I think it would be neat to keep track of what I'm doing everyday, so I'll make this thread. I started actually learning how to play the game of Go in October of 2013, and I took a hiatus until around Christmas time. Since then, I've been at least doing something go related everyday, even if it means just idling in kgs and watching some games. I am currently 11k on the verge of being 10k with one more win as of right now, and the goal I set for myself a few months ago was kgs 9k by 1 June 2014, since that was when school ended for the summer.

After that my goal will be 1d by 31 December 2014; I will not attain it, but I'm going to see how far along I get by that point!

20 April 2014 -

*In the wee hours of the morning I got a lesson about EVs and miai values in endgame counting as well as things like reverse sente in relation to determing point values. Needless to say I was confused.
*Did problems 198 to 218 out of Choi Cheolhan's elementary Life and death problems.
*Re-read the first 90 pages out of Attack and defence. (I think this is the 4th time I've read those specific pages and I still feel like I need to do it 20 more times)
*Played two even games against a 7k and a 6d. I am sick so I didn't feel like playing serious, ranked games.
*Watched Nick Sibicky's new sandbagger video while I was eating.

Happy easter/420.

Hey Abyssinica, best of luck in keeping this up and improving. Your goal's ambitious, but why not go for it anyway?

Sounds like you're off to a good start, though hope those two even games you managed to get reviewed.

PeterN

1 dan by the end of the year? That is quite a bold goal. Hopefully posting to your journal here will help you along the way. There is a lot to be said for reviewing what you have done and a journal like this will lead you to do that.

To reach 1 dan from your level in a year is not impossible. The YouTuber dwyrin apparently rose from just learning the game for the first time to 1 dan in only a year through rigorous self-study. That being said, such progress is rare and thankfully your study methods are not as crazy as his were. (Not only did he play a ton online, but apparently he drilled himself relentlessly by memorizing pro games every day. He says that you should never do this unless you want to hate go for a few years afterwards...)

You definitely should not be discouraged if you can't reach your goal by December. You are aiming high.

But with that disclaimer out of the way, there is no reason why you can't aim for something like that.

_________________
"You have to walk before you can run. Black 1 was a walking move.
I blushed inwardly to recall the ignorant thoughts that had gone through
my mind before, when I had not realized the true worth of Black 1."
-Kageyama Toshiro on proper moves

1d isn't necessarily a goal as it is a benchmark. I'm seeing how close I can get to that mark in expectations that it won't happen. I do remember Batt saying that he got to 1d in a year and basically went crazy memorising pro games and the like; I can't even memorise my own games (Though I did get to ~40 moves in the one against the 7k yesterday). My method is very simple, I feel:

Do at least 5-10 tsumego per day
Read books
Watch videos
Play games

With that being said, I'm updating daily so:

21 April 2014
*Did problems 219 to 239 out of Cho Chikun's elementary (Apparently there's no actual Choi Cheolhan version )
*Watched Batt's video on "Aji, don't leave home without it" while I ate
*Re-read chapter 2 of Direction of play. (Kajiwara could be the next Kageyama with how he writes. What makes me laugh is how he goes into a case-study from a 2d amateur game, and yet, after reading it, I'm feeling like both of those players were really bad.
*Re-read Tesuji from the second chapter to the one about ko fights - I'm going through tesuji much more slowly than I did with attack and defence. The first time I got A&D, I went through it in all of two days and didn't feel like I came out of it with much. After that, I re-read it again and still haven't feel like I've come through with much information. Even now after multiple short-section rereads and what I did yesterday, I still feel like I'm going to need to re-read it 20x over. With Tesuji, I don't want that problem. Sure, it's really boring going over these two chapters for, what, the third time now? But I'd rather make slow, steady pace throughout the book, imprinting its ideas into my mind rather than read it in its entirety.


The first time I captured an important piece of cutting stones in a loose ladder(Game-breaking I should say), it felt exhilerating. Even going through some old games I've lost, I could've won or done better if I just had done a loose ladder. Even knowing that these tesuji exist rather than being able to execute them perfectly is very nice in my opinion.

*Watched another of Bat's videos: Bats Lecture Series - 03/28/2012 - Largest move The last 10 minutes of this video were eye-opening because I do the same thing that 6k asked.
*Played a game of go and got to kgs 10k! I think it's hard to get out of the mindset of "Well, my opponet played X which was really small/slow/bad/a blunder so that was the only reason I won" That's the mindset I have and it's really annoying.

