My week in numbers (was "Tiny steps towards shodan")

[RBerenguel]

Refer to this in case you don't know what this is about.

This week I played a bunch of blitz games (to be precise, 10, with an awesome 3/7 result...) reaching 50 played blitz games with my blitz account. I re-read Namii's challenge and realised that to reach 50 games counting NGA games (I had totally missed this part) I don't need to stress any more about number of played games. So, the challenge started on 26th February, and since then:

• 31 blitz games are 15.5 "games" (found a mistake in my blitz-counting on the table below, by the way)
• Since that day I have played 19 NGA games

For a total of 34.5 Since for May I still have 6 remaining games, I'll start June (give or take a week or two if a game runs late) with 40.5 games if I didn't play any blitz the coming week. In any case, I'll try to reach playing 30 non-NGA games, which was also kind of part of the clause. This will be hard, but I still think game experience is what I lack most.

• 10 blitz 3/7 (3 wins against handi, 2 losses against handi, 1 loss even, 5 losses with handi ), 0 normal games

I've kept up with the Anki training, solving and re-solving and again Cho's Elementary Life and Death. I'm still tweaking the number of new cards/review cards so that it doesn't take me a huge amount of time each day. Currently I'm using:

• Max new cards/day: 30
• Max review cards/day: 70

I changed from 40 to 30 one day it took me almost 50 minutes to review everything. As it stands now, it takes me around 30 minutes to go over all due cards. If there are more review cards and I have some extra time I do an extra review session, and occasionally I do a "review tomorrow's items" if I feel like I want more tsumego.

Tesuji/tsumego:

• 360'-107' (that's total study time minus time from last week): 253'

So, 4h15 tsumego (since I also solved a handful NGA games from this month's assignment, I probably was closer to 4h30 than 4h15, but won't matter that much.

Checked the following pro games:

• Kojima Takaho - Takemiya Masaki 04-03b (I can't help wonder how Takemiya ends games so easily! 143 moves against a fellow 9d!)
• Rin Kaiho - Fujisawa Hosai 04-03e
• Shiraishi Yutaka - Cho Chikun 04-02a
• Sakata Eio - Kobayashi Koichi 04-02a
• Otake Hideo - Kato Masao 04-01
• Kobayashi Koichi - Ishii Kunio 07-03d (I made a mistake searching here , this is from July)

I have the impression at least 2 of these games I had checked a couple weeks ago. Probably forgot to log them.

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|    | ∆        | =       |
| TT | +4h15    | 26h45   |
| GC |   5      | 15.5    |
| PG |   6      | 74 (13) |

• 2h of tsumego 4h15 ★ Goal accomplished (24h by Summer) ★
• Count of 2 games (~0.5 games per day) 5 games
• 5-7 pro games [b6[/b]

So, I'm 26 pro games down (perfectly doable without stressing) and 14.5 games (29 blitz) to reach 30 blitz-pairs. This sounds like a lot, specially for me, but I want to try to reach this milestone now. I will nevertheless keep with the Anki drilling, since it seems to be working. That, or maybe 15 minutes of tsumego per day was just too little and I need 30+ per day to get a better flow.

I've found my gameplay somewhat sharper this week. I think the Cho Elementary drilling is working, I have won 2 NGA games and lost 1. The won games were against Xirxaven and Smar. With Xirx I'm roughly 50/50 (we play once a month or so,) but with Smar (who is a Finn EGF 5k, by the way) I was quite behind in direct matches (1-2 this year, but overall 2-5.) And the lost game was against a Finnish EGF 2k, so I can't complaint (the game was relatively close until I misread an area and then threw the game because of the "misread anger") Here you can see my game with Smar:

[Abyssinica]

I'm just flipping through this, but is there a reason you played Q19 instead of R19?

[skydyr]

I'm just flipping through this, but is there a reason you played Q19 instead of R19?

The small-knight monkey jump is often sente in cases where the large-knight monkey jump is gote. This generally occurs when the opponent has 3rd line support farther along than here. In this case, though, the followup with the large knight's move isn't that big, so it's currently gote with a followup that will later be sente. In this case, as I read it, the follow-up is 7 points gote with a 3 point sente followup to that. This early in the game, sente is probably much more valuable, as evidenced by the crazy fight that broke out afterwards.

