Life In 19x19

We 2010-07-14:
- Read Kageyama's Fundamentals, Chapter 3: The stones go walking
- Graded go problems, vol 2: 1-150

Th 2010-07-15:
- Read Kageyama's Fundamentals, Chapter 4: The struggle to get ahead
- Graded go problems, vol 2: 150-231 (vol.2 is done)

Fr 2010-07-16:
- Read Kageyama's Fundamentals, Chapter 5: Territory and spheres of influence
- Played a serious game on KGS (30min+5x30sec) against PeterGruen [6k], I lost by resignation. I'll post the analysis tomorrow. (I'm aware I have another analysis to do, so that would mean two analyses tomorrow and more tsumego. Should be enough work). Now I'm exhausted and will watch StarCraft videos for the rest of the evening.

Funny that while I was having some laziness issues in maintaining this study journal (*cough* StarCraft 2!), and was contemplating the effects of keeping track of my progress in this way, it seems like this has become an issue with a lot of people on the forums. I feel like it has a negative effect on my game. I read some of the concern on there being a lot of these study journals nowadays. To be honest, I hardly have time to keep mine updated and read the rest of the forums (I always skip the malkovich forums), so I've hardly read the other journals. Rather self-centered, and I guess there aren't many people out there that are actually waiting to read about whether or not I played my 4 weekly games or did my required amount of tsumego. I'm sticking with my self-imposed study-program though, but I will no longer keep track of every step of the way. Time spent writing all this stuff is time that could be spent actually playing the game. I would like to thank everybody that contributed analyses and advice.

An admin may step in now and close this thread.

No need to completely abandon it. Just keep it at a slower pace, e.g. once or twice a month to report your progress and improvemnt. That would be cool. Since I am around your strength, I am interested in keeping track of your (and others') journals to see which effort is needed to achieve an improvement.

I read journals which interests me, just to know how the individual training method works for the person. Maybe I see, where I can improve my method =)
I must confess, I didn't read your extensive game commentary but I almost never do this, except I requested this for my own games ^^

I would go with weekly, monthly updates. Just as it fits you. Go should be fun in the first place, so as long as you maintain this, everything is perfect =)

SoDesuNe wrote:I read journals which interests me, just to know how the individual training method works for the person. Maybe I see, where I can improve my method =)
I must confess, I didn't read your extensive game commentary but I almost never do this, except I requested this for my own games ^^

I would go with weekly, monthly updates. Just as it fits you. Go should be fun in the first place, so as long as you maintain this, everything is perfect =)

Same here. I didn't read much game commentary, as it's not easy to navigate the tree with keyboard as kgs is. But it's fun to read the progress.

After A StarCraft-induced break from playing go, I am back for more inching my way up toward becoming a better go player. Let's hope it lasts a little longer than last time. I still intend to focus on Kageyama's 'Fundamentals', Davies' 'Life and death' and 'Tesuji', improving my fighting strength through tsumego and thoroughly reviewing my games. I should play more games and do less of everything else than last time, though. Without games to process newly learned ideas, I will never truly improve.

I played a game against a 5k yesterday, and finally got promoted to KGS 5k. You can find my review of the game below. I would be grateful to anyone who would point out some of the mistakes in my play and/or analysis.

[sgf-full]http://www.hushfield.com/L19/2010-12-20-scotty55-Hushfield.sgf[/sgf-full]

Thanks for reading and it's good to be back.

move 15 : yes it was a bad move. you should never play a move that will self hanne double head. (sorry for bad translation)

Hi Hushfield

I like your plan, getting to a stage when you play a happier game (in mind, a calmer one) always does you better in the long term.

Im not a very strong Go player as Im a beginner, however as an ex tournament chess player I realised that my ambition (and to a degree youthful arrogance, due to my grade)led me down a path where i besmirked players on occassion and on one game ending up hitting a table so hard i broke my hand!. I am now embarrassed at such behaviour and when as poker players say I went on tilt my game always suffered.

The Go players I have met, have been very kind in general in explaining the principles. Learning about yourself and your psychology means that you become more rounded, this i believe increases your strength over time.

Your definately on the right track, about not playing games when your mind is not calm. If you want to play a stronger game, I would advise that you always consider your state of mind. I also always considered the level of sleep I had as it definately affected my game.

Sorry to ramble, use any of the above that you see fit and message me if I can assist you any further.

Be truthful, and I hope you achieve your goals.

Regards

markeemark

I played a few games last week, and have still to review them. I am mostly focusing on reading exercises again, as I am still very rusty from my time out. my main weakness is my inability to read ahead, so that's what I am working on. Progress is painstakingly slow, but there is some progress nonetheless.

I played a teaching game with shadonra yesterday, you can watch his review of my game here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zAZ-T_1nII.

