After 10 years (nearly to the day) I have finally managed to get promoted to 1 dan on KGS. This might be part of KGS's ongoing rank rebalancing, so we'll see if it sticks, but still, this is the first time I've gotten a legitimate dan rank on KGS (a few 1dan?s not withstanding). Getting stronger at go is one of the few long term personal projects I've followed through on so I thought I'd examine what it took using data!
Over that 10 years I've played approximately 4700 games. 4250 on KGS, 250 on Tygem, 150 on Fox and 50 or so in person. Between playing the games and doing tsumego, conservatively I've spent 5000 hours on go. The actual number might be closer to 7500 hours, but probably not as high as 10,000 hours.
I never really had a teacher, but I do own several dozen US language go books and another two dozen virtual go books, most of which I've even read. I went to a few tournaments and workshops in the bay area when I lived there but it was a relatively rare occurrence. Also, shout out to those from the Google Go club when I was playing there in 2015 and 2016.
Now for some graphs! The data is just pulled from KGS analytics so it does not contain data from Tygem, Fox or in-person games. But it still has data on 90% of the games I've played.
Here's how many games I played at each rank on KGS. I don't know why I spent so many games at 2k and relatively fewer on 1k.
Here's my rank distribution across time. It was smooth sailing up to 3kyu, but rather rocky after that. You can also see a few gaps in my play while I was doing other things.
Here are the total number of games I'd played by a given date. I played over half my games in the first 4 years.
Hope that was interesting!
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It also helps to read local situations to some depth before playing tenuki. Then if a crucial move comes up in that vicinity later, you are prepared. 