Just to highlight how crap I am at blitz and thinking under time pressure and how poor my instincts are:



My play in the bottom right is closer to 25k than 20k to be honest.

Move 18 - Find something better than M16, and why?

I prefer H11 now for connection reasons. That might be too passive though.

What's wrong with J15 for those same reasons?

I considered that too but failed to appreciate it's importance as a cutting stone.

An interesting game with a friend who I was playing at 9 stones with and losing 2 months ago:



Again, I missed a very ugly ko in the corner. I really need to improve my spotting of these. He's coming back after a few months away from the game, so he was a bit rusty.

Picked up First Fundamentals by Robert, I was interested in it after reading the sample pages. I can't resist having more books. Whether or not they actually make me stronger is something I don't know but I enjoy reading them so that's what matters really.

I'm coming off Trileptal, today was my first day on only 600mg (was on 1500mg two weeks ago for the past 8 years). I feel a bit groggy and out of it, so I didn't play any go. I should be on Lithium within a month, we'll see how that goes. I'm hopeful that it'll improve my quality of life demonstrably and that I'll have more stability in my life.

I'm finding it so hard to find moves with this lowering of medication. Honestly, it feels like playing with a headful of cotton wool or a bad hangover.

Anyway, here's a game from today, of particular note is the move which took me a minute to come up with which was absolutely dreadful. I'm just having these breaks in play where no move occurs to me and I'm just staring at the board as if I was 30k again. Usually, while I play bad moves fairly often, I have some idea what I'm at least trying to do but today I'm having these moments of being completely lost without an inkling of what to do.

Ignore the taunt at the start, it's part of a fun league on Kaya where one of the rules is that you taunt your opponent at the start of the game. It's all a bit of fun really.



I felt white resigned far too early. I'm only posting this game as an example of my state of mind at the moment rather than for review as it's so short. White got a superb result in the bottom right though, I really need to work on my corner play.

36 looks good to me, it was 40 that looked suspicious

I'll post more later

Bah, wrong direction. then atari my way into his moyo. I'm really not thinking clearly today.

Instead of N10, M8 is simple. if he plays N10 himself, then bO6 + bM6 catches him in a net.

Thank you, I miss the simplest of things.

A few comments.

BTW, you did not play so badly.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Thank you for the review Bill.

My concentration is improving a bit as my body adjusts to the lower dose of Trileptal. I played *really* badly last night, very passively, very unimaginatively, quite similar to how I play when depressed actually which I found interesting. This morning I was able to fit in an hour of tsumego without any concentration problems so I'm hopeful the worst of the concentration problems are over. Next week I drop to 300mg Trileptal and then two weeks later 0mg. It'll probably be fairly rough but hopefully not as bad as the drop from 1200mg to 600mg.

In go news, was working on problems from wBaduk this morning. They're quite interesting. I'm doing the pre-Intermediate Easy problems following the advice of doing many easy problems rather than few hard ones. I'll go back to Get Strong at Tesuji this evening, again working on the easier one and two star problems. I'll try and get some games in at some point too but this depends on my wife and the kids and all that.

My experience with Go problems is that the primary purpose is to infuse some good instincts into your first guesses and subsequent ideas. When I did get into doing them, the most effective method I had was taking a set of 100 problems, and give yourself 30 seconds for each. Then do another set the same way. Repeat those two sets for a whole week doing it the same way, and keep a track of how many you get right each time.

Then do a different pair of sets of the next week, and so on, and repeat the cycle in the next month. After 3 or 4 months, you should almost solve the problems simply by seeing them and knowing what to do - that's not quite learning by wrote, as there are enough different problems (there should be 800 or so in the first month alone) that you'll be recognising shapes, not problems.

There are all sorts of connections and funny 2-1 point style corner liberty tesujis that I rarely miss now because of this. Obviously, it won't help my fighting or strategic assessments, but my L+D and tesuji competence has gone up and, more importantly, stayed up.

I found labouring for a long time over difficult problems fairly fruitless (apart from the enjoyment of engaging deeply with a complicated puzzle), and would personally recommend against it. Even in the Japanese Insei school at the Nihon Ki-in, according to a certain 6d Finn that spent a few months there recently, they were typically given 20 problems and 20 minutes to solve them all - they were a step above the sort of thing I'd be trying to do in that time frame, but clearly the principles that applied were the same.

GoChild is excellent and well well worth becoming a member of : http://gochild2009.appspot.com/

Hmm, gochild attracted my boy's attention and he ended up doing 100 problems and playing his first game of 19x19. Fun. I just wish I was in a better position to teach him about go. I'm not even sure if 9 stone games are a good idea, maybe he'd appreciate territory more if he had to stake it out for himself from the start of the game? I don't know.

Unless he's an incredible prodigy, I doubt you need to teach him much more than he'll pick up by playing handicap games with you. By the time he beats you down to a small handicap, he'll probably be something of a reader.

Good point.

Reading and seeing. This is something Bill has brought up a couple of times, and I'm finding it to be very true in my games. I don't read out a lot of "good" moves, I just see them. I usually try to read them out to verify them just in case my pattern recognition is slightly wrong and I'm missing an atari somewhere or something but as I did problems today I found it again to be very true. I just saw answers normally, reading came second for nearly all of the problems. I need to practice my reading more, I find myself too often just answering problems on pattern recognition autopilot and not reading them out like I think I should be doing. This is something I need to watch in myself I think, I need practice reading, I know this.