dfan's quest for competence

[John Fairbairn]

Did Behind the scenes of some endgame tesuji move us in the direction of a full English breakfast at all?

It seems you were ahead of me!

Is a full go breakfast one with black pudding and white pudding?

[dfan]

It's fascinating to me how your accuracy rate is rather consistent throughout the book. I remember clocking in around 10%+ accuracy higher on the 5 moves to kill than the 5 moves to live problems.

I definitely find the living problems harder than the killing problems! So maybe I just take more care with them to compensate. Also I think that the increased difficulty most often manifests in it being hard to find a potential solution in the first place, but once I find a candidate variation I may be more likely to make a mistake of the form "This must kill, oh, whoops" rather than "This must live, oh, whoops."

I wonder, I wonder. Do we learn them properly?

Well, probably not! But honestly after a few decades of studying both chess and Go I've become pretty wary of any "if I just studied in this other way I'd improve much faster" thoughts. I also have a feeling that what works best varies a lot from person to person.

The one time I did make a big qualitative jump from a plateau was in chess when I suddenly went from 1800 to 2000+ USCF (say, like suddenly jumping from 2k to 1d). That happened when I did a lot of spaced repetition of openings and strategic problems (among other things), before spaced repetition became a big thing. So that's one reason I've been enthusiastic about the same process in Go. But really I'm pretty sure that the best thing for my improvement would just be to play more often.

[dfan]

I rejoined Yunguseng Dojang and the season just ended so I guess it's a good time to take stock.

I took a break from YD in 2020 after three years of continuous play there; I was getting a bit frustrated at not improving (much) despite the effort I was putting in, and I felt like I kept letting In-seong down with my bad play. I was a little ambivalent about rejoining but I thought that getting some game reviews would be really valuable and I felt that I had let go enough of my need to quantitatively improve that I could just enjoy the games and not take it so personally like I used to.

Well, the good news is that I went 10-5 this season and In-seong said he could hardly recognize my play from before. I used to be very conservative; this season he even needed to criticize a few moves for being too aggressive.

A few things that I think have changed:
1) As I noted earlier, I have spent more time doing problems and trying to read really precisely, with more confidence that I can actually do it based on my recent chess experience.
2) I trust my reading more. If my reading says my group is safe, then I'll leave it alone! If I'm wrong I'll learn something.
3) I am much more willing to live on a knife-edge between success and failure. I'll say more about this in a separate comment later.
4) I don't care so much whether I win or lose! I still enjoy playing well but I have stopped having a rank goal.

Of course the true test will be whether I am still so happy about my play when I have a bad season... but for now I am enjoying myself. In the meantime, I now feel fully confident going up against Fox 3d players; I'm 10-10 in my last 20 games (10-5 in my last 15) so I no longer feel just lucky to be there.

[dfan]

OK, here's the expansion of point 3 from yesterday.

I used to have the attitude that playing Go well was largely about making territory well and keeping your groups strong. If your opponent makes weak groups you can attack them, and if you have to invade, you should do it and try to do your best, but basically it's about sketching out territory with healthy groups.

My new attitude is that playing Go well is all about reading and fighting between groups of imperfect strength. There is a famous joke about two campers who encounter an angry bear in the woods; the first camper starts putting on their sneakers, the second one says "Surely you don't think you can outrun a bear?!", and the first replies "I don't need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you." In Go, your group doesn't need to be invulnerable, it just needs to be stronger than the one it is fighting. Capturing-race variations aren't a sign that you're desperate, they're a sign that you're effectively using the fact that your group is a little stronger than your opponent's. If your variations don't have you winning capturing races by one liberty, you're probably not playing maximally effectively. Once I flipped my attitude I started realizing how many josekis are really about getting one liberty ahead in a corner capturing race.

So that's my new attitude, or at least I'm attempting to make it so; of course sometimes my old conservatism creeps in. It certainly makes games more exciting!

I do think that the "Go is about safely sketching out territory" mindset is a big problem not just with me but with lots of Western players in the SDK range, particularly 5-9k or so. They've gotten to that point by slaughtering players who don't understand strategy at all, but then they get into a rut where they keep making moves that are only 70% effective because they're so conservative, and it's hard to get out of that rut because the moves that stronger players tell you you should have made look so scary.

[Gomoto]

So in this view the fighting aspect of go gets the attention.
Go revealing the fundamental vectors of all kind of battles.


