Life In 19x19

Yes....this is terrible...lol

2010/6 - 2011/1
Win Lose PCT
All 66 108 38%
Black 43 68 39%
White 23 40 37%
Higher 34 51 40%
Even 21 35 38%
Lower 10 19 34%
With H. 8 6 57%
Against H. 3 7 30%

DrStraw wrote:

tapir wrote:

DrStraw wrote:[
I do not think this is particularly short. I went from beginner to shodan in a little over two years and it was considered to be a little slow. And that was in the days of only playing once a week in the local club. These days, with 24x7 internet go, I would say that it is very easy to reach shodan in one year.

How encouraging to make 95% (or 99%?) of all players feel like they are a little slow or dumb or worse. Also, all people with more than 50% winning percentage either did improve some stones or are not ranked properly.

What utter nonsense. Where did I imply "slow or dumb or worse"? 95% of all players have no desire or no time to reach shodan. For many it is just a hobby and they don't dedicate enough time to it to every reach shodan. But for those who do have the desire and time then it should be easy.

(offtopic rant:)
You're the nonsensical one here.

I started in '07 and reached SDK in a matter of months, but now that it's 2011 I can't even call myself a solid dan player on KGS. I'm stuck at the 1k/1d twilight zone. Now, according to you, I don't want it enough or haven't dedicated enough to it.. Alright, let's see:

First of all, I've studied dozens of books since I started back to back and I do understand them. Countless hours spent on this. Then, when I first felt I was progressing too slowly(after the summer of '08), I dropped everything in my life and went to CHINA(Wuhan more specifically) and studied there for 2 months under Yan An 7p. I played 30-40 games against him(double that vs. others) and studied 6-12 hours a day. We had nothing to do but study.

I improved some, but not enough. A year later in fall of '09 I again dropped everything and went to South Korea and studied with Kim Sung-Rae 3p(at the time, now 8p) for 3 months. Again, dozens of games with professionals/high level players and hours and hours of daily study. Pretty safe to say more than you've spend on it, I can't know for sure, but the chances are you haven't done anything this extreme.

Again, according to everyone around me I improved a lot and my game sense was great. Awesome. Except it doesn't show on real games at all. So what did I do a year later? You guessed it. Dropped everything and went to study to Budapest for 2 months, under Kim Sung-Rae 8p, Lee Young-Sin 8p and Go Ju-Yeon 8p. Same deal as before.

Between all this, I have lifetime membership on audiogolessons and have watched hundreds of hours of material. I've been getting private teaching from a 6d since 2008 as well. I am currently 4000€+ in debt due to all this. Too much information? Perhaps, but a point needed to be made.

I have literally dedicated my life to this game since 2007 and apparently... It's easy as sh** and doable by anyone that "JUST WANTS IT ENOUGH".

The arrogance of some people.

Mike, you are determined.

In my case, I've been playing more or less for 15 years, but had a few hiatuses (hiati?). I've studied a lot, off and on, but never that much. And I've been improving roughly 1 stone a year, though a few years ago, with some lessons from a KGS 2D (freegame), I went up a couple of stones more quickly.

I agree that DrStraw is either exaggerating or trolling. This said, maybe for him it was that easy; for some people, apparently, this is the case. But I think that suggesting that those of us who don't make that kind of progress are stupid is, at a minimum, insulting. (And I say this with all due respect to DrStraw, who I have know for a very long time, since back on NNGS when I started playing seriously.)

I also started trying to reach shodan around 2008 and failed. I never studied regularly but I did play regularly and I solved a lot of tsumego. I am around 3-4kyu now and do not hope or try to improve any further as from this year on.

The reason is both that I am under increasing time pressure and the fact that Go slowly turns into a puzzle that I try to solve but continuously fail. If a hobby starts becoming more annoying than amusing, it is time to reconsider things and reassign priorities at least for a while.

Since I cannot reasonably assume that I wanted or tried less than anybody else who achieved the same goal, the fact that I failed obviously shows that at least some of my mental capabilities (maybe pattern recognition, short term memory, concentration, etc) are worse than some other people.

So what? Why should this be difficult to accept?

Then the only question is whether I still enjoy playing go or not. Unfortunately however if you take away the desire to improve, the joy of playing also decreases in an unexplicable way.

My goal for 2011 is not improving but avoiding to go back further than 2 stones. For achieving this goal I plan to play at least one serious game every month.

Mike wrote:Between all this, I have lifetime membership on audiogolessons and have watched hundreds of hours of material.