I am playing a teaching game with S1NK tonight in te L19 room on KGS, and will record an upload the review of that game as well.

I don't know whether the study journal section is still used a lot here on L19, as I haven't been an active memeber for over a year now (just about the time StarCraft 2 took the top hobby spot in my life). It turns out that much of the same problems that prompted me to start a study journal for go, returned when playing StarCraft. Playing blindly without careful reading, going on tilt from losing streaks,... But if it's the same everywhere I go, L19 and go are definitely the place I'd rather be. I can't say how long I'll stick around this time, since the last post in this thread was made around 6 months ago. Anyway, I fell back from 5k to 11k (!) and am now working my way back up through the KGS ranks.

I played a teaching game with smarre[1k] and another with plusguy[2d] yesterday. The latter was actually my very first game in the ASR league. Proud member of Division Delta I representing ^^ I feel that regular long competitive games with a review afterwards will really help me improve quite a bit.

Phase 2: Fundamentals Revisited
I'm crawling back in the old plan for improving my strength: a good grasp of the fundamentals and reading, reading, reading. Therefore the plan to become better at go is largely unchanged. I made a few adjustments as I feel that analysing my own games is really helpful, but very time-consuming. Therefore I won't try and review every game I play, just a few each week. I'll also keep in 2 non-go days.

Training Program
Weekly
- Do a lot of tsumego, following Benjamin Teuber's method of not looking at the answers ever. I firmly believe in this method.
- Play at least 4 serious games a week, if possible more. This role will be filled mostly by ASR league games. If no opponents are online, I will play other slow games.
- Analyze 4 games played, and discuss this analysis with stronger players. A small amendment form the previous version: analysis is very time-consuming and I'd rather play a few more games in the ASR league than spend more time reviewing ranked matches.
- Take two days a week of absolutely no go study. No books, no games, no tsumego. Being human is a good thing. I burned out on go before (and twice after that). Overkill is not desirable.

Daily:
- Tsumego (between 30 and 60 minutes)
- Read, and try to completely understand one chapter from one of the basic texts mentioned under study material.
- Work towards target of playing at least 4 serious games a week
- Work towards target of analyzing my own games and discussing these with stronger players
- Meditate for 20 minutes (this is the only exercise I will perform on non-go days.)

Study Materials
Tsumego:
- Kanô, Yoshinori: Graded Go Problems for Beginners, (vols.2 – 4)
- Yi, Ch'ang-ho: Selected Life and Death Go Problems (vols. 1 – 6)
- Chô, Chikun: Encyclopedia of Life and Death (elementary, intermediate and advanced)
- Maeda, Nobuaki: “Life and Death: Intermediate Level”
- Bozulich, Richard: “Five Hundred and One Tesuji Problems”

Books:
Kageyama, Toshirô: “Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go"
Davies, James: “Life and Death”
Davies, James: “Tesuji”

Things I will not do:
I will not play blitz games. This one required tough deliberation, because I keep hearing that blitz games sharpen your intuition, which sounds like a perfect fit for ingraining the fundamentals in my play. However, I can't deal with the pressure. I get angry. I play moves I know to be bad. Therefore I will refrain from playing blitz games for the time being. Also, slow games give you the time to create better moves than the ones that are already present in your mind.

Below you can find a review from a game I played against iqpi[7k]. I was hoping for some insight in what went wrong in the first half of the game. I was also wondering whether I missed crucial opportunities during the endgame.

[sgf-full]http://www.hushfield.com/L19/110602-R1-iqpi-Hushfield-L.sgf[/sgf-full]

Hushfield wrote:Training Program
Weekly
- Do a lot of tsumego, following Benjamin Teuber's method of not looking at the answers ever. I firmly believe in this method.

Leaving aside wether this method is good or bad (I think, it's bad : D), how do you know you got the right answer? Because you think you got it? Because you think, you have thought about every possible defense move?
There is a lot room for mistakes here. I'm sure it is good for your visualizing of Go stones (if you really try to brute-force every alternative you can come up with), but there is the possibility you think your wrong answer is correct, but how will you ever find out?
Lastly, I don't think Benjamin Teuber's advice of not looking at the answers includes checking if you're right, he just says you should not look at the answer, if you have no idea how to solve the problem.

The funny thing is, somewhere I read here that even professional advise to first look at all the answers and then solve the problems.