Not only the close combat is a cut throat activity. The whole game from move one to the end is a brutal confrontation in the full view of life and death with every move striving for the advantage.


But there is also a time for peaceful step by step development and even the defeat can be glorious.


As a second thought: What about the game between us and AI

[dfan]

Still having fun!

I'm holding steady at 3d on Fox. Still playing in Yunguseng Dojang, and my rating there has gone up, but more importantly In-seong has confirmed that I'm playing more actively and with fighting spirit. I'm also playing with a more carefree attitude, and so far have stopped myself from feeling too bad when I get a negative review. Finally, I've been playing in BenKyo League (https://www.benkyoleague.com/), Ben Mantle's (OGS 6d) group, for a few months. Ben's great, and the atmosphere there is very friendly; there's lots of chat on Discord and kibitzing of each other's games, so it feels like having a Go club around all the time.

My Go activity consists pretty much completely of playing games and tsumego. I continue to be very serious about reading accurately. I ordered some books from China a few months ago and they are the main components of my current diet.

- 速成围棋专项训练死活1000题 is a 10-volume graded set (starting at DDK, ending at 6d) with 1000 life-and-death problems in each book. I like the problems a lot, although I couldn't tell you how original they are, and the books are good quality. Each volume has a bunch of short chapters on individual techniques, then a few long ones (covering over half the book) that are just generically live, kill, and ko. The one negative thing, and it's a pretty big one, is that the solutions are not in the book; they're only available online, which I didn't realize before ordering. I started with the 5-1k book (volume 3) and didn't have much trouble (91%) and am now halfway through the 1d book (88%, but it'll get tougher when I get to the generic chapters).
- 围棋经典死活3600题 is I guess a popular collection of life-and-death problems (I've seen it referred to before); three volumes with 1200 problems in each. The first volume is plenty hard for me - 79% success so far. These are perfect for my current reading ability, a step above 1001L&D but generally within my reach (when I get a problem wrong I can see how I could have gotten it right). These books are also high quality; it's a pleasure to hold them and solve from them.
- 围棋经典手筋3600题 is an analogous collection of tesuji problems. These include both tactics problems and shape/haengma problems, which both seem to fall under the general category of "tesuji" (for example, I feel that Get Strong at Tesuji is largely about shape), and for me at least the difficulty of the two types is wildly different. I sailed through the tactical section of volume 1 (97%) and muddled through the shape section (57%). I guess the upside is that I can learn a lot from the shape problems, although there are no verbal explanations. I'm going through volume two now.

I've registered for the Go Congress; I was on the fence a bit, and then decided that I'm spending so much time on Go right now that it would be silly not to take advantage of the opportunity. I've entirely ditched my old goal of eventually reaching AGA 1d (for one thing, I'm more and more disenchanted with the AGA rating system) and am just enjoying playing and learning. I'm looking forward to seeing both old and new friends there.

[Kirby]

If you are consistently 3d on fox, maybe you could just self-promote to 1d. Should be fine.

BTW, I will probably be at the congress, so it would be cool to catch up. I don't think I will play in the open, but I will be there for socializing

[dfan]

I appreciate your confidence in me! But the highest rank I feel I could possibly "really" be is 2k, plus I underperform in over-the-board play. I don't want to game the system to try get my rank up and deprive some stronger players of the opportunity to play each other. I'm happy to just play the games that I'm naturally assigned and I'll do how I do.

[Kirby]

I appreciate your confidence in me! But the highest rank I feel I could possibly "really" be is 2k, plus I underperform in over-the-board play. I don't want to game the system to try get my rank up and deprive some stronger players of the opportunity to play each other. I'm happy to just play the games that I'm naturally assigned and I'll do how I do.

I don't think it's gaming the system. Self-promotion is a part of the system.

That being said, I can relate to being weaker over-the-board. I am like that, too.

[dfan]

I'm back from the US Go Congress in Kent, Ohio. In terms of results it was certainly a success; I went 5-1, beating a 5k, a 4k, and three 3ks, and losing to a 2k, so my AGA rank will certainly go back up to 3k. Despite the results, I'm not at all unhappy that I entered at 4k; my games were all interesting, and I got to play mostly 3ks anyway. The US Open was entirely even games (no handicap, full komi) this year, which I thought was great - in my opinion people should play fewer handicap games. (I'll write that whole rant sometime.)

