I'll fix the pages at http://senseis.xmp.net/?45Point43ApproachOgeima if I find the time. Any potential copyright issues?

That tesuji problem is one of the most beautiful things I've seen in this game. I thought I was dreaming the first time I solved it.

Ha! Ha! Ha! That's a good one.
Or are you seriously concerned about all the joseki content 'sourced' from Ishida?

_________________
Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

I don't own the place. I take responsibility for my own contributions. I was never involved in copying the vault of names from GoGoD or joseki from Ishida/Kogo. At the time we've argued a lot about it and I wasn't too happy with the course taken. I did transfer the Gokyo Shumyo version by Hashimoto Utaro to Sensei's and IIRC the problems were considered to be in the public domain, while the solutions were either found by SL members or referenced as Hashimoto's.

So, in the same spirit, I'm asking this question. But I'm glad it gave you a moment of laughter.

Knotwilg: while I assume joseki would fall under public domain (if even problems do), I'm not sure about all the specific diagrams explaining refutations of improper moves. Perhaps quote those as being the work of 廖渝生 (Liao Yu Sheng), the author of 围棋定式大全 (WeiQi DingShi DaQuan) (ISBN-9787536458857).

While there were almost no kids at School Stairs, School Pink Stones seems to be doing well for itself during summer. The 2-week recess was used to paint the walls, both inside and outside, and it has been cleaned quite thoroughly. Since a new semester just started at the school, there are a lot of new kids in our class. Many of these appear to be first-time students of Yan Laoshi. They've been assigned the same tesuji and joseki book as us. I played two of the new kids yesterday and today, and found - perhaps unsurprisingly - they are not yet at the same level of the kids that were here before them. I won all four games, but played really poorly.

In yesterday's first game my opponent made a pretty big mistake in the opening, and then lost all sense of direction for a couple of moves. I took advantage and had a lead which should have been comfortable. I should learn to play solid and thick moves if this happens again. I didn't, making the game closer than it should have been.



The second game of the day was played with a 9-year old girl who's new to the school. When I noticed a mistake in joseki, I quickly went from trying to punish the mistake to overplaying. I was not punished, but should have been. When I realized I was being a bully on the board, I let a second white group make easy life, and guided my opponent towards the big points in the endgame.



Today I played both kids again. Instead of slowing down, I played even faster. This resulted in a big mistake in reading early in the first game.



In the second game, I played almost at the kid's speed (no thinking), and the result on the board was clear about who was having the better end of that deal. When I noticed I wasn't doing so well against the little girl I beat by over 40 points yesterday, I overplayed big-time. In the end the game became really close, and I managed to sneak my way towards a close win.



After the review, I went over the game once more with Liu Jia Yi, and highlighted why her moves were good and mine bad. Also, she has gained the rights to all snacks I receive from Yan Laoshi.

Except for the losses against the three 5-dan opponents, all of my games this week have left a bit of a foul aftertaste. It doesn't feel good to win when you know you played a poor game. Playing stronger opponents forces me to look for better moves. But why does playing weaker opponents lure me into playing worse? I should work on playing a more consistent game.

Because we still study go most of the day on our free days, I feared that the problem with this week's games may be non-go related: I need some time off. I ditched my problems today, played some browser games, went out for basketball and did absolutely nothing productive. Right now me and my room mate are both lying in opposite corners of the room, and the AC remote is right in the middle of said room. Neither of us can reach it from our beds, and it doesn't look like either one is getting up soon. Forsti: if you're reading this: I can do this all day, man. I'm not getting that remote.

Thanks Hushfield for this great post. I've been enjoying it a LOT. I hope to be able to look at one of my games and have enough knowledge to say what was a good move and what was a poor move. Right now, it looks a long way off.

I look forward to your next installment on this and thanks again for sharing.

Rowen: Glad you're enjoying the study journal. While I sometimes notice that a move I played is not very good, the majority of the comments on my games come from Yan Laoshi, so I can't really take any credit for that. Don't be too concerned if you can't immediately see your mistakes after a game. Maybe try going through it with some other players?

Re-energized after a lazy afternoon and nine hours of sleep, we climbed into Yan Laoshi's van for another day at school. Yesterday was this week's last day at School Pink Stones. We discovered something quite surprising: the school is much larger than we initially thought. It's located in a block of flats, and our class (along with one other class) is located on the second floor. It turns out that what we thought was the entire school, were only the classes for the dan-level students. There's 3 more classrooms for kyu-level students, a kitchen in which we were treated to lunch (and pretty good lunch at that), better toilets and even a waiting room with a television.