22 April 2014

* Did problems 240-262 out of Cho Chikun's elementary. It sounds like a lot, but honestly, there's maybe a 2-5 minute reading problem every 5-10 problems and then the rest are almost instant to 30 seconds for me finding the solution.
*Re-read the entirety of Opening theory made easy
*Skimmed through Korean Style of Baduk GGG gave me this book for free when I had ordered my four other ones; it's kind of neat, but it's basically split in half between the large avalanche joseki and the mini-chinese fuseki. I can't really complain since it was free and has lots of pro games availible for review in it.
*Watched Bats Lecture Series - 04/11/2012
* Beat a 5k twice. We both reviewed our mistakes afterwards and I got a 1k to do it for the first game. I didn't know the wall on the right could've been killed and I could've avoided a headache! Or, you know, continue running and surrounding two week groups so that I don't become the one under attack. In the first game, I think black comes back into the game rather than lost where white resigned, but he still felt like it, so I told him not to continue if he didn't want to. In the second it was much more fun, but we had the gimmick of, "Let's play taisha." They're both free and not private games with my online go club, so if you want to see, go ahead!

23 April 2014

*Did problems 263-292 in Cho Chikun's elemenatary Maybe I should look up 1001 Tesuji problems instead of devoting 100% of my tsumego effors to life and death.
*Read chapter 6 of tesuji
*Watched Bats Lecture Series - Attachments
* Played three games
* Replayed a Huang Longshi vs Jian Tianyuan game on my board Why not? I'm not trying to do anything special with it, just look at the game rather than flip through an sgf and think about nothing.

Man, I want to play in real life.

24 April 2014

*Did problems 293-306 of Cho Chikun's elementary. One of the things that makes me take 5-10 minutes on one problem is that I'll usually read out the correct sequence when I start the problem, but then misread the endresult and judge that I had failed. After trying every single other sequence I can think of, only then do I go back to the correct one and realise I misread the end result.
*Watched a video on baduk videos about the 3-3 point.
*Read some of the direction of play. Chapters one and three. I should really find something else to read. I have all these pdfs but good, physical copies of a book are always better in my opinion.
*Read chapter 7 in tesuji.
*Watched Bat's KGS Series - 05 - 1dan + Ina!
*Replayed some Huang Longshi game 3 times because I wanted to see how SoDesuNe's method on pro-games fans out for me. New daily thing! It's probably my least productive of the bunch, but it can't hurt! I'm going to start with every Huang Longshi game I can find. gokifu.com/f/2nm.sgf

25 April 2014
*Did problems 307 to 319 out of Cho Chikun's Elementary.
*Did problems 1-8 out of Cho Chikun's Intermediate. I think I just kind of gave up or was too tired to attempt #320 in the elementary, so I wanted to see what Intermediate was like. Suprisignly, they aren't impossibly hard. I like how the first few problems have to deal with falsifying the eyes on those long strings of second line stones. Also the fact that I don't have to protect the stone I hane'd with since it's not an eye anyways and I can just extend the stone inside their eyespace.
*Read a bit of Shape up I'm out of shape. I'm all out of shape!
*Watched Studying Professional Go Games - Legend88 - 04
*Won a game I should've lost because of time. I think the point I started to lose was after I tried doing a probing thing that I never really do, and then treating the stones super lightly and tenuki-ing, abandoning most of them. SE says the endpoint of the game was B+10, but I had one really big weakness I didn't patch since I could not afford to lose any points. I'll probably have more after I make this post, but this section at least says I played games!
*Played out another Huang Longshi game. http://gokifu.com/s/1tm-gokifu-16820101 ... 28%29.html

26 April 2014
*Did problems 320-336 out of Elementary They're starting to get really hard now.
*Did problems 9-27 out of Intermediate Seriously, intermediate seems way more easy than Elementary right now; I'm just flying through these since I can recognise things like snapback and eye-falsification/vital points much more quickly. There seemed to be a lot of bent four questions in a row.
*Watched Bat's Lecture Series - Kobayashi Fuseki
*Played a game

Think I took it a bit too easy today. Oh well; I'll have plenty more to do tommorow.

27 April 2014

*Did problems 27-40 out of Intermediate.
*Re-read the chapter on defence from A&D
*Did problem 337 out of Elementary
* WatchedBat's Lecture Series - Great Gu Li Game and Nick Sibicky Go Lecture #24 - Lessons from a 7 Dan Pro

I spent a lot of time playing Tabletop simulator today, but at least I still got a game in. Go to bed early because I have non-go related stuff to do.

