Life In 19x19

I'm continuing to make my way through Maeda vol. 1, though I have slowed down a bit; tsumego is tiring. I picked up Train Like a Pro because Kirby said that he improved a lot when he worked through it around my level, and this sort of mixed-problem-type training has worked very well for me in the past in chess. But I feel I should finish the Maeda book first.

I continue to enter flashcards for Get Strong at Tesuji and All About Life and Death into my spaced repetition system. I'm having a lot of trouble with the latter, though some of the moves and statuses are starting to sink in. It's amazing how much complexity there can be even in situations when you only have to read five moves ahead.

I finished going over my recent tournament games carefully with Crazy Stone and continue to believe that this is my secret weapon. I just analyzed a recent casual 9x9 game with it, in which I thought my opponent and I both played fairly decently, and it found so many terrible errors, each of which I feel I am now slightly less likely to make in the future.

As I mentioned in an edit to my previous update, the tournament was rated and I'm now 3k AGA. There's another one next week where I can try to hold onto that rank, but I will try not to be too invested in the result.

Here's the latest Maeda problem I did (#80), where once again I don't understand if/why my followup was suboptimal:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$W W to play
$$ ---------------
$$ . . . . . . . |
$$ . O X X X . X |
$$ . O O . O X . |
$$ . . . . O X . |
$$ . . O . . O O |
$$ . . . . . . . |[/go]

The book's solution:
and mine:

Black can play six next to three, and if White takes them, Black can take back.

Gotraskhalana wrote:Black can play six next to three, and if White takes them, Black can take back.

Wait, the other guy is allowed to play under the stones too?? That's not fair at all!

Thanks.

2016 retrospective!

I came back to go this spring after a long time away, and spent a fair amount of time just trying to get back to the level I had been at in the past. At some point I decided that I see a path forward to 1 dan (let's say AGA for concreteness). I'm rather lazily sauntering down that path, so the odds are good that I'll get distracted by something else along the way, but I really do have the confidence I can get there within a few years if I keep my focus.

My confidence is largely based on one postulate, which I have no proof of: 1d is not really all that good.

I don't mean that it's easy to get there! It's obviously quite hard! But the more I play and watch and talk to dan-level players, the more I think that 1d play consists largely of good fundamentals, good reading, the lack of blunders, and the willpower to play at one's best all game (all things I need to get much better at), rather than, say, superhuman talent. Even 1 dans are putty in the hands of 4 dans, and 4 dans get beaten up by 7 dans. So how good can 1 dans really be?

My two main current methods of study are:

• Record every serious game and go over it in detail with Crazy Stone
• Lots of spaced repetition

I think that Crazy Stone has been my secret weapon the last few months. It tells me so many big mistakes (I don't worry about the little ones), and I really try to internalize the resulting lessons. On the spaced repetition side, I now have flashcards for every problem in Get Strong at Tesuji, and am now going through All About Life and Death. The latter may be a fool's errand, and if it becomes a burden I'll stop, but it's been fun so far.

My trudge through Maeda vol. 1 slowed down a bit because I have been doing 10 problems a day on 101weiqi.com. I recently got to 1k there, and I can tell that my tesuji and life-and-death flashcards have helped a lot in spotting good ideas. I am up to problem 153 (out of 225) in Maeda vol. 1, with a 67% success rate, which is a nice challenging level.

One big difference from previous times I took the game seriously is that there is now a really great and vibrant local scene. I've made a bunch of friends among local players, many of whom are right around my level, and the healthy competition is a great spur towards improvement. The social aspect gives me some hope that I'll stick with the game this time.

One thing I really do have to do is get over my fear of playing. One thing that has helped is that every game I play is fodder for a Crazy Stone analysis session. The local group has started playing AGA-rated games lately, so that may force me to put aside my fear.

My AGA rating jumped from 4k to 3k after the one tournament I mentioned earlier. After that I lost my next three rated games (none were disasters, and I learned plenty from them), so that might put me just on the wrong side of the 4k line. Whatever. In 2017 I'm going to pretend I can play like a 2k and see where that takes me.

I don't mean that it's easy to get there! It's obviously quite hard! But the more I play and watch and talk to dan-level players, the more I think that 1d play consists largely of good fundamentals, good reading, the lack of blunders, and the willpower to play at one's best all game (all things I need to get much better at), rather than, say, superhuman talent. Even 1 dans are putty in the hands of 4 dans, and 4 dans get beaten up by 7 dans. So how good can 1 dans really be?

Well, I've been dan level for a while now and I still blunder plenty...