My first game of the day was with a new opponent, a boy called Wukai. He's definitely the strongest of the new kids I've played so far. I finally managed to play slightly more solid than before. Though I definitely used more time, my opponent didn't rush his moves either. The game took around two hours (enough for most other kids to finish and review two games).



The second game of the day was another game with Liu Jia Yi. I was set on not playing as poorly as I had done the day before, and that resulted in the following game:



I'm suddenly noticing a marked increase in the speed with which the life and death problems are going. Tesuji problems are also going a bit better. I'm working through the mid-level tesuji from 阶梯围棋综合棋力测试:手筋分册. One month ago I couldn't solve a single one, now I'm getting around 50% right on my first time through. Weirdly enough, I think this might be a result of the joseki study, as I recognize a lot of the joseki these problems stem from, and am faster at spotting the urgent points in the shape.

Today marked the end of another school week. Tomorrow we have the day off, and the day after that is home study, including another teaching game with Yan Laoshi.

When you look at the strength of the kids at both schools, there's basically two big groups: the stronger group (5-dans) and the weaker group (3-dans and below). For more info about the ranks at our school, see this earlier post. At the start of summer I was around mid-level in the weaker group, and just managed to maintain a winning percentage. Right now, a 2-dan called Ruo Shi is probably the closest thing to a "rival" I have in the weaker group (because Shong Feng has gone AWOL). We've played 5 games so far, and I'm currently 3-2 vs him.

Yesterday's game with Ruo Shi served as a good reminder of the importance of shape, and the way playing bad shape can come back to haunt you.



Obviously, I was less than pleased. I was eager to play Ruo Shi again today.



I finally finished the "beginner" life and death problem book (围棋经典死活3600题 初级). At first I was thinking of going through it again as review, but I want to push a little harder for the remaining time I have here. Therefore, I'll be moving on to the intermediate edition (围棋经典死活3600题 中级) immediately. I've done the first 8 problems as a test, and even though it takes a bit longer to solve them, I got 6 of them correct.

This mentality of pushing a bit harder for my final week here should also apply to the opponents I play. Usually Yan Laoshi assigns us opponents, but I think I should be a bit more assertive in asking games from the 4-dan and 5-dan kids, on black and two stones respectively. Within the weaker group, my record was 11 wins and 1 loss this week.

Going by the results, it was a good week, and one might say I'm slowly drifting towards the upper part of the weaker group. But this week's games also highlighted lingering problems with playing poor shape. Efficiency is also something to work on. A move like Black 71 in the second game with Ruo Shi for instance, would have been better at H16. Peeping a second time there was pointless and slow. But efficiency might be something for another day. The thing my games are telling me to work on right now is thicker, better shape. Which means more tesuji and life and death problems.

Today was another day off. I recently wrote about us still studying quite a lot on free days, and because I had a spur-of-the-moment free day earlier this week, I got up at six this morning and still managed to get in around six more hours of tesuji, life and death and joseki study. That way I didn't feel guilty at all when I left the apartment after lunch and finally went on some proper exploration of the city I've been calling home for the past six weeks.

Wuhan is the capital city of Hubei province. Around 10 million people live here. I walked around town, because that is how I prefer to travel, and it's much easier to stop to take pictures of things that interest me. Chinese traffic will get its own instalment in this study journal some time later this week, as I feel its whackiness deserves more than a single paragraph.

As one would expect from a city this size, it has absolutely everything. And then some. In a 5-hour walk I saw luxury department stores, local markets (more on those later), beautiful parks, museums (with art both contemporary and historical), zen temples, an establishment which I'm pretty sure was a bordello, a person making a monkey perform tricks, fortune tellers, a forest with plastic trees (in three different kinds: blossom, summer, autumn colours) that were all fitted with little lights so they light up at night, an army convoy, people gambling in the street, traffic accidents, turtles being sold alive, turtles living out their lives in a temple pond, and the tourist hotspot that is Wuhan's Yellow Crane Tower.

Wuhan doesn't lose out to other places in our westernized world in its search for luxury and extravagance. It's yet more Nike, iPhones and German luxury cars. The city also seems to be growing quite fast, resulting in constant construction of high-rise apartment blocks and mega-malls that seem to advertise their exclusiveness through the size of the LED-screen advertisement above the main entrance.

