My week in numbers (was "Tiny steps towards shodan")

RBerenguel · **#121**

Bill Spight wrote:

RBerenguel wrote:

Did the first 100 problems of the Nihon Kiin 1-dan life and death problems, got 19 wrong. Since number of wrong problems grew incredibly in the last problems (started with 6 wrong out of the first 50) I have stopped and decided to re-start it again. A neat tsumego book.

Only 19% wrong answers? That's 81% correct. Sounds like the book is too easy for you now.

(50% wrong is about right, both in terms of information -- obvious--, and in terms of psychology -- not so obvious.) As for the difference between the first 50 problems and the second 50 problems, it seems unlikely that the problems are so finely grained in difficulty that the difference is anything but noise.

Oh, having 50% wrong feels "so wrong" when solving tsumego! I'll raise the bar, then. Thanks!

By the way, look what the cat dragged in yesterday!

LCH's tesuji and tsumego. I'm missing one of Vol4 (don't remember if tesuji or tsumego.) I returned vols 1 and 2 I had from a friend, now I have my own version

Also...:

7mm slate & shell stones.

Bill Spight · **#122**

RBerenguel wrote:

Bill Spight wrote:

RBerenguel wrote:

Did the first 100 problems of the Nihon Kiin 1-dan life and death problems, got 19 wrong. Since number of wrong problems grew incredibly in the last problems (started with 6 wrong out of the first 50) I have stopped and decided to re-start it again. A neat tsumego book.

Only 19% wrong answers? That's 81% correct. Sounds like the book is too easy for you now.

(50% wrong is about right, both in terms of information -- obvious--, and in terms of psychology -- not so obvious.) As for the difference between the first 50 problems and the second 50 problems, it seems unlikely that the problems are so finely grained in difficulty that the difference is anything but noise.

Oh, having 50% wrong feels "so wrong" when solving tsumego! I'll raise the bar, then. Thanks!

Well, how do you know the level your game in general? It's where you win half your games.

But yes, you do want to review until you get 100% correct, and then review some more.

But the best challenge is where getting the right answer is a toss-up, not too easy, not too hard.

RBerenguel · **#123**

Bill Spight wrote:

Well, how do you know the level your game in general? It's where you win half your games.

But yes, you do want to review until you get 100% correct, and then review some more.

But the best challenge is where getting the right answer is a toss-up, not too easy, not too hard.

That actually sounds pretty spot-on

RBerenguel · **#124**

Week in review:

Solved ~ 540 problems these days (had two 5 hour train trips and two idle afternoons while on holiday). For vols 1 of LCH tesuji and tsumego I had roughly a 10% failure rate, same for tesuji vol 2, tsumego vol 2 more like 25-30%. Somehow this book does not suit me... I also finished the tsumego assignment from the Nordic Go Academy.

I finished reading Come Up to Shodan (got it as a gift 2 years ago already) and also skimmed over old issues of the British go Journal. Next week I'll tackle another tesuji book, maybe the Japanese graded go Problems for dan players (tesuji.) Let the tsumego feast continue!

RBerenguel · **#125**

Got new books!! A friend's brother has been selling away his go book collection, and I have gotten my hands in a few (the LCH tesuji and tsumego above, as well as a neat set of bowls and slate and shell stones before.) Now arrived the bulkier things. Seems like I need to split the post in 2, since I got 5 items and I can only attach 3 things.

How to improve on 5x5, a problem book by Fukui Masaaki I had been looking to purchase since I saw JFs post in the long-dead MindZine website

Improve your Intuition by Takagawa Kaku. This was an added gift by the seller

Another gift by the seller, a kifu recording booklet, I think. I don't know how to use it, though

In the next post the largest things in the purchase

RBerenguel · **#126**

The second largest thing in the purchase was volumes 1-3 of Fujisawa's Dictionary of Basic Tesuji:

And the reason I made the purchase and added all the rest... Go Seigen's collected games (Chinese edition, 8 books):

Don't know where to start (well, learning some basic Chinese characters for Go is now a must..,) probably it will be wrapping all the books to avoid damages (some stupidly time consuming thing I do to all my go books!)

Ember · **#127**

It looks like you got yourself some very nice books! I own the first two volumes of Shuko's Tesuji Dictionary, too, and I really really like them. They're like a workbook and a reference in one so that's a very nice thing to have. I hope you'll enjoy them, too, and that you'll learn lots of great new stuff!

On the kifu paper I can help a little, at least in the case if you don't know how to write the game down with it. If it's that, it's pretty easy to explain. There are basically two methods to record the moves and it depends on personal likes which one you prefer:
1) The first method is using two differently coloured pens, one colour for black's moves and one colour for white's moves.
2) The other possibility is using just one pen but drawing a circle around the moves of white (or black if you prefer it that way). T
he "=" below the grid are for ko moves.

I tried both methods before switching to my Nintendo DS for recording and I liked the second one better because it is less messy and you can concentrate more on the game because you don't have to pay attention to using the right colour to write down each move. Still, I think that recording the game like this distracts me a lot and as it is also prone to lead to mistakes (my favourites: using the same numbers twice for two sequences or skipping numbers), so I very much prefer using my DS. Or a tablet. Or any such thing. It's also much more comfortable when you analyse the game because you don't have to hunt down every move from the bulk of numbers. Although I must admit that I come back to kifu paper whenever the battery has fainted, it's still better then having no record of your mistakes at all. ;-)

RBerenguel · **#128**

Ember wrote:

It looks like you got yourself some very nice books! I own the first two volumes of Shuko's Tesuji Dictionary, too, and I really really like them. They're like a workbook and a reference in one so that's a very nice thing to have. I hope you'll enjoy them, too, and that you'll learn lots of great new stuff!

Thanks! I still have not opened any of them, though... Just finished the workday, will pick one in a few minutes

Ember wrote:

On the kifu paper I can help a little, at least in the case if you don't know how to write the game down with it. If it's that, it's pretty easy to explain. There are basically two methods to record the moves and it depends on personal likes which one you prefer:
1) The first method is using two differently coloured pens, one colour for black's moves and one colour for white's moves.
2) The other possibility is using just one pen but drawing a circle around the moves of white (or black if you prefer it that way). T
he "=" below the grid are for ko moves.

I tried both methods before switching to my Nintendo DS for recording and I liked the second one better because it is less messy and you can concentrate more on the game because you don't have to pay attention to using the right colour to write down each move. Still, I think that recording the game like this distracts me a lot and as it is also prone to lead to mistakes (my favourites: using the same numbers twice for two sequences or skipping numbers), so I very much prefer using my DS. Or a tablet. Or any such thing. It's also much more comfortable when you analyse the game because you don't have to hunt down every move from the bulk of numbers. Although I must admit that I come back to kifu paper whenever the battery has fainted, it's still better then having no record of your mistakes at all. ;-)

The thing that kind of bothers me is that the move nombre should be written on the lines... This feels weird, maybe less weird with Japanese numbers (I know just a few, though) but Arabic numerals like we use have a lot of vertical lines, so 1, 7 and others will be hard to write. I expected kifu paper to be like a 19x19 array of neat circles to put the number in. But, oh, well, in any case I'd use my iPad. No need to translate it to SGF later

But it's a neat gift, it makes you realise how things were done before (and this I say after having purchased a slide rule a few months ago out of geekness!)

Ember · **#129**

On the numbers: Well, you could use a red or green pen from the start to avoid that the numbers become unclear to read. :-)

And I also saw other kinds of kifu paper, like where you write the number in the squares. But THAT would distract me a lot more. It would drive me mad even. :-?

Or where there were circles at the place where the vertical and horizontal lines cross and where you wrote the number inside the circle. There's some freaky stuff ot there. :-)

Oh, and I totally agree on the sgf thing. Once I wrote a kifu on paper I was always way too lazy to transcribe it afterwards.. :-|

Have fun with Fujisawa-sensei! :-D

RBerenguel · **#130**

Week in review:

Got a shipment of neat books, as you can read above.

Solved ~ 260 or 270 problems these days, "only" (did almost double last week.) LCH Tesuji Vol 1 and Vol 2, a few from Tsumego Vol 1 (I forgot it at my workshop so I couldn't finish it this week...) 15 from Gokyo Shumyo and 10 from Improve on 5x5 (a great book!).

This time for the tesuji volumes I tracked the number of mistakes, got 11 in Volume 1, 10 in Volume 2. The problem is that I feel like I'm stumbling repeatedly in the same "stones." I've used tracking the number of mistakes as a minor kind of "loading" (taken from Bill's improvement page on Sensei's.) For my next run with these two books the loading will come from counting the points in the involved area.

I also played two games from the Nordic Go Academy, won both. I was pretty happy with my play in both, too (not like I didn't get a ton of remarks on improvement from the one that I got the review already). Didn't play any blitz, have not logged into my blitz account for almost 3 weeks.

RBerenguel · **#131**

Live update: won my first game in the Barcelona Go Tournament... By half a point! The recording has a mistake somewhere that I need to fix, then I'll post it here. Let's see how it goes this afternoon!

RBerenguel · **#132**

RBerenguel wrote:

Live update: won my first game in the Barcelona Go Tournament... By half a point! The recording has a mistake somewhere that I need to fix, then I'll post it here. Let's see how it goes this afternoon!

And lost the two afternoon games, so today's score is 1/3. Let's see tomorrow (5 round McMahon)

RBerenguel · **#133**

RBerenguel wrote:

Live update: won my first game in the Barcelona Go Tournament... By half a point! The recording has a mistake somewhere that I need to fix, then I'll post it here. Let's see how it goes this afternoon!

And lost the two afternoon games, so today's score is 1/3. Let's see tomorrow (5 round McMahon)

Won today's two games (so 3/5), if I didn't make any mistake I'll end with 1189 GoR (+13 points) so my rank of 9k seems still appropiate :/

alejo · **#134**

Booooh!!! You're such a bad player!!!

And I'm even worse!

We could upload our game where you beat me by 1.5 points and review it... If you want...

EGF rankings around 8-10k were such a mess. In the end, I couldn't wait for three final results to come out and I had to leave early. I'll check the European database every once in a while to see if it's updated...

By the way, I hope I can come back soon and defeat you. Hehe

Ember · **#135**

Sounds like you had a lot of fun at the tournament. :lol:

I definitely liked your live updates, RBerenguel! I hope you still intend to post this nail-bitingly close win, I'd like to see it.

RBerenguel · **#136**

Absolutely, here it is! I stopped recording when I realised I had some wrong order on the middle-left area... There was a misplaced stone that made any subsequent plays there pointless :S So the endgame is missing, which may be an interesting part, specially in this game.

RBerenguel · **#137**

Quote:

16:42 Namii: I suggest watching Japanese games from 80s to 90s
16:42 Namii: Try to check at least 500 games before Summer
[...]
16:42 Namii: so you have 3 months
16:42 Namii: Then solve tsumego for 2 hours each week, feel free to distribute it as you like
[...]
16:42 Namii: so it becomes 8 hrs per month, 24 hrs by Summer
16:42 Namii: Then play at least 10 games (in addition to NGA games) per month
16:43 Namii: so it comes to 30 games by Summer, + NGA games
16:43 Namii: so I guess around 40-50 games in total
16:43 RBerenguel: blitz counts as games?
16:43 Namii: Ah, blitz is 0.5 games

16:43 RBerenguel: hehe ok
16:43 Namii: Hmm, I guess 500 pro games is a lot
16:43 Namii: Go for 100 instead
[...]
16:43 Namii: So about 1 per day
16:43 RBerenguel: aha
16:44 Namii: Oh, 100 per month I meant, so 300 before Summer
16:44 Namii: Summer begins on June 1

[...]
16:44 Namii: So if you keep this ~5-7 pro games / week, 2 hours of tsumego / week, 2-3 games / week (+ NGA games)
16:45 Namii: then I will call you Iron Man Ruben for the entire June+July
16:45 RBerenguel:

16:45 RBerenguel: challenge accepted

So Namii put forward this "challenge." Now I re-read it, I'm unsure about the number of pro games, so I'll aim for ~ 300 (3 per day) and in any case I'll do way more than 100 by summer. As for tsumego, I'm splitting it into 15' chunks (regardless of amount of problems done in this time.) For pro games I take around 10-15 minutes to go through one. I look for interesting patterns, like josekis I haven't seen (many,) middle game "joseki-like" I've seen rarely, endgame tesujis, direction of play, tenukis. This kind of things. As for games, I'll mostly play blitz, since it's a particularly blind spot for me, and it's easier to fit in a busy schedule (10 games per month is 20 blitz games per month, which is 0.6 games per day)

Week in review (since Wednesday 26th Feb, when I started logging it, Sunday not counted):

1h15' of tesuji problems from ishi no renkaku tore ningu nihiyakunanajiyuu maikomi igo bunko shiri zu, a cutting-and-connecting book with 270 tesujis. From now on, 270-cut. I'm on problem 79 (I'm taking ~1 minute per problem so far, it seems.)
30' of "endgame" problems from igo totsukun go kakeru go godouban jiyoutatsuhou ("How to improve on a 5x5 board", from now on 5x5.) I'm on problem 16, taking almost 2 minutes per problem.
4 blitz games (that's a +2 to game count,) lost all. 3 giving 4-5 stones, one even. From the handicap games I got a clear improvement in playing calmer moves and waiting for the opponent mistake (lost the first 2 by resignation, the third one by 1.5 points.) From the even game, to don't play stupid moves in a joseki.

Checked the following pro games (one-line annotation and reference from SmartGo Kifu included):

Ishi Kunio - Ishida Yoshio 1980-00-00a: Middle game "joseki" for sabaki
Kobayashi Koichi - Takemiya Masaki 1980-01-10f: Nothing specially interesting
Cho Chikun - Rin Kaiho 1980-01-10b Big post-joseki fight and resignation
Hashimoto Shoji - Ishida Yoshio 1980-01-10a Miskill/misread at the end (?), resignation
Kobayashi Koichi - Cho Chikun 1980-01-11b How to neutralise centre thickness
Rin Kaiho - Fujisawa Hideyuki 1980-01-16a: Mutual settling fight followed by attack without territory
Shiraishi Yutaka - Fujisawa Hosai 1980-01-17b: Counter-example of getting 3rd line territory in exchange of a wall (Fujisawa did, won).
Rin Kaiho - Kudo Norio 1980-01-24b: Rin lost a huge dragon misreading a ko threat, resigned
Sakata Eio - Shiraishi Yutaka 1980-01-24e: A territorial game in fuseki, followed by reduction.

Forgot to say, I'm picking Japanese games starting from 1980 where at least one player is 9d and the other is at least 7d. Since there are many games, I'd rather start with the top pros, if I ever ran out of games I can see all others.

Code:

|    | ∆   | =  |
| TT | +2h | 2h |
| GC | +2  | 2  |
| PG | +9  | 9  |

Since I started the counts in February, it's hard to tell month-wise if I'm on schedule or not. I have used 4 days (W,T,F,S,) so:

2h of tsumego
Count of 2 games (0.5 games per day)
9 pro games (2.25 per day) (technically almost on schedule, but 2 of these pro games were technically checked "today," since I went to bed late...)

Let's see how the following week goes!

RBerenguel · **#138**

Two problems from igo totsukun go kakeru go godouban jiyoutatsuhou. They are not hard ( the second has a minor trick, but most of this section aren't specially hard... but there are 3 sections) but it shows the kind of things to keep in mind when solving these small board situations. It's a great book, I'm very glad I got it.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code: [go]$$B Black to win $$ +-----------+ $$ | . . . . O | $$ | O O O O O | $$ | X X X X O | $$ | . . . . . | $$ | . . X . X | $$ +-----------+[/go]

Click Here To Show Diagram Code: [go]$$B Black to win $$ +-----------+ $$ | . O . . . | $$ | . . . O . | $$ | O O O X X | $$ | X X O X . | $$ | . X X . X | $$ +-----------+[/go]

RBerenguel · **#139**

This was hard to read

Click Here To Show Diagram Code: [go]$$B Black to win $$ +-----------+ $$ | . . . . . | $$ | . O X O O | $$ | O X O O . | $$ | . X X X X | $$ | . . . . . | $$ +-----------+[/go]

RBerenguel · **#140**

Refer to this in case you don't know what this is about.

30' on the 270 book
45' on the 5x5 book
45' on the NGA assignment (with re-solving)

2h total.

Checked the following pro games

Cho Chikun - Hashimoto Utaro 01-24d: Interesting fights all over
Kato Masao - Takemiya Masaki 01-24c: Fights and attacks by Kato
(9x9) Go Seigen - Miyamoto Naoki 68-8
(9x9) Miyamoto Naoki - Go Seigen 68-9
Kataoka Satoshi - Fujisawa Kazunari 2014-02-27 (Judan prelim): White had two weak groups and won anyway
Fujisawa Hideyuki - Rin Kaiho 01-30a: Weird game
Kobayashi Koichi - Sakata Eio 01-31a: Heavy fighting game with many struggling groups
Kajiwara Takeo - Ushikubo Yoshitaka 01-31b: Huge loss in several trades
Takemiya Masaki - Hane Yasumasa 01-31c: Very interesting game with several neat moves
Rin Kaiho - Fujisawa Hideyuki 02-05a: Huge side vs. rest. Interesting endgame play
Tajiri Yuto - Ida Atsushi 2014-01-09 (Chisato cup): Seemed passive by black, who lost
Kudo Norio - Sakata Eio 02-07a: Nothing remarkable
(9x9) Ishida Atsushi 4d - Kurahashi Masayuki 1d 1987-10-10a
O Rissei (5d) - Sakata Eio (9d) 02-13c
Kudo Norio - Otake Hideo 02-13b: Interesting shimari invasion against a hoshi+shimari
Fujisawa Hosai - Takemiya Masaki 02-14d: Takemiya can be a real killer
Ishii Shinzo - Sato Masaharu 02-14c: Weird cap by black, also got a carpenter square on the board
Kato Masao - Kobayashi Koichi 02-14b: Again, a cap I didn't see right. Slightly less weird
Takao Shinji - Yuki Satoshi 2014-3-4 (Judan 1): Not specially violent
Hane Yasumasa - Rin Kaiho 02-14a: Pincer-jump-jump-attach-extend-pincer joseki
Fujisawa Hideyuki - Rin Kaiho 02-20a: Group dies, Rin loses
Takemiya Masaki - Hane Yasumasa 02-21d: Mistake by Hane in an endgame hane XD
Kishimoto Kazuo - Hashimoto Yoshimi 02-11c: Tenuki in joseki to play enclosure
Haruyama Isamu - Hisai Keishi 02-21b: Weird side-corner invasion
Kobayashi Koichi - Ishida Yoshio 02-21a: Interesting pincer-jump. Koba killed a group to get life at the end, +R.
Otake Hideo - Ishida Yoshio 02-24a: Interesting hoshi-side invasion
Cho Chikun - Hashimoto Shoji 02-25b: Cho playing 3-3 a lot lately
Miyazaki Ryutaro - Rin Kaiho 2014-3-6 (Meijin Pre) White kept the pressure, on endgame a B group died. W was ahead anyway
Sato Sunao - Tsuchida Masamitsu 02-27b: Didn't understand anything
Cho Chikun - Hashimoto Shoji 02-25b: Nothing remarkable
Rin Kaiho - Fujisawa Hideyuki: Heavy fighting

In parentheses, 9x9 pro games I replayed.

Code:

|    | ∆        | =      |
| TT | +2h      | 4h     |
| GC | 0        | 2      |
| PG | +28 (+3) | 37 (3) |

2h of tsumego
Count of 2 games (0.5 games per day) :tmbdown:
28 pro games (4 per day)

My week in numbers (was "Tiny steps towards shodan")

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