Life In 19x19

I’ve tried. It’s too much work to run a stopwatch on every problem, and it’s annoying when I leave a problem and come back to it, and most importantly it encourages me to make decisions too fast. Hopefully accuracy is enough information to be useful.

My reading was feeling a little soggy so I took another trip through 1001 Life & Death Problems and the results were unexpected: What happened?

Here are some components of performing well in tsumego:

• Visualization (navigating the tree of variations accurately). This has always been a big issue for me, and since I started playing again a couple of years ago I've been really concentrating on it. I wouldn't have thought this had gotten much better over the last year but I have been doing harder problems that require me to keep track of more things, so maybe my muscles have improved without me realizing it.
• Pattern matching. I do feel like I have gotten better at saying "This is clearly the first point to try", or "Look at all the lack of outside liberties, can I just get a golden chicken?". I have said before that the problems in this book are quite artificial, which thwarted my old pattern matching repertoire of things like L groups, but I feel like my life-and-death internal vocabulary (as opposed to just brute-force looking at every move) has expanded.
• Carefulness. Most of these problems are really about carefulness in the end, due to their small size; you should in principle be able to quickly falsify any incorrect try. Maybe I'm being more careful than before? I certainly know by now that the live-in-1 problems are trickier than they look. It's also possible that as my pattern-matching improves, I now see the correct move before I have the chance to miss the refutation to the incorrect move.
• Familiarity. This is at least my fourth time through the book. I hardly remember any individual problems (there was one that made me say "Oh, this gave me fits last time"... and I got it wrong again) but just doing these over and over has to have had some effect.
• Grading criteria. Am I being less harsh when I grade myself than in the past? Maybe a little... My confidence in saying "Well, I didn't look at White 4 explicitly but I looked at the idea in other lines and it was clear that it couldn't be the most testing move" may have gone up a little. This component is probably not zero but it can't account for that much.

Anyway, since I haven't been very confident in my actual play recently, this was a nice boost, showing that I have qualitatively improved at something.

Meanwhile, I keep playing in Yunguseng Dojang and BenKyo League and my results there have been good - for what it's worth, over the last year my YD rating has gone up about half a rank to a number In-seong estimates at about 1k AGA (I'm not sure I believe that) and my BKL rank, which is loosely tied to OGS, is a strong 2k. Fox games have regressed somewhat, perhaps due to mostly playing 20-second games in an attempt to get more games in, and I bounce between 3d and 2d. But I'm really trying not to worry about rank; I just want to play well and feel happy about how I'm playing.

I'm back from the 2024 US Go Congress in Portland, Oregon, and it was a lot of fun as always. I went 5-1 again (really 4-1 plus a forfeit ), so with my -3.15 AGA rating coming in I must be guaranteed to hit AGA 2k (if I don't, I give up on AGA ratings entirely). Of course I'm happy about that but then I look back at my early posts in this thread which talk about me feeling that I was basically 2k already... well, it's nice to "officially prove it" finally. And regardless of my perceived level then or my real level now, I definitely feel like I'm playing stronger Go (of course, this does not always translate into actual results).

My games were more stable than last year, which is also nice. In three of my wins I outplayed my opponent in the opening, kept on playing good moves in the middlegame, and didn't give it away in the endgame (always with some hiccups, of course). The other win was much more chaotic but it's nice to have not lost my head in the chaos and I think I'll learn a lot from going over it. In the sole loss, I outplayed my opponent in the opening, successfully dealt with the middlegame chaos he introduced, and then threw it away (my compensation after a big fight was a flower ko that I just forgot about). That's okay, I played well for a while and painful lessons are the most effective ones.

Part of my Go Congress ritual is to speedrun Graded Go Problems for Beginners during my downtime (apologies to those who are averse to soulless numbers!) and I can see that my accuracy has improved since last year, which is another nice quantitative measure of some sort of improvement.

All that aside, I swear that I still don't have rank goals! For one thing, AGA ranks are very noisy so a lot of your movement there is at the mercy of who you happen to get paired against. But more importantly, although I still would like to improve qualitatively (I like improving in general!) it is more about just being happy with my own games and feeling that I can play a full game that makes sense. That's something I think I am still capable of getting better at no matter what happens in individual games.

The other main interesting Go thing at the Congress was a series of three lectures that Michael Chen (= Zhaonian Chen = zchenmike) 1p gave on what he considered to be the principles of high-level Go. They came at some essential concepts from a different angle than I'm used to, and whether or not I'm able to apply them myself, it was really interesting to view the game in a different way from the usual. I took a lot of notes so I'll try to summarize his ideas in some other posts at some point.

The US Open and Congress in general were run smoothly and effectively, so props to the organizers for that. I particularly appreciated that there was an explicit crackdown on noise in the tournament hall after a lot of complaints during the first two rounds.

dfan wrote:The other main interesting Go thing at the Congress was a series of three lectures that Michael Chen (= Zhaonian Chen = zchenmike) 1p gave on what he considered to be the principles of high-level Go. They came at some essential concepts from a different angle than I'm used to, and whether or not I'm able to apply them myself, it was really interesting to view the game in a different way from the usual. I took a lot of notes so I'll try to summarize his ideas in some other posts at some point.

I see that he's planning to give the same lectures at the European Go Congress, so I won't spoil them here, at least for now, and will instead encourage people who can to attend them live. He's a very engaging presenter and I wasn't the only attendee who found the concepts interesting.