Hi yall,
I'm back at it again with a fresh request! I put lots of comments about my thought process during the game, so if you're willing to read kyu ramblings there's a lot to review there ^.^ For some background, I've been replaying some Cho Chikun games so my general game plan was to play for territory then try to break what my opponent had built. Besides tactical lines missed and stuff, notes about general positional evaluation would also be much appreciated!

I played white:



On a side note, has KGS rank drifted in the last year or two? It seems implausible that I gain a comfortable 2 stones of strength right after taking a long break, so either I'm in good shape to finally make shodan or anchor changes have bamboozled me.

EDIT: Had to upload as attachment because external sites were returning "invalid game data"

I am 2k myself, so can't help much, but here is a couple of moves that I found surprising.

if you want to play in the area, it seems better to attack C15 more severely by playing around C12. You probably can't kill it since Black can hane at C17, but at least you can try to surround the group and build a moyo at the same time.

feels too slow. You have some kind of wall at Q5, so you can pincer R9 to push it against your wall and separate it from its friend Q17.

I made a comprehensive review with Katago.

General remarks:

+ you have good fighting spirit and in general a good intuition for middle game running battles
- you seemed overly concerned with territory and continuously misjudged the balance; Black was not ahead, despite White playing without komi
- I think you can improve your notion of "good shape"

Your natural ability in fighting will shine if you use your thickness to attack, rather than worry about not having enough points.

Thanks for the very in depth review! I've been quite busy this week, so I couldn't thanks you sooner. The suggested lines (assumed to be Katagos?) are certainly interesting. Confusing to me like most AI lines, but valuable nonetheless

You're welcome. The suggestions are KataGo's. I no longer offer suggestions of my own but try to interpret those offered instantly and for free by the ghosts of supraprofessional strength that now live on our machines. I do try to bring these interpretations down to our level of comprehension. And I stick with old review practices, to highlight what may be a structural mistake in the player's approach, rather than getting lost in variations.

Cheers!

The place where human teachers really, really shine over bots is the interpretation-providing part. And the ability to point out mistakes of the right "level", including mistakes that, even if they lose less than 1/10th of what the "objective" blunders in the game lost, are more than ten times easier to correct - such as just learning what the standard shape move is in a common situation.