistic.
I think weekly updates will be sufficient:

What are you waiting for? Go study!

lobotommy · #7

Instead of report about my progress...

How do you feel after wining a game? Some time ago I realized that wining a game does not make me happy. When I win by a large margin I feel like that playing was just a waste of my time, if I win by a small margin I feel I have not progressed at all so I could do better solving tsumegos and reviewing pro games instead. A tricky situation. Maybe it's a good sign? No more emotion driven games, just calculations and questioning approach. But hey, who stole a fun part from my games?

gowan · #8

lobotommy wrote:

Instead of report about my progress...

How do you feel after wining a game? Some time ago I realized that wining a game does not make me happy. When I win by a large margin I feel like that playing was just a waste of my time, if I win by a small margin I feel I have not progressed at all so I could do better solving tsumegos and reviewing pro games instead. A tricky situation. Maybe it's a good sign? No more emotion driven games, just calculations and questioning approach. But hey, who stole a fun part from my games?

If your goal is to get to be a good player then very often winning will not be satisfying. As you say, it is difficult to say how much what you did contributed to winning. I enjoy finding good tesuji that wouldn't be obvious to anybody, and I enjoy making good moves, moves that remain good even after analysis and are not connected with my partner (opponent) making a mistake. The famous Japanese pro Kajiwara Takeo said "Whether you win or lose is mostly due to fate. What really matters is whether you played good moves." I think this was a motto of the day on SL some time ago.

lobotommy · #9

gowan wrote:

If your goal is to get to be a good player then very often winning will not be satisfying. As you say, it is difficult to say how much what you did contributed to winning. I enjoy finding good tesuji that wouldn't be obvious to anybody, and I enjoy making good moves, moves that remain good even after analysis and are not connected with my partner (opponent) making a mistake. The famous Japanese pro Kajiwara Takeo said "Whether you win or lose is mostly due to fate. What really matters is whether you played good moves." I think this was a motto of the day on SL some time ago.

Thanks gowan. Good points.
Indeed, playing good move is so much more satisfying than just winning another game.
I can bring back from my memory some great sequences I played even though I lost in a certain game. In the same time I almost immediately lost interest in a game which I won, I hardly can remember it.

Unusedname · **#10**

lobotommy wrote:

Instead of report about my progress...

How do you feel after wining a game? Some time ago I realized that wining a game does not make me happy. When I win by a large margin I feel like that playing was just a waste of my time, if I win by a small margin I feel I have not progressed at all so I could do better solving tsumegos and reviewing pro games instead. A tricky situation. Maybe it's a good sign? No more emotion driven games, just calculations and questioning approach. But hey, who stole a fun part from my games?

Not so great haha. I always blame it on my opponents mistake and not that I got any better.

But maybe it's better to focus on that fact that you can easily spot this mistake that you wouldn't have noticed before.

Or notice that maybe you played solidly enough that your opponent was forced to make a mistake because they didn't really have a good move.

jts · **#11**

I find it rather varies by opponent, and by how the game went. There are some opponents whom I absolutely love losing to. There are others where the opponent manages to make even a win seem rather bitter with pomposity. (Side note: it's really weird how I take both "You were winning here, but then you blundered" and "I was winning here, but then I blundered" as insults. Logically, if I find one to be insulting, shouldn't I find the opposite one to be praise?) But even against horrible opponents, an exciting fight or a cool series of tesuji make a game fun, win or lose. Conversely, losing because of idiocy (for example, ignoring a ko threat that obviously works, or neglecting to count and then taking an absurd risk) always feels bad.

EdLee · **#12**

lobotommy wrote:

When I win by a large margin I feel like that playing was just a waste of my time,
if I win by a small margin I feel I have not progressed at all

Go is often not what we think it is. Neither is progress.
If one is lucky enough to have a good teacher review one's games,
one may find out that even when one wins by a large margin, that one actually
made many mistakes and a lot can still be learned from that game.
The same is true for a small margin. In other words, the margin of win/loss
is not correlated to the quality of the game or of one's moves.

gowan wrote:

As you say, it is difficult to say how much what you did contributed to winning.

Yes, as gowan said. Especially for kyu and low dan levels, to really find out how much one did contributed to the win (or loss),
often it takes a much higher-level eye to review the game.

