Life In 19x19

I won 6/7 at challengers, to come joint top with uberdude, who I will be playing in the final of the British Championship.

I felt I played much much better than at candidates, and by games 4,5,6,7, my opponents seemed to have no chance.
So along with nice study sessions with Andrew Simons, Tim Hunt and Andrew Kay each evening over alphago self-play, I was in a good mood the whole tournament despite losing on day 1 to Uberdude, and getting a ridiculous £80 fine on morning 2 for forgetting my discount railcard at home while using it for my oyster card on the London Underground.
Quite relaxed whether I got through or not. And daring to experiment with the crazy ideas from alphago self-play

varying amounts of comments, I'll probably add more later

I'm very pleased to have won game 1 of the British Championship, and played well. I had gotten far too nervous beforehand, so this has calmed me down.

Slow games prove very good for me. And my self-review file is full of variations, at a record size.

Good job holding onto that grain of sand! Thanks for sharing such a thorough and interesting review.

I don't much trust leelabot these days.

But using it points out some of the issues in my judgement, especially when emotional.

1) At the start, it preferred black in my joseki choice: perhaps move 13 is better at C17; at move 16, it doesn't like my D15 idea as it thinks the D14 cut works instead of needing to atari D18; move 20, 21, 22 could all be D15; move 35 mistake drops B's win chance from 52.6% to 38.3%

2) my whole sequence from move 52 to 62, taking gote for insufficient profit, is questionable, e.g. it preferred move 54 at D3. I had already suggested in my review move 52 at L17


btw, upon calculation, move 68 better endgame is actually to make good shape at C6

3) At move 69, B's chance jumps from 36% to 39% (it didn't notice how good this move was) at it suggests J17 for W and cut. It really doesn't like my strategy with move 70, I suppose it says I lose too much on the upper right without sufficient profit from any attack. By move 79, it likes B with K15, at 62%! But perhaps it is a bit confused, as even though move 88-94 follows its line it rapidly drops from 60% to B to 60% to W. Leelabot is bad at semeai. At move 124, it is up to 86% to W, and doesn't really change afterwards.

I won the 2nd game of the title match by 3.5 on Saturday, so I'm British champion! Still, I'm sufficiently disappointed in my play I haven't found much motivation to review it. I was quite far behind through the middlegame, but Andrew made some slack moves.

Though I haven't actually had the time with all the admin 1st week back at uni, and organising the go stall at the Fresher's fair.

I have spent time on a lengthy review of my Pandanet game last Tuesday though.

It was a crazy game, a simple mistake nearly cost me the game, forcing me to play a 100 point ko for life for my huge group while 7 seconds per move. I had been hoping for a less stressful game, but I guess go is like that.

Board 1 vs Denmark's Jannik Rasmussen:

For a low dan player, your game reviews would be highly instructive paths to professional play.
If I wanted to become better, I'd study them.

some alphago thoughts

added quite a bit of tewari on positions that have confused me for a while

A very short review this time. Perhaps I'm a bit tired for these matches, but I need to be in good form to have a chance against Germany.

Nothing really happened this game, and I wasn't concentrating too hard.

just let leela do the analysis of the opening. It says I was very far ahead in the opening (I did copy from alphago, deepzen), but both sides did several silly things, and the win rate switched between 50 and 70% in my favour twice.

My Britgo summary tells the story: I won against Jonas Welticke 6d by resignation, bring me to an unbelievable 10/10 on pandanet! This was supposed to be my toughest test so far, so while maths has been prioritised this term, I tried to study go for the last 2 weeks, particularly define 3.0 on the computer Go server.

He opened adventurously with four 11-3s. Especially as I wanted to play territorially anyway, this set bells ringing in my head that this should be a territorial game (hard to make frameworks, so I focused on the corners). He invaded 3-3 into my star point and his result was poor when I took the corner (the 10-3 was an inefficient one space extension from a ponnuki). He attached star point on my komoku, I took the corner and I was happy. He attached 3-3 on my other komoku, and I was very happy to take a very large corner.

He finally invaded 3-3 into my other star point, I played good direction, but overlooked a severe cut, when he blatantly had more ko threats. However, instead of ending the ko to get a good result, he made the ko even bigger. He played a poor ko threat worth around 25 points. Ending the ko, I got a massive corner territory plus thick influence, and he had a wasted stone on the outside.

Furthermore, he overlooked a lovely tesuji I had for liberties in the semeai, and a horrific bulky 6 tesuji, so even his follow up to his ko threat died on a large scale. So by move 90, I already had 80 solid territory points compared to his 20 or so. He had to place his hopes on the centre.

