Hi,

The plan:
I'm currently finishing my Phd (and am hopefully finished around march next year) and do plan to take a few months off before starting a life in the big bad corporate working world.

I've read about http://thedanplan.com/ and have the phantasm of doing something similar to viewtopic.php?f=15&t=4329, only on a larger scale. I'm pretty sure it takes a lot of good planning in advance for a full month of studying, so I'm gathering opinions.

I'm currently in the earliest planning phase, so I'd like to ask about your opinion. I'm thinking of spending a maximum of 500.- for this experiment, most of it would probably spend for high quality reviewers/teachers.

Current questions to the audience:

• How would your ideal study month (i.e. 28/31 free days) look like?
• How could I monitor short-term or micro progress. I'm rather unsatisfied with "I've won this game so I understood this concept"?
• How could we define delibarate practice in Go terms? I'll be looking in the chess paper mentioned below but am open to any ideas / definitions.
• I'm thinking about asking at other places, too but am a bit unsure where; Websites like [url]gogameguru.com[/url] seem to be the wrong place. Senseis maybe?

Any other things I should keep in mind?

Todo:

• Find testimonials for the suggested teachers
• List advantages and disadvantages of the different hosting solutions
• Create daily routine, especially keeping in mind the topics didactic quality and deliberate practice.
• "formalize" improvement measurement.
• Alternative to updating this forum post, which offers the same amount of interactivity with the L19² community? It *seems* a bit cumbersome and chaotic.

Things I have (material and technical):

• Books:
  
  • Graded Go Problems 1-4 (finished 1 and 2, in the middle of 3)
  • All books of the elementary go series (read through Tesuji, Attack and Defense, but starting to read them again)
  • Invincible
  • Lessons in the fundamentals of Go
• A nice go board.
• Broadband internet connection.
• Supportive girlfriend (let's see how far I can go )

Psychological relevant things

• The forum post about Motivtation to improve at http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4409 , especially the video and the talk http://the99percent.com/videos/7061/Jos ... lf-Failing about deliberate practice.
• The book Talent is overrated http://www.amazon.de/Talent-Overrated-S ... 603&sr=1-1 which focuses again on deliberate practice.
• ez4u has found (written?) a paper about deliberate practice in chess: http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/uploads/tx_r ... se2005.pdf
• Shortcuts to Go improvement discussion: http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic. ... w=viewpoll

Technical remarks:

• What free blog hosting offers easy inclusion of SGF files?
  Answer: A wordpress blog with the http://eidogo.com/ plugin.
• GoGameGuru offers an account as a writer

Evaluation:
After talking to my girlfriend (which has a phd in psychology) I have at least two ideas for measurements of my learning success:

• Timing and measuring the number of correct answers while doing Tsumego (tactical knowledge)
• Having a list (quite a few) of whole board positions. I'd record where I think are the big or urgent points on the board (maybe even timed) and compare my answers after four weeks. Maybe my future teacher could provide me with such a list after going through a couple of my games and looking for my particular weaknesses.

Fighting boredom:
I need to do different things each day to fight boredom or laziness: Currently I have these activities in my mind, although I'm not yet sure about the ratio of each:

• Playing serious games (esp. participating in the ASR league)
• Playing blitz games
• Reviewing games on my own
• Reviewing games with my teacher
• Doing tsumego
• Looking at commented games (esp. Invincible)
• Teaching weaker players (on a live board), a couple of friends have started playing Go recently and if they still play at the time teaching would be a good opportunity to get away from the computer/books and try to explain newly learned concepts.
• Attaining a tournament
• Additional live games over a real board -- could be hard to find players.
• Doing other leisure stuff from time to time:
  
  • Playing the occasional Snooker game
  • Having a dog (in general )
  • Continuing Aikdo for relaxation (at least 2 times a week, maybe 3 then)

Current teachers I could ask:

• Tobasuma (suggested)
• Jennie Shen (suggested)
• Yilun Yang (suggested)
• topazg (have very good experiences in the past): probably not available

Things which are good but don't work in my context:

• Going to a chinese go camp.
• Going to Budapest

One of the reasons is that I want to see what is possible and effective with self study at home. Although I'm not sure if having a stronger teacher would be cheating under these requirements.

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Go is easy: don't play bad moves.

If I had a month to devote to Go, I would go to where the strong players are and do what they tell me to do.

Something like Guo Juan's workshops in China.

Sightseeing is a nice bonus.

Although technically quite a good idea I should add that I want to do it from home (having a dog) and it would probably cost more than 500.- for all expenses.

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Go is easy: don't play bad moves.

For $500, I'd get maybe two lessons a week from a strong player online, a few problem books, and maybe a commented game collection. I'd spend maybe half your study time doing problems, play two serious games a day, and maybe go through a pro game on non-lesson days.

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
--
My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

It's regrettably that you're ruling out a trip to a go school, as I don't think anything will come close in terms of concentrated learning, as well getting a good foundation in how to study and approach the game. Opportunities to take trips like that will become rarer once you start working. However, I appreciate that costs are an issue.

Given your rather generous budget, I would focus on getting as many lessons as possible from a strong player, ideally a professional, but try to make sure that you look for someone who is recommended for their ability to explain things.