Hushfield wrote:Study Materials
Tsumego:
- Kanô, Yoshinori: Graded Go Problems for Beginners, (vols.2 – 4)
- Yi, Ch'ang-ho: Selected Life and Death Go Problems (vols. 1 – 6)
- Chô, Chikun: Encyclopedia of Life and Death (elementary, intermediate and advanced)
- Maeda, Nobuaki: “Life and Death: Intermediate Level”
- Bozulich, Richard: “Five Hundred and One Tesuji Problems”

Books:
Kageyama, Toshirô: “Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go"
Davies, James: “Life and Death”
Davies, James: “Tesuji”

If you just dropped to DDK and peaked at 5k, I would start with Graded Go Problems for Beginners Vol. 3 and 4, because it offers something for every part of the game. I would then start to solve the books by Yi Ch'ang-ho.
If you are past 5k, you can try "501 Tesuji Problems" but they are really nasty (at least if you haven't read "Making Good Shape").
"Life and Death: Intermediate Level" is said to be a good book but you have (in my opinion) enough material with GGPfB and the books by Yi Ch'ang-ho to get past Shodan.
The same thing goes to "Life and Death" by Jamies Davies. I think for not wanting to overkill, you have too many books you want to dig through.

So maybe you want to tighten things up a bit and focus more on specific books.


Good luck! =)

It's been a month since I returned to my go studies. I've worked through 3 tsumego books this month, namely Graded Go Problems for Beginners vol.3 and Lee Chan Ho's Tesuji vols. 1-2. I noticed that with the easier tesuji volumes, I can almost instantly spot the correct move, though it still takes too long to read out whether the move actually works. Getting the reading going again is going slower than expected.

I played over 50 games this past month and have noticed two trends: At first, I played very calmly and started winning a lot of games (against stronger opponents too). In the ASR league I won in even games against 3k and 4k players, and played some calm, good games against players which were rated around my strength. I was quite active (especially during the first 2-3 weeks of the league) and managed to win my division. But even more than winning, it's the games I played that I'm happy with. They show I can play on even footing with stronger players, and should eventually be able to rise to their level.

[sgf-full]http://www.hushfield.com/L19/110615-A1-Igneel-Hushfield-W.sgf[/sgf-full]
(the comments marked H are mine, those marked dv are from my teacher)

Then something changed again, I lost focus and started losing many games because of mistakes in reading and hasty, unbalanced play. I suspect it has to do with a series of close losses I had on tygem, after which I lost confidence, and immediately dropped back to 14k on the server. I had always thought the difference between KGS and Tygem was blown out of proportion, but it's truly a very big difference. The players there seem much stronger than their KGS counterparts with the same rank. I believe this is the result of two things:
1) There are a lot of sandbaggers which makes the rank of your opponent effectively void. I have played against 13k players which were very weak, and then 14k players which ate me alive. This might be a result of the "instability of amateur play" as Kageyama calls it (more on this later), but I believe it's also a result of plain old sandbaggin'.
2) There are players on this server which have played massive amounts of games. I mean thousands. When you play these players you notice their opening and general sense of direction isn't all that good, but they are great at initiating fights and instantly exploiting any weakness in your position. I have lost time and again in middlegame fighting. I also noticed that I also play differently on Tygem than on KGS. It's so easy to get sucked into the hyper-aggressive, blitz play of many of the players here, which severely hampers my ability to look at relations of influence on a larger scale. I get sucked into a fight and find myself waking up to find I've lost a game in about 10 moves.

So, I have some mixed feelings about this month.

Good:
- I played well in the ASR league, I think I can even say I managed to rise above my usual play. I have seen that if I put my mind to it, I can play a calm game.
- I retook the playbaduk strength test, and it has the audacity to claim I'm around 2dan EGF in strength. One shouldn't take such tests too seriously, but it does show that in the areas the test measures (namely calm analysis of wholeboard positions), I'm doing fine. That means something else in my play must be severely lacking. Which brings us to the bad:

Bad:
- It seems I still suffer big blows to my mental attitude because of losses and dumb mistakes in reading. Perhaps as a result of my results in the ASR League I got quite concerned with rank and promotion again, and my desire for the win immediately made my play take a nosedive. The fact that I can win in an even game against 3k players and lose to an 8k a few days later shows that something is quite wrong. I need to work on this.
- Perhaps as a result of the change in mental state my reading and middlegame fighting seems to have gotten several stones weaker again. During this period I also changed my approach to tsumego and did look at the answers.

So, just as one needs to analyse single games, one needs to analyse the bigger picture. Do I need to change anything about my study plan?
- When doing tusmego, I've tried looking at the answers, and I've found that though it does provide a faster way to discover new moves, it mainly promotes laziness on my part. I will therefore revert back to the plain old "no-peeking" method of working with tsumego.
- The same should apply to my attitude in-game. I have started playing too many hasty moves, without properly reading out the sequences that flow forth from the stone played. I seem to encounter a few points in almost every game, where I'm just stuck for a move to make. This is usually when it's my turn and I decide to tenuki, needing to invade a framework, etc.. From now on, I'd rather lose on time than play without properly thinking out the move. I'd like to end with a nice quote I found upon re-reading the treasure chest enigma (as someone mentioned it on the boards recently, I think in the "Bestest of Books"-thread). It shall become my motto for my study during July:

Suzuki Tamejiro wrote:"If you did not know how to play, why did you take a stone from the bowl? [...] The job of a go player is to search for the truth, no matter how long it takes."