Edit:

My big question is why white didn't live outright with the string on the left after he was given the opportunity around 213 by playing F5. As soon as white's alive there, everything around the kill is alive so white doesn't have to capture.

[RBerenguel]

I'm just flipping through this, but is there a reason you played Q19 instead of R19?

The small-knight monkey jump is often sente in cases where the large-knight monkey jump is gote. This generally occurs when the opponent has 3rd line support farther along than here. In this case, though, the followup with the large knight's move isn't that big, so it's currently gote with a followup that will later be sente. In this case, as I read it, the follow-up is 7 points gote with a 3 point sente followup to that. This early in the game, sente is probably much more valuable, as evidenced by the crazy fight that broke out afterwards.

Edit:

My big question is why white didn't live outright with the string on the left after he was given the opportunity around 213 by playing F5. As soon as white's alive there, everything around the kill is alive so white doesn't have to capture.

Short monkey for sente, indeed. And living, totally overlooked it I was so ahead I didn't worry that much by that point (bad thing!)

[SoDesuNe]

I didn't work on my Go for a long time, so even more grain of salt than usual ; )

[RBerenguel]

I didn't work on my Go for a long time, so even more grain of salt than usual ; )

[..]

Thanks! The comments seem to be pretty much spot on, and also point on what I'm usually being told I'm doing wrong, wrong, wrong (push from behind, bad sense of direction, etc). I'll drop you a PM when I have a review of this game so you can compare your ideas with the reviewer's (I think Antti will be reviewing this one, since namii is going to Strasbourg, but hard to tell yet, I only played this game on Friday and we've had 2.5 lectures since then )

[SoDesuNe]

Cool, thanks! =)

[RBerenguel]

Refer to this in case you don't know what this is about.

This week I tried to play "a lot" of blitz games... and ended playing 10, same as last week. So, not specially incredible. At the current rate I'll need 2 more weeks to reach the required "30" games before summer. Summer was weakly defined (since it included being called Ironman during June and July, so... 21st June? Just 1 June?) but I'll try to stick technically to 21st June as summer start, and understand it as the end of the challenge. One of the blitz games was a fuseki timeout: Looks like my opponent had activated automatch and went away. I gave him an extra minute, but he didn't even move.. I'm still counting it because, well, I was there for the game to be played. I waited 7-8 minutes afterwards for another automatch game, but no luck.

• 10 blitz 5/5 (1 forfeit, 1 even win, rest had or gave 2-4 handicap)

I've kept up with the Anki training, solving and re-solving and yet again solving Cho's Elementary Life and Death. For a few days I also worked on Intermediate, but gave up devoting only 2 minutes total.

At the current pace of 30 new cards per day I'll have seen all problems in the list by May 31st. As of now, 211 unseen cards (don't know why not 210, a few days ago it was a multiple of 30 and I'm doing 30 per day...) 68 mature cards (that's cards with intervals longer than 21 days) and 619 young/learning. I have also 2 suspended cards because I couldn't solve them after 2-3 minutes. They were 3 yesterday, usually it's essentially a very long brain fart that eventually goes away

I have to say that although using Anki is pretty interesting, it's quite tough doing it every day. Some days it's a breeze, and I even review in advance or add 5 new cards, but others (today, for instance, probably because it's Saturday) it was a pretty tough chore. But seems to be worth it so far.

Tesuji/tsumego:

• 594'-360' (that's total study time minus time counted from last week): 234'

So, 4h tsumego (since I also solved a handful NGA problems from this month's assignment, the tsumegos from the weekly tsumego at the NGA and a few more.)

Checked the following pro games:

• Nakamara Hidehito - Fukui Masaaki 04-03c Quite an attacking game!
• Kato Masao - Otake Hideo 04-09
• Hashimoto Utaro - Kobayashi Koichi 04-10b
• Sakata Eio - Takemiya Masaki 04-10f
• Cho Chikun - Fujisawa Hosai 04-17b
• Sakata Eio - Rin Kaiho 04-17a

That's 6 pro games

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|    | ∆        | =       |
| TT | +4h      | 30h45   |
| GC |   5      | 20.5    |
| PG |   6      | 80 (13) |

• 2h of tsumego 4h ★ Goal accomplished (24h by Summer / now 30h45) ★
• Count of 2 games (~0.5 games per day) 5 games
• 5-7 pro games [b6[/b]

In short, I'm 20 pro games down and 9.5 games down (19 blitz.) If I played 4 blitz/day next week, doable, but it's quite rare I have a full hour or two to wait for enough automatches for it.

