We're only a week away! Who else will be attending?

This will be my very first US Go Congress so I'm pretty excited about pretty much every aspect of it: the AlphaGo keynote, the tournament, the lectures, and making new friends who love this game.

Enjoy!

I am going. It will be my 12th. I lived in the Boston area for 11 years, but that was before I played go.

My first. I live in Boston so I couldn't stay away. Unfortunately I don't have the time to play in the Open but I'm looking forward to other events.

I'll be attending Sat-Sun on the first weekend, and Fri-Sun on the second weekend.

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I'll be there.

It is the sad nature of Internet acquaintanceship, that we can walk right by each other in real-life without a clue.

So,if you've seen my face around, please say hi!

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

We should have some means of recognizing each other. Perhaps something attached to the membership badge.

I said hi to Brady (wineandgolover) this afternoon as requested and he is as pleasant in person as he is online (as am I).

I've only been able to enjoy afternoon events due to time restrictions, but those have been a lot of fun. Mostly I've been attending game reviews, which have been incredibly instructive.

Today was the computer go afternoon, which I had been looking forward to. Fan Hui gave a talk analyzing the fuseki of Game 5 between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, including variations that AlphaGo "considered" and distilled commentaries from top pros like Gu Li. The most surprising thing he mentioned was that the "blunder" in the lower right where it seemed to not see the stone pillar tesuji coming was actually (maybe) on purpose, and after the subsequent exchange in the upper right it already thought it had a 75% chance of winning. I guess this will all become clearer in a few weeks when the commentaries on these games are published.

I wish I had known about this event... I would have like to attended that one. But Thursday was a busy day for me, with the technically difficulties we had that morning, and broadcasting games all day long, leaving little time to further debug and fix the issues -- Masters games that morning, followed immediately by the Under 16 Girls tournament, then the final for the Redmond Cup, and finally Pair Go that night.

I got to join the Pro Dinner Wednesday night. Aja Huang and Fan Hui 2p were there, as well as Facebook's AI team too.

On Friday I finally got to say hi to swannod, who's been making some very nice blog posts about his experience at the Congress and making me wish that I could have taken the whole week off instead of a few afternoons.

The famous Yilun Yang gave a lecture on "how to play against strange moves", which frankly I was a little disappointed by. There was a lot of great insight, but the majority of it was spent doing things like finding the perfect theoretical response to an opening 9-5 move and pointing out all the drawbacks of the suboptimal moves. It was fun and instructive, but I think it was easy to come away with the lesson that finding the absolute perfect moves in the opening is really really important, when I think that, as in chess, many of us obsess too much over opening moves when we should concentrate on improving the rest of our play. In fact Andy Liu's lecture on Sunday was largely about his contention that many opening moves are very close in value so we shouldn't sweat it too much, and a recurring theme in game reviews was a player asking a pro "Was this the best move?" in the fuseki and him/her saying "It's fine, don't worry about it".

Speaking of game reviews, I then sat in on Stephanie Yin's game review session for players a bit stronger than me, which was very interesting. I think that these game reviews are probably the most valuable sessions from an instructional point of view and am surprised that more people don't take advantage of them.

Strolling through the tournament hall with the hundreds of go boards really made me wish that I could have played. There's something really nice about sitting in a room with hundreds of people who are all thinking really hard. Maybe another year, although it will never be as convenient as this time!

Yes, yes, and yes.

I agree. Sequestering a pro for a review is perhaps the best use of time at Congress. After all, they address your mistakes, not hypothetical ones.

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

Seriously. I enjoyed the pro reviews so much that I've convinced myself to check out Stephanie Yin's New York Go Academy in Flushing and try to start taking lessons with her. There'll definitely be a post about my experience there in the near future