Sometimes it also takes a much higher-level person to assess
whether one has truly improved -- one can be losing a lot of games
and still be improving; conversely, one can be winning a lot of games
and still be stuck.

lobotommy · **#13**

Winning a games against 2dan on Tygem or Wbaduk - #nothappy
Lost on IGS to 2kyu - #satisfied
DragonGoServer - a win against Taiwanese 2dan. #notsatisfied

I want to share this last game not just because I'm proud of it, but to show how easly 2dan player can dvelope a huge moyo. I thought I played ok, but then the center was all white. I decided to invade once then reduce as much as possible. Probably I should do this in reverse.

-------
As RJ wrote in other thread about 1dan players:
"- They are occasionally completely surprised by stronger players' sacrifice strategies, which they overlooked completely."

This so true. In this game I was really surprised when white just sacrificed white stones in the right upper corner. Well, another lesson taken.
-------

http://eidogo.com/#t3tgct55

lobotommy · **#14**

Some 'work in progress' sketches. I try to build my own heuristics for learning processes, which can be used in go and other mental activities.

General description of cognitive rules useful in learning go. #1

Let's use following triad of cognitive processes:
Recognition, Interpretation and Evaluation.

Let assume that each part is trained in a different way, and it is a bound system where changing data in one class of processes can influence process quality of others.
In other words: Recognition, Interpretation and Evaluation has a close relationship and each one influence each other.

Setting a convention for mentioned triad naming:

Recognition:
Is a instant (mostly unconscious) cognitive process when we encounter a situation and our mind can address it similar one or identical situation retrieved from certain database (in our current situation: a memory).
It answer a question: do I know x?
It is trained via reviewing pro games and doing tsumego, learning/remembering joseki.
What can we achieve through it: large database can help us in the next two steps.

Interpretation: class of mental processes which are based on experience, knowledge, and reading ability of the person.
It answer a question: what is the meaning of x = How can it develop further? what kind of possibilities we can get after processed sequence?
Trained mostly by real playing experience, which is an intense verification and falsification process.
What can be achieved through training Interpretation: better understanding of situation and possible playing vectors available in current position.

Evaluation: a moment when we add a quality tag to the outcome of previous two classes of processes. Also an outcome of process of evaluation.
It answer a question: is x good or bad?
Trained by high quality commentary (also auto commentary)
What can be achieved: better overall level of play.

This whole thing is not an iterative process, it's rather simultaneous. Moreover it is not required to be conscious of it, however, I think that being aware of it can be important progress factor in go. I think an assumption that this triad of R,I & E just happen all the time in our minds when we experience anything (not just playing go), is not that far from true set of events in our minds.

*
Chosen naming is just a convention. I tried to provide clear explanation for meaning behind main terms used here (R,I & E) so please don't be a linguistic purist here. Every constructive input is welcomed and if you want to discuss something related to this entry feel free to write.

lobotommy · **#15**

"What is most important thing in go?"
"To be not attached to the game."

Currently I'm playing 14 games on OGS. Probably my all time record. In the last two days I won two intense games on Boardz. Lost today on playOk by time against player with 250 ELO rating higher than mine while beign +20~+40 on the board. Not a big deal. This was a great game. Everything just worked for me. Everything was simple and fun.

Killing a big dragon is fun, winning a game by 1.5 is fun, and losing on time is also fun. The game is not important. The outcome is not important.
It's all just circles and lines.

lobotommy · **#16**

Losing games is so good!
My Zen is growing stronger.

bengozen · **#17**

Here's to working on our zen! Only then can we get stronger!

HermanHiddema · **#18**

lobotommy wrote:

My Zen is growing stronger.

I am reminded of:

Dokuganryu · **#19**

My sensei gave me thirty minute meditation to do, I nailed it in ten ;-)

lobotommy · **#20**

OGS game lost to Herman Hiddema. I think I can be proud that I lost only by komi against 4dan. As Herman pointed after a game - better yose could even get a win for black because his better center position after middlegame. However I think there was still higher probability for white to get the edge.
Thanks Herman for the game!

#127 probably a losing move.

Reinventing the wheel. Just another average go journal.

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