My direction of play is still feeling pretty week, and I'm pretty angry at having missed two great moves in two games just by clicking too fast in an obvious spot.

[RBerenguel]

Fast update: I can't count. By Monday I was done with the 30 games/total, reaching 60 blitz. Easy to see:

• My account has 68 blitz games
• In January I played 8 blitz during the end of the month
• In February I didn't play until February 27th, which is when the thing formally started anyway

So, games done. Now pro game reviewing!

[RBerenguel]

Screen Shot 2014-06-01 at 10.17.59.jpg (42.67 KiB) Viewed 11716 times

Refer to this in case you don't know what this is about.

Finished! As I said before, I miscounted the number of blitz games I had played, so by playing 8 this week I finished. I had a horrible 2W-5L on Sunday and 1 win on Monday to seal the 60th game. I tried a couple times to play a few more, but automatch didn't find anything.

• 8 blitz 3/5

Yesterday Anki showed me the last 17 new cards of the deck, so I have already solved all problems in Cho Elementary L&D. The stats for Cho-1 are as of now:

• 25 days, 2337 problems solved (93.5 average per day)
• Last week: 299 minutes (893'-594')
• Total time: 893 minutes (2 problems/minute on average)
• 310 mature cards, 590 young cards

Since I was getting a little sick of just-life-and-death, I added the first volume of Lee Chang-Ho tesuji. I had converted all problems to SGF when a friend lend me the book, in case I didn't get my own copy (now I have, but having SGF is handy sometimes, like now ) and used all the scripts I have lying around to generate the diagrams automatically.

I have restricted it to 14 new problems/day. I'll explain why in another post about Anki usage (to be written some of these days.) In this deck:

• 7 days, 149 problems (21/day)
• Last week: 59 minutes
• Total time: 59 minutes (2 problems/minute on average)
• 0 mature cards, 98 young cards, 25 unseen cards

So, the total for this week is a whooping 358 minutes, not counting what I spent on a few NGA problems (I'm late with this list, which is due on Tuesday, and a little tired of tsumego already :/)

Tesuji/tsumego:

• 358' (for LCHT1 and Cho-1,) I'll count it as 6h45, rounding up 5 minutes (since I count in full quarters)

So, 6h45 tsumego. No doubt I'm feeling a little burnt up!

Checked the following pro games:

• Takemiya Masaki - Sakata Eio 04-24b
• Rin Kaiho - Cho Chikun 04-24a
• Tono Hiroaki - Cho Chikun 05-00e
• Hane Yasumasa - Kato Masao 05-01a
• Ishida Yoshio - Sakata Eio 05-01c
• Shiraishi Yutaka - Kobayashi Koichi 05-01b
• Takemiya Masaki - Rin Kaiho 05-01f
• Sato Sunao - Haruyama Isamu 05-07b
• Cho Chikun - Takemiya Masaki 05-08d
• Hane Yasumasa - Takagawa Shukaku 05-08b
• Kubouchi Shuchi - Ohira Shuzo 05-08a
• Oyama Kunio - Sakata Eio 05-08f
• Kudo Norio - Nakamura Hidehito 05-14b
• Cho Chikun - Chino Tadahiko 05-15a
• Rin Kaiho - Hashimoto Shoji 09-04a (again, slipped to later games without realising )
• Sugiuchi Masao - Kudo Norio 09-04b
• Yamabe Toshiro - Kato Masao 12-04b
• Kobayashi Koichi - Sakata Eio 12-04a
• Cho Chikun - Honda Kunihisa 12-04d
• Ishii Kunio - Shiraishi Yutaka 12-04e

That's 20 pro games wooo.