A wonderful thing has happened. I played an ASR league game today, and then proceeded to review the game. You can find the game below, though what happened in the game seems only of slight importance to the lesson I learned tonight.

[sgf-full]http://www.hushfield.com/L19/110809-A1-Hushfield-DreamC-W.sgf[/sgf-full]

During my review two tsumego (resulting from moves in the same corner position) popped up, and I decided to make solving the two problems the focal point of the review. That was a lot more than two hours ago. I have since given up trying to read everything out in my head, and even when cheating against my self-imposed rule of no peeking at the answer (which during analysis equates to putting stones on the board), I still haven't exhausted all possibilities. As I've stated to the point of being extremely annoying, I firmly believe in solving go problems only by reading my way to the right answer. Find a sequence that works, than consider every other move my opponent could make and refute it, until I arrive at a solution. I thought I had that down. I thought I did that all the time with go problems in books. Only this time, I wrote my analysis down instead of doing it in my head. That showed some disturbing things. I wanted to consider all possibilities, as I thought I had always done with L&D problems. But I didn't.

1. White to kill

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bc White to kill the lower left corner
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . X . . . O . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . X . . . . . O O . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . X O , O . O O X X X . . . . X . . . |
$$ | . X O . . O O X O . . . X X . . . . . |
$$ | . . X X X O X X . . O . X O . . . . . |
$$ | . . . O . X . X X . . . X . O . O . . |
$$ | . . O . . X O O . X X X . . X O X . . |
$$ | . O . . O O . . O O . O O . . . . . . |
$$ | . X O O X O . X . O . X . O . O . X . |
$$ | . X X . X O . . . . . . . . . . O O . |
$$ | . . . . X O . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ +---------------------------------------+[/go]

My 'solution':2. Black to live

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bc Black to live in the lower left corner
$$ | . . X . . . O . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . X . . . . . O O . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . X O , O . O O X X X . . . . X . . . |
$$ | . X O . . O O X O . . . X X . . . . . |
$$ | . . X X X O X X . . O . X O . . . . . |
$$ | . . . O . X . X X . . . X . O . O . . |
$$ | . . O . . X O O . X X X . . X O X . . |
$$ | . O . . O O . . O O . O O . . . . . . |
$$ | O X O O X O . X . O . X . O . O . X . |
$$ | . X X . X O . . . . . . . . . . O O . |
$$ | . . . . X O . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ +---------------------------------------+[/go]

My 'solution'It is now almost three hours later, and I'm reminded of the saying "experience is what you get, when you don't get what you want." So here I am, experiencing my inability to read out a simple corner position. I may have made mistakes in my analysis of the previous two problems. In fact, I'm pretty sure of it. But this is my current ability, and I'll have to do a lot better if I ever want to be a dan-player. So more tsumego for me. A lot more

I remember John Fairbairn recently saying somewhere on L19 that even professionals miss certain sequences, and I'll admit that I thought something along the lines of "Blasphemy! Surely they consider every possible move in every line of play, and base their play not only on the result which gives the most points locally, but also includes matters of possible ko-threats, aji, strength of surrounding positions, etc." And actually, I still believe they do. I know I'm no amateur 6-dan, and I'll have a lifetime of study in front of me if I ever want to achieve that, but seriously. I can't even completely read out a corner position like this? That's plain depressing. And inspiring too. Never have I felt more respect for the players that do manage to look at a position from all possible angles, and manage to completely read it out. My hat off to you, mad geniuses.

I'm off to do about 10.000 go problems now. Thank you for reading. Oh, and if you have some comments about the game, I'll be more than happy to hear them.

Have you seen [sl=GokyoShumyoSection1Problem18]this gokyo shumyo problem[/sl] before?

emeraldemon wrote:Have you seen [sl=GokyoShumyoSection1Problem18]this gokyo shumyo problem[/sl] before?

Well, hello there. This seems familiar. I couldn't resist and looked at the SL solution page. It appears that this is a slightly altered version of the problem, in which the best black can do is get a thousand year ko (which might very well turn into seki later on). Seems my proposed solution B for the black to live problem overlooks a white double atari, so A is the best option for black.

I haven't started the gokyo shumyo, I'd love to dive into some of the classical tsumego collections, but I want to feel confident about my solving the graded go problems for beginners vols.1-4, yi changho's life and death vols.1-6 and yi changho's tesuji vols.1-6 first. Right, off to bed with some yi changho book. Thanks for the info. Oh by the way, I haven't seen you on KGS in a while, are we still good to play our L19 tournament game? When would be a good time for you?