I haven't really touched upon this before, but studying weiqi is something for the upper middle class here. Extra-curricular activities are a way to further distinguish yourself, and taking lessons from a pro teacher is probably too expensive for a lot of people that live and work here. Even at School Pink Stones, most of the parents pick up their kids in luxury cars.

Speaking of wealth: I've come up with a completely unscientific way of measuring how well-off a certain neighbourhood is, which I have given a very scientific-sounding name to make up for its lacking standard in content. I call it the laowai-coefficient. "Laowai" means foreigner, and every time one hears people saying it (pointing at a foreign beard or staring for longer than five seconds also count), the neighbourhood said foreigner is currently in receives an extra point in the category "genuine/local". The current high score stands at 8. This was amassed in under twenty minutes. On my first time travelling in Asia, I was pretty shocked by the level of homogeneity of the population, but this time around I'm more used to it. Captain Obvious remarks I stick out like a sore thumb - often quite literally, as my rather modest height seems quite a bit less modest around here. People that have travelled in Asia will be familiar with the random "Hello"'s, "Hallo's" and awkward handshakes that are a result of just walking down the street, but it's kind of telling I don't think it's weird when total strangers ask if I will pose in a picture with them.

For all its high-street extravaganza, Wuhan has plenty of neighbourhoods were life isn't pure glamour. For many people wages still aren't that high. Speaking of "housing" is a form of hyperbole at times. Hygiene can be quite insufficient in both the personal kind (century-old toilets) and the commercial kind (unrefrigerated meat being assaulted by flies). But then again, none of these are unique to Wuhan. They're probably more a result of the way in which we structured our (global) societies, then they are an expression of local identity.

About a 30-minute walk from our apartment there's a huge indoor market that sells about everything legal, and probably quite a few things not entirely legal. There's plenty of fruit available, including watermelon (I swear Wuhan is made of watermelon, I must have had ten whole watermelons since I got here, they just keep magically appearing after every meal), tiny banana's (the level of cuteness is way over 9000 in those) and the infamous durian. It's called the king of fruits and apparently smells about as appealing as the average corpse. Because all specimens we've found so far didn't have the trademark smell, we didn't get any yet. Let's hope our nose guides us to some choice durian in the coming days.

Concerning the meaty options: there's a lot of duck and pig. Nothing of the animal is wasted, so ducks are cooked and eaten beak and all, same with pigs: from snout to feet, not single piece of fat is wasted). Live crayfish and eels are also quite abundant.

Among the borderline legal items (thinking from a western perspective, I have no clue about local sales laws) one can find living turtles being sold. Also, strangely enough: chickens. Right before we got here a new law was passed, temporarily banning live chickens from being sold. I have no idea about the reasons, but as a result we've been having a lot more duck than would normally be the case. Every piece of chicken we've had so far was hamstered in advance, and hidden away in the Yan family's giant freezer. But at this particular market, I saw chickens being sold. Rather odd that I'm more certain about the chicken being illegal goods than the turtle.

China is not a very quiet place, and this is in no small part due to all the public dancing. Mornings and evenings are favourite moments for large groups of people to gather and have outdoor dance or martial arts practice. In the picture above (taken from our balcony), you can see the neighbourhood old-timers cracking their morning taichi routines. These old ladies are wielding swords at a time of day where I'm not even confident in my ability to wield a tooth brush.

Finally, special mentions must be given to our home court. A lot of people in this neighbourhood play basketball. At any given day there's around 6-10 people playing, but that pales in comparison to Sundays, when there's easily more than twenty people engaging in half-court tournaments. Chinese basketball is all about long distance shooting. There's not that much driving and any contact is called a foul. I prefer my game to occur in the paint, but either way it's great to have this many people to play with.

This turned into quite a long off-topic post. Tomorrow I'll be back with more go. As always, thanks for reading.

It sounds like an amazing adventure, Hushfield I wish I could do the same thing, but if I don't have my wife and daughter with me, I feel like my arms are gone. And while my 5yo daughter loves weiqi, I'm not sure if I can justify taking her out of Kindergarten for several months to study it! [This is completely disregarding fact that none of the three of us are within Yan Laoshi's 15-35 year old limit for his foreign students. And job. And money.]

It does sound like an awful lot of fun, though. And I am sure you will be a terror on the go servers when you get back! Your games look absolutely awesome.

Sam: I understand the sentiment. By the way, from early June to the beginning of August there were two people staying here: an 8-year old little girl and her mother (who said she didn't meet the age requirement, but a gentleman doesn't ask). So don't take the age requirements too strictly. It's just a guideline. When it comes to go, as with many things in life, the question isn't "Who is going to let me?" It is "Who is going to stop me?"

