Over the last few months I've returned to playing go after a hiatus of a few years, and as I've been taking it more seriously recently I thought it might be nice to start a study journal as a way of seeing how my thinking and play changes over time.
I had
another study journal here once, five or so years ago, but it's been long enough that I think it makes sense to start a new one.
Where I am these days: I started playing go again this summer after some old go friends convinced me to try out the AYD Summer Stage, which consisted of three games and a teaching game over the course of two weeks. When I played a few games on KGS to shake out some of the cobwebs, to my great surprise I went on a considerable winning streak and briefly attained a rank of 5k, which was several stones stronger than I had attained previously. I even beat an old friend and rival who's about 5k in an even game. Maybe I forgot more bad habits than good ones. Naturally I went on to go 0 for 3 in the Summer Stage games and my KGS rank soon dropped from that questionable height back down to about 8k, but playing serious games was such fun that I decided to sign up for the AYD fall season, which started in September.
I'm interesting in improving, but I also don't want to become rank-obsessed to the point where it discourages me from playing online, which has happened to me in the past. So in this thread I'll try to focus on other aspects: understanding mistakes, new patterns learned, tsumego, etc.
To start things off, here's a game I played in AYD last week (comments welcome!):
I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do these self-reviews. With the new-to-me AI tools available now it's easy to just click through and see what KataGo thinks were the biggest mistakes, but it's probably useful to go through the game without AI first and try to identify a few mistakes I can understand. If anyone has advice on the best self-review methods for kyu-level players, let me know!
This game leaves me with two takeaways, I think: first, there were a couple of situations where I wasn't sure about reading the result of a cut, but could see clearly that not cutting was bad for me -- I'm thinking of the reduction on the top and my failure to connect on the left side. Probably I should just cut in those situations and find out what will happen that way.
Second, there were a couple of big moves (the 3-3 point and the turn at P7) which went unplayed for both of us for a long time. I should probably try to value moves like that more highly.