This is one of a series of games with Joe Casey. Before Covid-19, we met once a week to play 2 or 3 games. Since Covid-19, we play 2 games a week on KGS. The resulting .sgf game records are available from KGS, and have been analysed with AI, first with Leela Zero and more recently with Katago. The resulting commentaries are emailed to Joe. (He does not have the time or the computer resources to do similar analyses, even if he were minded to.) This particular example may interest other weak players. Since it exists anyway, posting it was easy to do.
I use old versions of Lizzie, Leela and Katago. They are good enough for our level, and any attempt to update them might well fail. Others on this forum have described ways to partially automate analysis with AI to highlight the biggest mistakes in each game. I have not tried that.
A recurring problem is that the score predicted by Katago swings wildly when there is a large and urgent point on the board which both players overlook. Our blindness can last for many moves. The work-around is to report the predicted score every 10 moves, starting with move 0. Doing this hides the wild swings, and shows progress in the game we were playing rather than in the game we should have been playing.
We are both weak: he is about a stone weaker, but wishes to play even games, so I always play White with no komi. KGS has decided that I am 2 dan, but I am really 4 kyu (EGF) on a good day. I thought that sending the commentaries to Joe would enable him to improve and give me a harder time, but it may be that preparing the analyses helps me more than reading them helps him. (If you want to learn something, try teaching it...) We are both over 70, so rapid improvement is unlikely in any case.
The comments may seem excessively didactic and portentous, which I dislike when other weak players dish it out. The excuses are that the opinions are mostly backed by AI, and I have enough experience of Joe's play to confidently identify some of his faults, such as a restricted opening repertoire, frequent zoku-suji and an excessive liking for playing in the middle of a one-point jump. My worst weaknesses are ridiculous reading mistakes, "fishing while the house is on fire" and loss of composure. Plain speaking and lots of repetition can help learning at our age.
The games typically take an hour, unless there is an early resignation.
For those unfamiliar with KGS, comments preceded by "thirdfogie 2d?:" or "JoeCasey -:" are from on-line chat during play. Everything else was added by me afterwards. For those unfamiliar with the English-speaking cultural milieu, "Lucky, lucky, lucky" is an allusion to the oeuvre of Kylie Minogue.
JoeCasey played black, and white won by 1 point.
|