I agree with you on the willpower thing. I do find that for me maintaining strong effortful concentration through the whole game makes a big difference:

• Making full use of my time and buckling down and everything reading as carefully as I can. Even on seemingly obvious moves taking a few seconds to be sure rather than playing automatically.
• On my opponent's time, taking the effort to count the score every so often, and otherwise scanning the whole board making sure I'm always thinking globally and being aware of the future possibilities - the various followups I have in each area that I can mix and match based on how the game develops, shape defects that point to future tesujis that don't quite work yet but could in the future, etc.
• Being focused on finding the *best* move rather than a good enough move. This frequently takes the form of asking "Is there an even better shape?" and "What happens if I tenuki?". I was really happy in some tournament games not too long ago that more than once I forcibly dragged myself back from the brink of responding automatically to a threat and was rewarded by finding a move that was significantly better than than simply defending.

Playing this way is very tiring, of course - I can't do more than one game like this during a day, and I don't always achieve being able to play like this. But it feels really good when I do and end up playing a really beautiful game as a result (at least, until it gets torn apart by a stronger player's review ). Anecdotally, for me the difference between playing this way and playing in a more casual or distracted way is easily as much as 2 full stones, at least in the extreme cases.

For once I went over a game without using Crazy Stone (yet), so I'm posting it here without computer assistance in the hope of getting some human thoughts. This was a live game played against a friend last night. I was very happy with my opening (though I'm not sure yet how happy I should be!) but made some big strategical and tactical mistakes at the end and lost by 2.5. Thanks in advance for any comments.

141: Can you omit the connection and take sente?

164: For the move on the top that you didn't take, I believe the sente hane and connect is better than the gote clamp.

Thank you for the comments!

141: Yes, and Crazy Stone confirmed this. In fact I ran into a similar situation a few days later when playing a training game against Crazy Stone, where a stone two diagonal points away from a first-line hane can help reduce the severity of the second-line cut. So hopefully I will recognize this in the future.

164: Yeah, I have to learn to recognize sente and gote sequences more easily.

In going over the game later with Crazy Stone, the biggest mistake that I made that I didn't already have some idea about was that a push at D4 (during the middle game) would have been very strong, because the cut at C3 is huge.

dfan wrote:In going over the game later with Crazy Stone, the biggest mistake that I made that I didn't already have some idea about was that a push at D4 (during the middle game) would have been very strong, because the cut at C3 is huge.

Yeah, that's one that you see a lot after that joseki in professional games, sometimes surprisingly early.

I just got back from another AGA tournament, going 1-3 as a 3k, but one of the losses was giving 9 stones to a 12k, and all my other games were interesting. The result should bring me back down to 4k, but that's okay. I'm now 4-8 as a 3k, which is decent enough that I'm still going to keep entering tournaments at that rank. And I have four (well, three really) more serious games to learn from!

I guess it's time for an update. I've played 7 tournament games since the last update and went 4-3; my AGA rating is 4.3k but I'm entering tournaments at 3k and feeling confident. In my last two casual games I beat a 3k and a 2k by resignation.

I joined AYD in the spring and have played 15 games in it. It's been an awesome experience and I've already signed up for the next two seasons. The lectures are outstanding (you get access to the full backlog) and getting your games regularly reviewed by a very strong player who knows your play personally is gold. It also has helped with my nervousness about playing games, since I feel like the point of playing is to get a useful review, not as much just to win.

I also have been watching lectures and doing problems at Guo Juan's site. The spaced repetition system is something I was already sold on, and it's been great for retaining things like joseki as well as training my pattern intuition. There is a small mismatch in that In-seong (of AYD) is very up-to-date on the latest fuseki and joseki developments so sometimes I will be memorizing a joseki line that he regards as obsolete. Not a huge deal in practice because obviously the joseki can't be that terrible if everyone was playing it until 2015, but to get the most from his reviews I want play things that he recommends and maximize the review time spent on other things.

I've backed off of all the tsumego (still haven't finished Maeda vol. 1) and am concentrating on playing and studying the areas that those two sites focus on. 1d may still be a while away (and I may never get there) but I feel like my play is a lot more mature than a year ago. Most importantly, I'm still feeling very motivated and enjoying go a lot.

My third AYD season just ended so it's time to take stock again.

My energy has flagged a bit so I've eased up on my brain-busting active studying such as tsumego problems and my activities have mostly been more casual:

• Guo Juan's lectures and spaced repetition problems
• AYD games and reviews
• Serious non-tournament live games with friends

The good news is that in my most recent AYD month I beat a 1d in a serious even game for the first time, which is one box checked off on my list of go goals.