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|    | ∆        | =        |
| TT | +6h45    | 37h30    |
| GC |   +4     | 30       |
| PG |  +20     | 100 (13) |

• 2h of tsumego 6h45 ★ Goal accomplished (24h by Summer / now 37h30) ★
• Count of 2 games (~0.5 games per day) 4 games ★ Goal accomplished (30 games | 60 blitz by summer / now 60 blitz) ★
• 5-7 pro games [b20[/b] ★ Goal accomplished (100 pro games by Summer / now 100 & 13 9x9 pro games) ★

So, challenge accomplished! I'll tell Namii when he's back from Amsterdam.

And what I'll do from now on?

• Keep with the Anki training. Anki is a nasty b***h and will keep nagging me no matter what
• I'll keep playing blitz, but only if I feel like it. No need to stick to minimums.
• Keep reviewing pro games, but again, only if I feel like it.

As you can see, I'm dropping the two later parts to a minimum. Why? First, because the amount of time I'm giving to tsumego is rising rapidly. Anki... By the end of the month the amount of time spent daily will decrease somewhat, but as I keep adding new books/problem sets the amount of time will rise again. So I need to cut go-corners somewhere.

Also, my gameplay lately is... weird. I fall really behind during opening and early middle game, and then catch up (losing by less than 10 points, or winning by less than 10 points) in late middle game and endgame. So, I will concentrate a little on these aspects as of now (by checking some fuseki dictionary as of Tien suggestion, Opening Theory Made Easy and Attack and Defense as my own suggestion, later I'll re-read Jasiek's Fighting Fundamentals, quite likely.)

So, if I want to have time for all this studying, some corners need to be cut, and it will be blitz and pro games for the time being. Since I enjoy playing the occasional blitz, I don't think I'll get back to 0. But who knows?

[RBerenguel]

Finally wrote the post about my use of Anki. It has some more details on what I'm solving now.

Since the Ironman challenge is over this will be shorter. Namii is thinking about what to do for a "Steelman challenge," but probably will involve too much playing (granted: 20 blitz games/month is too few) and I won't make it.

So, this week:

• Played a blitz game, won by time.
• 982'-893' for Cho-1: 89'
• 111'-59' for LCH-1: 52'
  Total: 141' (2h 20)

Why less than previously? Easy: When new cards run out it gets far faster. See the anki post above. There's more time devoted to my other decks which are not "so much tsumego." Again, see the post above.

[Abyssinica]

I should probably try that Steelman challenge.

[RBerenguel]

This week:

• Played no games (aside from NGA)
• "19 hours"-982' for Cho-1: ~158 minutes
• 136-111 for LCH-1: 25 minutes
  Total: 183' (2h 3 min)

Daily review time is shrinking slowly. I've faced recently (the last 2-3 days) 4-5 problems that left me puzzled and I even had to set on a board to solve. Don't know why, I had solved them previously. But well, that's the neat thing about SRS: set them as wrong and I'll be seeng these quite a lot.

This week I replayed 6 games by Go Seigen, on a real board, with slate and shell stones (from his Collected Games set of books). 4 were replayed for the 12th, for his birthday, the other 2 yesterday. I enjoy his play. I know amateurs shouldn't check his games and yadda yadda, but since I enjoy it, it won't do much harm. 819 games to go!


My NGA game was on Friday, and I saw a remarkable improvement of play (Namii also pointed this.) I was making reasonable plans and ploys and played a decent fuseki (or at least got no fast remarks on IRC about my fuseki, the full review is still not ready.) I can trace at least 2 moments to my Anki training. Soon before ending the fuseki and getting into real middle game, my opponent had a cut, one I may have overlooked before, seeing it as unplayable or just simply being oblivious to it. I had been pincered, instinctively jumped and the next move I focused on the cut, instantly saw the possibility of playing an angle play to cut, then read the cut and saw it worked, so cut there. In the past, I may have ignored the cut, or just cut, not check several local interesting options (if you know what I mean.)

But a Spanish saying goes "Una flor no hace primavera" (Just a flower does not mean it's already spring) so I still quite a lot more games where I feel "decent" to be able to know I have improved.

[SoDesuNe]

I know amateurs shouldn't check his games and yadda yadda, [...]

Say whaaaaaaaaaaaat?

[RBerenguel]

I know amateurs shouldn't check his games and yadda yadda, [...]

Say whaaaaaaaaaaaat?

Haven't you heard this one before? "Don't study Go Seigen's games because they make no sense"