Some of the games were pretty messy, so I could have lost more games than I did, but I actually see that as a good thing. Historically I have had a tendency to fall apart when things get complicated, but this year I just kept fighting hard until the end, and although my opponents and I all made lots of big mistakes, in the end I was able to take advantage of theirs more than they were able to take advantage of mine.

It was weird playing over the board for the first time in over three years! I played a couple of warmup games on the day I arrived, which helped, but it took me a couple of days to get used to playing with a physical board and stones again.

I had an annoying occurrence in my first game; 2+ hours into the game, as I hit byo-yomi, I discovered that the audible countdown on our Ing clock didn't work. After about 15 minutes of the TDs trying unsuccessfully to substitute in a different clock (they couldn't figure out how to set the two players' times differently), we just had a TD stand behind me and watch the clock for me (he spoke when there were 10 and 5 seconds left). It was like being a pro!

It was nice to see and talk to a bunch of people I hadn't seen since the 2019 Congress, including Kirby. The town of Kent was pretty nice once I realized that all of the action (food, drink, etc.) was in town and that there was no hope of finding anything interesting on the Kent State campus itself. My hotel was over a mile away from the venue but it was a very pleasant hilly walk through campus, and my legs got a nice workout from making the round trip twice a day.

As usual, my main takeaway from playing a tournament is that I need to play more games. I do a lot of tsumego but it's really not a substitute for thinking hard about the same game for a long time from beginning to end.

Overall I had a great time, and I'm not just saying that because I had a good result. It was once again really nice to be surrounded by friends and rivals (and I keep accumulating both) in an atmosphere that's all about Go for a whole week.

Now, off to play some more games...

[xela]

...The US Open was entirely even games (no handicap, full komi) this year, which I thought was great - in my opinion people should play fewer handicap games. (I'll write that whole rant sometime.)

I've never understood the point of tournaments played with fair handicap. Instead of testing who's the strongest player, you're just testing who's got the most inaccurate rank. (I'm fine with handicaps for social games. I don't mind too much either way.)

For smaller tournaments, I think you do need some sort of handicapping, because you'll sometimes get pairings such as 5 kyu versus 12 kyu, and an even game wouldn't be very interesting for either player. It's less of an issue when you have hundreds of participants. I think handicap = rank difference minus three (even games if you're within 3 ranks) could work well, but I've never managed to persuade an Australian tournament director to try it. I think some UK tournaments use handicap = McMahon score difference minus one, so handicaps in later rounds may depend on results of earlier games?

[kvasir]

I think some UK tournaments use handicap = McMahon score difference minus one, so handicaps in later rounds may depend on results of earlier games?

Many McMahon tournaments, at least in Europe, do this. The problem they are trying to solve is that in small tournaments there are usually gaps in the McMahon scores (or few players with the same score) and after a few rounds it is inevitable that players need to be paired across McMahon score and then that players with very different McMahon scores are playing each other. I think H-1 and H-2 are common, I'm not sure but maybe H-2 is more common than H-1. In case of H-2, if a player with a MM score of m needs to be paired with someone with score of m - 2 it is still an even game but but if the player needs to be paired with someone with even less MM score there will be handicap.

This kind of handicap should be a rare occurrence if the tournament has a reasonable size, except for the lowest ranked players, and I think it is most of the time only applied if one of the players has a rank lower than some preset level (15 kyu?). Assuming it is a rare occurrence it might not be that useful to use large handicap reductions, I'd expect that the number of handicap games would fall off very sharply when increasing the handicap reduction.

I have wondered if a better solution to this specific problem would be to group players in equal sized groups by rating and assign the initial McMahon score based on this ranking. Then simply ensure that each group is large enough to be able avoid pairings with wildly different McMahon score.

Last time I inspected the tournament results from US Go congress (very long time ago) it appeared to me that it was played in groups based on rank. That is it was like separate tournaments for each rank band, but maybe this was my misunderstanding or it could be that some congresses were like this? That system seems like another way to test who's rank is most modest. Maybe it is a problem that is hard to solve once you decide to seed players based on rank.

Overall I had a great time, and I'm not just saying that because I had a good result. It was once again really nice to be surrounded by friends and rivals (and I keep accumulating both) in an atmosphere that's all about Go for a whole week.

Now, off to play some more games...