I haven't played a live tournament game since my last update (they stress me out, which is probably another thing to work on), so my AGA rating is still 4k, but I just totalled up my live games since that update, and looking at my even games in that period, I'm 7-0 vs players 4k or worse, 4-4 vs 2k, and 1-0 vs 1k. So I am pretty comfortable assessing my skill as at least 3k, and 2k opponents don't scare me at all.

From AYD and Guo Juan I definitely feel like my sense of "Go culture" on the board has improved a lot over the last year. I feel like there are signposts to guide me in my decisions and I flail less. One promising thing that I've noticed is that my mistakes are smaller. I'll make what feels like a big mistake and beat myself up about how terrible my position looks, only to find when I look at the game on the computer later that I was only down by 5 points or something. If my perception of mistakes is getting more sensitive, that should mean I'm getting better, if that makes sense.

When I look at tsumego I still always feel like a total beginner, but my reading seems to be okay for my level so I'm happy to concentrate on other things for now and just enjoy playing the game at my current level rather than go back into intense study mode. I don't feel like I currently have the motivation to seriously push for 1d (the way I felt a year ago), but if I keep playing and enjoying the game, I hope to maintain my current skill and enthusiasm, and maybe I can make a push later on. Just the fact that I can give players at the 1d/1k level a good game makes me happy with the level that I've reached.

I'm currently going through the Chinese equivalent of Speed Baduk 10-12 (the "Intermediate Series here). (They're great, by the way). I just got to this problem, #16 on p. 68 of volume 11:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bc B to play and kill W
$$ | . . . , . . . . . .
$$ | . . . X X . . . . .
$$ | . X X . . X . . . .
$$ | X X O O O O X X X .
$$ | X O . . . . O O X .
$$ | . O . . . O . X X .
$$ ---------------------[/go]

My solution:

The book's solution:

What am I missing?

(Meanwhile: still enjoying AYD, still around 50-50 in live games against 2k AGA friends, just beat a 5d AGA friend down to a 4-stone handicap (went 3-0 with 5 stones). I'll get a reality check at the US Go Congress in a month.)

dfan wrote:I'm currently going through the Chinese equivalent of Speed Baduk 10-12 (the "Intermediate Series here). (They're great, by the way). I just got to this problem, #16 on p. 68 of volume 11:

$$Bc B to play and kill W
$$ | . . . , . . . . . .
$$ | . . . X X . . . . .
$$ | . X X . . X . . . .
$$ | X X O O O O X X X .
$$ | X O . . . . O O X .
$$ | . O . . . O . X X .
$$ ---------------------

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bc B to play and kill W
$$ | . . . , . . . . . .
$$ | . . . X X . . . . .
$$ | . X X . . X . . . .
$$ | X X O O O O X X X .
$$ | X O . . . . O O X .
$$ | . O . . . O . X X .
$$ ---------------------[/go]

My solution:

$$Bc
$$ | . . . , . . . . . .
$$ | . . . X X . . . . .
$$ | . X X . . X . . . .
$$ | X X O O O O X X X .
$$ | X O . . 2 1 O O X .
$$ | . O . 3 . O . X X .
$$ ---------------------

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bc
$$ | . . . , . . . . . .
$$ | . . . X X . . . . .
$$ | . X X . . X . . . .
$$ | X X O O O O X X X .
$$ | X O . . 2 1 O O X .
$$ | . O . 3 . O . X X .
$$ ---------------------[/go]

The book's solution:

$$Bc
$$ | . . . , . . . . . .
$$ | . . . X X . . . . .
$$ | . X X . . X . . . .
$$ | X X O O O O X X X .
$$ | X O . 2 . 5 O O X .
$$ | . O 3 1 4 O . X X .
$$ ---------------------

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bc
$$ | . . . , . . . . . .
$$ | . . . X X . . . . .
$$ | . X X . . X . . . .
$$ | X X O O O O X X X .
$$ | X O . 2 . 5 O O X .
$$ | . O 3 1 4 O . X X .
$$ ---------------------[/go]

What am I missing?

Maybe this:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bc B to play and kill W
$$ | . . . , . . . . . .
$$ | . . . X X . . . . .
$$ | . X X . . X . . . .
$$ | . X O O O O X X X .
$$ | X O . . . . O O X .
$$ | . O . . . O . X X .
$$ ---------------------[/go]

dfan wrote:What am I missing?

If a3 is not there so black can't play a1 next: