Life In 19x19

Thanks for the comments! Playing a move to disconnect already-disconnected stones is something I've noticed myself doing a few times lately.

Here's a game I played on KGS. I made a couple of interesting mistakes. In particular I was curious about the corner invasion in the lower right. In the game ...

That makes sense! I like the idea of having questions in mind about the game before analyzing with KataGo.

Here is a fast game I played on Fox (5:00 plus 30 seconds/move). The main takeaway I have from it is the quite bad intuition I had about handling the invasion on the top (starts at move 123 ...

Over the last few months I've returned to playing go after a hiatus of a few years, and as I've been taking it more seriously recently I thought it might be nice to start a study journal as a way of seeing how my thinking and play changes over time.

I had another study journal here once, five or so ...

Thanks for the comments!

A game I played on Friday as black:

http://files.gokgs.com/games/2015/6/13/Fools-loganmhb.sgf

This is not a move I'd seen before, though I seem to have played joseki moves up until .
Here I was starting to get nervous about a large white left side, but given that all White's moves have been on ...

I have continued to play games on KGS as well as at the club, and can feel myself improving already. I have risen to 10k on KGS, which I hadn't previously been able to maintain.

This weekend I played an even game against a 4k friend, and managed to eke out a win (after some tricky playing and ...

Thanks for the feedback! Playing with the ideas of solidity and strength in mind seems to be helpful.

Incidentally, I've noticed a few differences in my play coming back from a break. For one I feel much more comfortable playing moves without knowing joseki, which I'm sure a) causes mistakes and b ...

And just like that, two years have gone by!

I was drawn away from studying go by my final year in college, and then by teaching myself programming. Now that I'm graduated and employed, I've found my way back. And I only seem to have lost a stone or two in the interim. Since it's now again summer ...

I use ElyGo for Kogo's on Android and it seems to work well for me, but it's a paid app (I think $5 or $6). It also comes with a couple of hundred problems and a database of Japanese pro games, though.

Almost two weeks in--all, of course, is not going according to plan, but I'm fairly happy with how things are going. The biggest thing I'm struggling with is fitting tsumego into my routine--originally I planned to do them before bed, but by that point I tend to be too sleepy to do them effectively ...

I also tend to be on evenings EST (GMT-5) -- although I go to bed fairly early since I have to get up quite early to work on the farm.

If anyone's interested, I'd be up to arrange/schedule some games ahead of time, so we don't have to rely on being on KGS at the same time. As it stands I'm free ...

@oren - Good question. Sometimes I don't, but usually if I spend enough time on a problem (a couple minutes for most of them) I'm confident that I've found the solution. Sometimes I come across problems where I can't find a move that seems to work, or can't verify that an attempted defense fails. I ...

Finals ate my time last week, but I am definitely interested in this.

Regarding 2) -- if we want to avoid komi (which is appealing to me for whatever reason) we could do as the pros did and use sen-ai-sen as an intermediate between 2-stone and even games. I don't know how that would affect the 2 ...

I've found that how you spend your tsumego time is much more important than how many problems you end up solving. You might want to set a time based goal to avoid encouraging yourself to read briefly and then check the answer, because what matters is that you're pushing the limits of your abiity. I ...

The free time I'll have this summer (finished classes in my third year of college yesterday) begs to be filled with go. Hopefully a study journal will keep me on track. Right now I'm about 10-11k on KGS, and I'd like to improve by several stones this summer--I think it's an attainable goal, as I ...