The biggest problem I think you will face is getting serious games. True, you can easily get games on KGS etc, but you can never know how seriously your opponent is playing. Perhaps you can join one of the formal structures, like breakfast's insei academy, or the newer Nordic Go Academy? There's also the free ASR league on KGS. Regardless of what you do, get your games reviewed, preferably by your teacher above.

In terms of literature, I would probably focus on tsumego books, as you will get more than enough theoretical ideas from your game reviews, and more pertinently, they will be theoretical issues that apply to YOUR games. I strongly recommend the Lee Chang Ho L&D series (6 volumes) and Tesuji series (6 volumes).

In terms of measuring progress, I'm afraid there is no other way than winning games against ever stronger players. Go is not like other martial arts, where you can earn belts for demonstrating a technique. If you can't make it happen in a real game, tough. Having said that, however, your teacher should be able to help significantly in this regard.

A lot of people have suggested pro lessons which are great. However at 7k, lessons with a strong dan teacher that last longer may be better. You can look at Tabemasu here on L19 for an example.

This sounds like it would be a lot of fun, but it could be very tiring!

Once you're done with this (and hopefully not burned out on Go) I'd suggest using your PhD study skills (you did do daily work on that dissertation, right?) to set up a daily Go routine. What was your dissertation on? I just finished my part-time MS in Electrical Engineering - the feeling of freedom was amazing until kid #3 came less than a month after I finished

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Go here:

http://www.badukcenter.com/


its in Budapest.. would cost 250 Euros for accommodation AND study for a month . Food is very cheap.

Take the dog with you...

This is interesting, please post a journal of some kind!?

I have a friend returning from the Budapest center in a few days, so I can give you a first hand report shortly. My initial impressions from brief conversations with him was that it was less structured and intense than the courses based in China/Korea/Japan (e.g. the Experience Go in China program, which I've been on), but you are at least surrounded by people very serious and committed about improving their go, and you have access to pros to review your games.

I'd be interested in a full review..

The question might be about cost. 250 Euros plus cheap food (I guess you could eat for less than 100 euros for a month there), means pretty good value. You could even feed the dog!

I'm not sure you could even get on the plane to china for that cost. As living there for a month would be cheaper than staying in Germany then surely it would be better than just studying at home.

Setting up would also mean evaluating my study, which I find extremly difficult. How could I measure that I've learned more about invasions after let's say 3 hours of studying. In a game are too many other factors that play a role. I'm not sure how to approach this kind of studying scientifically.

My phd (or Doktor, as it's actually called in Germany; I'm not sure it is the same as in other countries. Talking with other phds let me think that other countries have a lot more structure in their approach) is about functional programming and parallelism, esp. different parallelization methods in Haskell. If for some pervert reason someone is interested in this kind of work, take a look at http://www.plm.eecs.uni-kassel.de/plm/i ... d=mlesniak where hopefully the list of accepted papers will grow on two further.

- Michael

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Go is easy: don't play bad moves.

The url does currently not work. Although quite cheap I'd prefer something which I can do from home (due to other various reasons). I can still easily study 8 hours a day, any more would probably have a negative effect on efficiency.

But in general this sounds like a good idea (maybe for later).


- Michael

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Go is easy: don't play bad moves.

That's what I think, too. Assuming I'll be around 5k-6k at that time (I'm currently a weak? 6k on KGS) I'm pretty sure I can profit more from a didactically good dan than a mediocre professional (which would probably also cost more).

- Michael

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Go is easy: don't play bad moves.

Sure. But good teachers will still probably a reasonable amount. I'm sure if you ask on this forum you will get a number of good suggestions (I can certainly recommend a couple). One factor to bear in mind is that with a teacher/pupil relationship, particularly a remote one, is that you might want to maintain it for a reasonably lengthy amount of time, e.g. 6 months+. The idea that you're going to achieve 1d in one month is probably unreasonably optimistic, since many things take a long time to bed down.

Warning - you may even find yourself dropping a stone or two after this one month exercise, as you try and apply all the things you might learn, and end up applying the wrong combination of things at the wrong time.

You're right. And I plan on keeping the teacher/student relationship, albeit obviously not with the same frequency.


Where have I said that this is my aim? I *definitely* do not aim at becoming 1 dan, which is unreasonable in this short amount of time. What I'm aiming at is experimenting with (and maybe evaluating in some form) self-study possibilities over a not so short term.


Correct.


- Michael

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Go is easy: don't play bad moves.

I like this. It will be very subjective to your own strengths, but I'm very interested in hearing how you make out. Hopefully you'll be recording your experience for the rest of us to read!

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Free Webhost service that offers sgf embedding....

How about here???????

I think a forum is not the right type for posting daily updates. Especially comments for different days are easily mixed up and difficult to differentiate.

- Michael

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Go is easy: don't play bad moves.

How much time before you need the blog space?

I'm swamped at the moment, but if you have a bit of time before you start your month, I have web space and could probably provide you with a sub-domain to post on. I'm on a plan w/ unlimited storage and bandwidth (though it is still shared hosting) and I think I could put something together that would allow you to blog with built-in SGF support.

(I'll really need to check, though ... it's been a while)