I decided I still wanted an interesting game, and played daringly into the centre, but a peep overplay and a big blunder on the upper left, meant my group in the centre wasn’t clearly alive. However, his position was just too thin and eventually I captured another 50 point group with my centre group.

Unfortunately I then realised I had 2 seconds to play 2 moves. So I was frantically power-clicking S19, a move worth around 200 points just in case he ataried it. I wouldn’t mind if he got three moves elsewhere, as long I could play S19 (and maybe S18 to fill my own territory) and get into the next time period. He tortured me for 7 minutes like this! But he honourably resigned. I could have cried in relief.



I was almost as nervous as my first few league games, against a 2592 player, when the UK were fighting for top spot in the league. I don't think it was that I played well, just he made it very easy for me with his weird opening and direct 3-3s/3-4s as I didn't have many options and needed little thought to find a good move.

I'd consider 3-3 next time, but I'm happy with my choice too
In hindsight, extending the other direction should be better as in the game my 4-4 got hurt. I was concerned about him living in the corner, but that is a minimal concern
fighting spirit, and it makes his efficiency look bad locally, but perhaps a solid defense in the corner was proper. hmm, hard to find a good move though. I definitely had to add a move, but it was hard to choose where, or if I should have quit extending at some point earlier and fixed. My personal judgement was 70% in my favour.

seems approach C14 is obvious, if I retreat knight's move, he can still play 3-3, and it may be more severe.
yes, should just extend. Was planning too, and then wanted to ask for more. Actually, I just didn't consider him cutting.
clearly he didn't want to play P19 so as not to let me live, but this way around he wasn't alive.
nice to see my tesuji took 1s
my bulky 6 took 2:30 to verify! If this wasn't necessary or didn't work, this move would be too embarrassing, because the simple S13 would lead to a very good result for me anyway. I did read the game variation but thought he could have done better with R13 or S13 instead of T16. My personal win expectation was well over 90% by this stage.
a mistake in hindsight, just fill liberties. edit: the comments are correct, the poke works if I continue at P12, but I misjudged some variations and thought there was some messy ko, when P12 is clearly far better than the game.
w132 just play a little more solid should be a lot better
w150 should be D18

I wouldn't be too surprised if my centre group was killable at some point. I don't think Jonas played the best moves.

rambles to myself ...
Since I focused on maths surprisingly well this term, also feeling negative about interest in human go understanding post-alphago (finally overcoming my initial alphago buzz at times), my go time has often just been for de-stress, not study, and accepting that it is difficult to improve now however much time I spend, unless I quit maths. Most of the time I just feel too tired even when I want to take my go seriously.

But a part of me still chases for the feeling of quick and confident judgment of a position that I felt at the Challenger's, my reading would be fast and reliable, and I would be able to make quick judgements about positions that I felt proud of. But those moments are actually quite fleeting. And I get broody over whether my play has deteriorated that I can't reach that again, or whether those feelings were just overconfident in the first place.

So I feel like I'm a having a minor confidence crisis with go whenever I try to play seriously. The London open starts in 4 days and I wonder how I'll do.

Perhaps it is that I can't seem to play fast go (even 60 min games feel fast) so well (my guess is alphago gives so much inspiration that it is information overload and too much to consider/read), and I see so much rubbish in my play, losing control of basics as the 1st game below shows.

Also though I still like pandanet for finding strong opponents the fastest, half of my losses seem to be by disconnection (my phone tells me I lose on time, the server says I've resigned), which is a bit annoying, but I've gotten used to it over the last year.

I've started to feel better about my go only over the past week with London open prep, better able to play my own games without being pushed by alphago, and my last 4 pandanet games were 40+ point wins. luck, skill, & alphago?. Hopefully it is enough of a confidence booster.

This game is pretty representative for my quality of play (mostly not under the mathmo account), spending lots of time thinking on tangents and still playing rubbish.

pincer joseki are always very confusing and there are myriads of unexplored variations.

Even though I've played this opening alphago joseki so many times with great results, I still feel very confused by many of the positions that occur, and the complications are probably not much less than the small avalanche. Still I clearly understand it better than my recent opponents.

Also I feel that post-alphago, tenuki is better appreciated, and you often should let your opponent into what used to be your territory when they probe it. That theme appeared when I allowed move 54 in the 1st game below. You really don't need to obsess over keeping your 3rd line territories if it doesn't affect the life and death of groups





20180101: correction: the lower right corner cannot locally live without ko anyway

trying to analyse my London open games and prove to myself that I am stronger now.

edit: trying to practise on a real board as I am most used to computer screens, and noticed a few more details in game 1