Lifetime membership, huh? (I thought year membership was a new feature since last year. Or probably you spent so much money on it already, that restrictions were waived for you.)

Unfortunately, a good overall sense of the game (flow, direction, decision making) does not directly translate into good results. If you can't back it up with the required reading muscles it may even make your results worse. Unless you acquire the muscles and the patience to work with it, you feel like you want to give up your good habits very soon... but your case really makes me curious, I am not that much stronger myself KGS 2dan right now (not in a year though . Your head is supposedly full of concepts, experiences, teachings already just a little integration lacking. What is your handle on KGS?

tapir wrote:Unfortunately, a good overall sense of the game (flow, direction, decision making) does not directly translate into good results. If you can't back it up with the required reading muscles it may even make your results worse.

I completely agree with you. However, I'd be surprised if Mike's reading is that bad. I've not been on the particular courses Mike mentioned, but I've been to a similar one in China, and in my experience, the teachers really hammered me on my poor reading (compared to my sense of the game), and I've since been working really hard on that. I'm sure if Mike had a similar mismatch the teachers would have picked up on that.

Go is a hard game, and for many people even an investment as profound as Mike's can have a comparitively limited payoff. Sure, some people do get to shodan or a bit beyond without too much effort, but I don't think they should be taken as the norm (especially for people who only discovered the game as adults). I've recently made 1d (having discovered the game in my 30's), while a guy I know (who discovered the game in his teens) made it at about the same time. I've put vastly more effort into our equivalent achievements.

I found DrStraw's post irritating and trollish (even if he honestly believed it), but I resisted the temptation to respond.

Although I failed at my goal to reach 1d this year, I think I generally agree with Dr Straw on this point. Over the last couple years, I've gone from the middle-SDK range to 1k. If I hadn't changed jobs this year and significantly limited my playing this year, I'm quite confident I could have have made it. Although I've worked diligently, I would not say that there has been anything terribly difficult about the process.

I don't want to insult anyone else's effort by saying it's "easy", especially, since I haven't reached that level myself. However, if you aren't making steady progress as a kyu, there's probably a reason why. And, that reason probably isn't because the game is just too hard.

norman wrote:I don't want to insult anyone else's effort by saying it's "easy", especially, since I haven't reached that level myself. However, if you aren't making steady progress as a kyu, there's probably a reason why. And, that reason probably isn't because the game is just too hard.

I love this thread. So many opportunities to say how great oneself is. Me too, I improved last year.

Sure there are reasons for each and every roadblock (not limited to those of kyu players) - concentration, patience, misconceptions, lack of flexibility, attitude, frustration, bad habits acquired in long years etc. etc. - but that does not mean it is easy to change it, even with effort and professional help. Claiming otherwise is not only self-congratulary but also so very discouraging for everyone around. I mean, the stagnation feels the same whether at 2kyu or 2dan - but if those who are improving even make an effort to make all the others feel bad - do you still wonder why Go isn't popular? Shouldn't it the other way round, if you improve take the others with you, encourage, motivate...

Writing a symphony is easy. I wrote my first one when I was three. Anyone who has been playing music for over a year and hasn't written a symphony would be better off working at a car wash. Go on the other hand is hard. If you reach shodan in a year, you're probably some kind of a genius.

My go record in 2010 was 120 wins and 98 losses

I don't really feel like I learned much last year but the AGA seems to think I'm 2d (up from 1k). I'm 4-5 in tournaments as a 2d (and something like 10-3 as a 1d before that) so I guess it's for real... I've played so little on KGS lately that I have no meaningful stats there.

I played less than 50 games on KGS this year, and less than 20 rated games. I'm not sure how to figure out my overall score, but I gained only a little over a stone in strength (from a strong 6 kyu to a weak 4 kyu).

I hope to play more rated games in 2011 (at least one a week) and to make it through at least one tsumego collection (this one: http://senseis.xmp.net/?WeiqiIntroducto ... Collection).

I've been playing quite a bit of chess lately but I might try to back off a bit on chess and spend more time on go in the coming year.

daal wrote:Writing a symphony is easy. I wrote my first one when I was three. Anyone who has been playing music for over a year and hasn't written a symphony would be better off working at a car wash.

Don't diss the car wash!

It'll take me over two years and 2000 games to get to 1d. Currently I'm a 4k after 20 months and about 1500 games.
In the year 2010 I played 488 ranked games(284:204 58%) on my main account and 710 total.

Whenever I'm disappointed with my speed of improvement I think of a 9-11k I know. He played over 9000 games(winrate 40%) over the last three years on KGS.

I've played one game on KGS last year -- I lost.