The sleep-deprivation monster sure did stop me from going all out in one of my last teaching games with Yan Laoshi. The night before, somebody starting blasting their car horn at three in the morning for what seemed like forever (I believe the mathematical consensus is that when you're trying to sleep anything you can't count on two hands is an infinite amount). The game was played immediately after breakfast, and for one of the first times since I got here, I really didn't want to play. I just wanted a breakfast nap. It was a bad game.



Well, bad games happen. This one highlighted the shape problems even more than my previous games. I studied some more 5-3 joseki in the afternoon, then reviewed a bunch of tesuji problems and cracked one or two more chapters of the intermediate tesuji and life and death book.

My plan to step it up for my final week didn't take into account that we've been granted a compulsory day off to go rafting. If you don't hear from me again, you'll have definitive proof that rabbits can't swim.

There's no water on the moon, so no wonder they can't swim.

Apparently, rafting for one afternoon is Chinese for full-fledged weekend trip. Before I knew what was what, I was sharing a van with ten other people and at least as many backpacks and went hiking deep in the Chinese mountains. This also included rafting and fishing two almost drowning senior citizens out of the river. Because of the trip we effectively missed 3 days of school, so I've already had my last day at School Pink Stones.
This morning we left for School Stairs after less than 6 hours sleep. After some joseki study I played two games with Li Yi Chen. It was the same thing as last week's teaching game. I was not in the mood for playing, didn't read very far and the resulting games were fast fumblefests. I did get both of them reviewed, and I'll upload them here for your enjoyment.

During the nigiri-phase for game 1, I chose odd, and Li Yi Chen opened an empty hand. Did anybody here read "Get Strong at Nigiri"? Is that even allowed? I'm not exactly a math-wizard, so I hesitated for a bit, not knowing whether zero is odd or even. I eventually turned towards a field I have more experience with (linguistics) and decided that "I took one stone" and "I took no stones" were proof enough that Li Yi Chen had an even number in his hand.



We quickly started another game, but even as I placed the trusted low Chinese on the board, I knew what I was feeling all too well. It's not so much an old friend as the drunken uncle that stubbornly keeps showing up at family dinners. When Uncle Tilt starts speeching, you know it's time to go home.



I stopped playing after that (we'd only been at it for 30 minutes), and decided to study for next week's university finals instead.

But even short games like these can teach something. I feel like I have gotten a bit better at sensing when it's not a good time to play. Though one must be careful not to deceive oneself, I don't think it's the same as avoiding playing in order not to lose. In fact, there was very little attachment to the losses. It's the kind of signal I receive right before I lose interest completely and switch hobbies for the umpteenth time. This is not really a surprise, after keeping up with such a gruelling schedule for most of the summer. Questions of improvement aside, I feel like I've gotten to know myself better as a go player. I'm not the kind of player that cranks out game after game and improves like that. I like taking my time on a game, reviewing it afterwards and then taking a break to come back the next day and play one or two more games. I'm very much ok with that.

As promised, a glimpse into the utter jungle that is Chinese traffic:

Let's start with public transport: the sane option is the subway. This one's actually really safe, as stations use the same system as e.g. Seoul, Korea, where passengers wait behind unscalable plexiglass, with doors at fixed intervals that only open when trains arrive. It's almost impossible to fall onto the tracks, and I really think all subway systems should be using this by now. The downside: stations are far and few between, meaning you might be in for a bit of a walk if you decide to take the subway. This option is for foreigners and people that happen to live right in front of the subway station. A bit closer to the real Wuhan traffic spirit are buses (with open windows, and commuters happily spitting out of said windows, often onto passing cars) and taxis (which already got an honourable mention a few pages back).

What really gives Chinese traffic its unique flavour, though, are the cars. Forget what you think you know about cars. You know nothing, Jon Snow. Being in a Chinese car is both hilarious when you're not the person driving it, and terrifying when you are.

It's total chaos. Direction indicators are a lie. People just go everywhere at once. Every square inch of the road is populated. Cars are parked in the middle of the road. Stopping on the highway is not all that uncommon. The fact that all the roads are "Made in China" doesn't help much either. Most of the people I know back at home, are quite intimidated when buses or trucks come thundering by at full speed, but the drivers in Wuhan are not impressed. Cutting people off is standard practice. There's usually five cars driving side-by-side on a three-lane road. While most drivers seem to have developed superhuman reflexes, two tweaks help to regulate the chaos somewhat.

The first one of these is the horn. If you're not honking, you're just not doing it right. Where I live, using the car horn always has this (slight) hint of aggression. It's not unusual to see drivers hurling obscenities at each other's head right after somebody uses it. Not so in Wuhan. There's not even the slightest bit of aggression involved. Using the horn is a simple safety measure: "I'm coming through. You better believe I'm not stopping so get out of the way, thank you very much." As a result, honking is about as natural as the sound of crickets. At first I couldn't believe my eyes, but the chaos does seem to make drivers much less aggressive than is the case in any European country I've seen so far.

A second tweak is the way in which people react when cars inevitably do bump into each other. A quick stop for measuring the damage usually turns into the culprit admitting his or her mistake and immediately handing over an appropriate amount of cash to pay for the damages. Which is a nice bonus for the victim, as nobody ever seems to get their car fixed. Almost all cars carry the battle scars of life on the road. There's seemingly no need for police officers or insurance papers and both parties are off before the lights have turned green again.

Another thing which I really like are the scooters. They are a convenient way of squeezing past the cars. I don't know if you noticed in the picture above, but there's one important thing missing in all of them: exhaust pipes. China has enough smog-woes as it is, so all of the scooters I've seen so far were of the electrical variety.

There are not that many cyclists, but a ton of pedestrians. They squeeze through the tiny amounts of space left on the road, and are about as unfazed by the whole thing as the average driver is.

Yan Laoshi's son is currently taking the 4-part driver's license test. He passed the first three parts pretty easily. I'm assuming the fourth part consists of parking a car on a moving platform that is being airlifted onto a cruising cargo ship by a helicopter. That's about the level of skill one needs to survive on the road here.

I've never been in China but its neighbour India qualifies for all the virtues you mention. There are traffic signs featuring a horn covering the spectrum from "Don't honk" to "Please honk". I went through the same stages of suspending my disbelief and settled for the interpretation that honking isn't more than asserting one's presence, being even abundant in total standstill.

The rules in Indian traffic are simply Belgian rules reversed: it is pure survival of the fittest or "law of the strongest" as we put it. This has comic effects when Indian colleagues visit our office and watch our suicide maneuvers across the street with bewilderment.

They too are masters at the traffic jam game. A nudge forward, two nudges backward and the implausible equivalent the Indian cars seem to have of abdominal contraction when squeezing yourself through speleo caves. Solved.

One of the issues is that they would be faster by bike or even by foot but a combination of status, safety and wet feet in the monsoon season urge all well thinking citizens into the four wheeled cage.

Well, I'm off to home on my bike making a difference for our planet's future!

I can't agree with this more.

One thing to note in India, at least, is that many vehicles don't have side-view mirrors. As a result, it's bad form to NOT honk when passing, as otherwise they might not know that you are there at all. Driving is definitely a more active and engaged process there, involving lots of reading and communication with other drivers.

As a spectator, I'm sad you're journey there is ending soon. It's been a blast reading about your battles and your studies.

Hopefully you're wrong, and you're not burned out and about to switch hobbies. That would be sad. I'm sure when you're back on KGS, there will be some beautiful, beautiful games.

Not if he plays me ... my games are ugly, regardless of opponent.

I do hope he plays me, though. I like to play against everyone.

Sam: I think the way I phrased things in a previous post might have given you a wrong idea: I'm not burned out on go at all. In fact, I'm more motivated about it than I've been in years. What happened a few days ago is just the inevitable need for a small break. Think of it like going on a long-term diet. If you allow yourself to have a small snack or cheat-meal every once in a while, it's much easier to keep up with the diet for a long time. Right now, I just have two very important final exams coming up to complete my teacher training, and those take priority over anything else.

Today, there was go: I played my last game with Yan Laoshi. Below you'll find my even game against a professional.



After 47 days, over 50 hours of joseki study, thousands of go problems (I lost count somewhere during August) and exactly 70 slow, serious games my study in China has reached its conclusion. It was a worthwile experience in which I learned a lot about go, myself as a go player and a surprising amount of Chinese language as well. Going by the accounts of the ones that came here before me, this is not the end, but merely the beginning. After a 1-week break for my finals, I'll continue studying go back home. As the goal of this journal was to share the circumstances of studying in China with everyone here at L19, I won't continue keeping a journal once I'm back in Belgium. But I will study. Never underestimate the resolve of the quiet man.

Thanks for reading.