[dfan]

The US Open is McMahon. I think the handicap has been rank difference minus two in the past (I see a 2018 game I played (and won!) as White despite being a 4k facing a 2k), which is probably good enough, although there still ended up being some matchups at the end that were like 4k-1k, which I think deserve to be even, especially if the 4k is having such a great tournament! I've never seen McMahon difference used for handicap.

I'm still not pleased in general about the fact that a handicap of H may indicate a real rating difference of anything from H-0.999 to H+0.999 (though this could be addressed with a little work), but once you're adding a bunch of stones anyway it may not matter so much.

One slightly odd thing (it seemed to me) this year was that the distance between the bands doubled halfway through the tournament (I think). As a 4k I was playing 3ks with two fewer wins with me, rather than one. I can see the reasoning but it was slightly disheartening to see the stronger players moved further away from me. I don't know if this is common McMahon practice. (As I said, I got six good games in the end, so it worked out fine.)

[dfan]

One nice thing about keeping formal track of my tsumego book results is that I now have a relatively objective way of measuring the difficulty of various collections. I tend to say things like "I think that book is somewhere between volumes 2 and 3 of Graded Go Problems for Beginners" but now I have actual numbers to back that up.

I keep all this information in a Google Sheet at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... NvF8TOP0c/ but I'll paste the current data here for ease of viewing (the original does have a little more information about the books). The date is there for reference in case I improve (or decline) over time. I already have two trips through 1001 Life and Death Problems in there. I'll add to the sheet as I finish more books, and I may update the copy here as well. The books I'm currently working on will probably end up in the lowest quarter of this list; I think I could use a bigger challenge than the 90+% books for now.

Yes, the Mateusz Surma books (You Won't Get Dumber While Thinking) really are that hard.

Code: Select all

2022-11   99.5%   围棋基础训练丛书系列 red (local fights) 5k
2022-10   97.2%   You Won't Get Dumber While Thinking 18-20k   
2023-04   96.9%   围棋经典手筋3600题 vol 1 (problems 1-834)
2022-10   95.5%   Jump Level Up 1   
2022-11   95.5%   围棋基础训练丛书系列 orange (capturing races) 5k
2022-10   95.3%   Jump Level Up 3   
2023-07   95.1%   Graded Go Problems for Beginners vol 2   
2022-11   95.1%   围棋基础训练丛书系列 purple (life and death) 5k
2022-10   94.8%   Jump Level Up 4   
2022-10   94.6%   Jump Level Up 2   
2022-11   93.4%   围棋基础训练丛书系列 red (local fights) 1k
2022-11   92.0%   围棋基础训练丛书系列 purple (life and death) 1k
2022-10   91.9%   Jump Level Up 5   
2022-11   91.3%   围棋基础训练丛书系列 orange (capturing races) 1k
2022-09   91.0%   围棋快速练习 800 题
2023-04   91.0%   速成围棋专项训练死活1000题 vol 3 (5-1k)   
2023-02   90.9%   1001 Life and Death Problems   
2023-01   90.8%   囲碁高尾紳路の最強詰碁初級・中級・上級　この一冊で手筋の基本がすべて身につく153題
2023-07   88.4%   Graded Go Problems for Beginners vol 3   
2022-09   88.0%   1001 Life and Death Problems   
2023-01   88.0%   9級から初段までの基本詰碁 : 囲碁 : だれでも楽しめる146題
2022-11   86.7%   围棋基础训练丛书系列 brown (tesuji) 5k
2023-07   86.2%   速成围棋专项训练死活1000题 vol 4 (1d)   
2022-10   85.5%   You Won't Get Dumber While Thinking 15-17k   
2023-04   84.8%   围棋经典手筋3600题 vol 1 (total)
2023-07   77.7%   Graded Go Problems for Beginners vol 4   
2022-11   75.7%   围棋基础训练丛书系列 brown (tesuji) 1k
2023-08   71.2%   You Won't Get Dumber While Thinking 12-14k   
2023-04   56.9%   围棋经典手筋3600题 vol 1 (problems 835-1200)

[EricBackus]

One nice thing about keeping formal track of my tsumego book results is that I now have a relatively objective way of measuring the difficulty of various collections. I tend to say things like "I think that book is somewhere between volumes 2 and 3 of Graded Go Problems for Beginners" but now I have actual numbers to back that up.

Maybe you should keep track of average time spent per problem as well? Presumably you will get more problems correct if you go slower, or fewer problems correct if you go faster.