28 April 2014

*Did problems 338-372 in Cho Chikun's elementary After getting over those first few problems, today's mainly had to do with reducing your opponet to a killable eye shape. Really neat, and I couldn't stop doing more and more problems. But, seriously Cho, things like these aren't problems.


* Read some more out of the Direction of Play because it was the only book I brought with me
*Watched Nick Sibicky Go Lecture #8 - 8-9k Game Review + Dwyrin's Crazy moves video. The crazy moves video really struck a chord as I hate players like that.
*Got "Invincible, the games of Shuusaku" There's a lot more stuff on Shuusaku than Huang longshi. One question I have about ancient chinese games is why do players make moves like the circled black stone. It gives the opponet a two space extension so it isn't a pincer.

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At least I can reasonably go through a chapter or two a day. Maybe I'm just lazy and want easy acess to certain shapes and ways of playing my brain can subconciously soak up. I do want to actually, you know, read the comments, so I plan to: Open it in an sgf, play it out completely on the sgf, then go through it on my board + sgf while reading the comments. While some sequences are a no brainer, the kifu that has 50 moves on it leads to too much searching in my opinion.

29 April 2014

* Did probkems 372-414 out of Cho Chikun's elementary. Just flying by some problems now; the volume has increased, but the time I'm taking to do them certainly hasn't.
*Watched about half of Bat's Lecture Series - Orthodox opening
*Went over game #2 Shusaku vs Shuwa

I think there are two answers to your question, one important for our development and one less so. The less important point is the idea that joseki and fuseki (if you will pardon the use of the Japanese terms when discussing ancient Chinese games) were less developed and the players of the past simply didn't understand this stuff as well as we do today. We can find this explanation in writing a good many times. However, it will not do much for us except perhaps lead us to dismiss these old games, or at least their early stages, as material for serious study.

The second answer is that "pincer = play that prevents a 2-space extension" and "Respond to an approach move with: an extension, a pincer, or playing elsewhere" are heuristics that we learn in this day and age. They can be very helpful in trimming the list of our potential responses to an approach move, but they can also impose limits on how we understand and evaluate positions.

So what does the 4-space quasi-pincer do (we understand that it does not prevent a 2-space extension)? We can see that it disrupts the relationship between the approach stone and the same-color stone in the adjacent corner. It may be worth remembering that with the old-style Chinese opening of diagonal star-points, all approach moves were played from a 'friendly' corner and all pincers (whether real or 'quasi') were such disruptive plays rather than 'positive' ones attempting to build up an area in front of friendly stones. With this in mind we might notice that the play also occupies a balanced position that leaves behind a 2-space extension to either side of itself. In a sense the stone is settled as soon as it hits the board. This might be a considerable virtue for a stone being inserted into hostile territory. If we expect that the approach stone will initiate some heavy fighting in and around the corner real soon now (a reasonable expectation from the old Chinese games that I have looked at) then having used a stable stone to separate the approach stone from the adjacent corner may have been intended to leave the pincering team with the maximum flexibility to respond in the corner (i.e. the least potential bad aji on the outside for the other team to exploit).

I am not sure that we can ever say why the players of old made such moves. I am not aware that their thinking on the matter is recorded anywhere. However, the interesting question that is left to us is how did they use such stones? The game records allow us to see the fate of the stones and perhaps understand how world-class players of that era exploited the potential in them.

_________________
Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

Regarding the 4 space quasi-pincer, I recently asked about it as well, and you may want to look at that thread for at least a brief discussion on it:

http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=10190

30 April 2014

*Did problems 415-445 out of Cho Chikun's elementary
*Finished watching Bat's Lecture Series - Orthodox opening
*Read chapter 5 out of attack and defence
*Watched all of batt's actual lecture Battousai quote of the week, "Okay, I want to know how the 10 kyu got this answer right."
*Went over game #3 in Invincible

Thanks for the answers to the 4-space "pincer." It seems neat in that it's settled as soon as you place it on the board. Sometimes I wonder how the ancient peoples learned how to play the game or came up with its various intricicies or how styles have changed. (Everyone always does the large knight's enclosure. I think I read that Go seigen made the keima popular?)

1 May 2014

*Did problems 446-475 out of Cho Chikun's elementary.
*Read a little bit out of shape up
*Went over game #4 in Invincible.
*Watched Nick Sibicky Go Lecture #52 - Where to Play in the Opening

Man, I feel like I'll have the time to finish Cho Chikun's elementary tommorow.

2 May 2014

*Did problems 476-500 out of elementary
*Read a bit out of A&D and Direction

Too lazy to bold on this phone.

3 May 2014
*Did problems 501-521 in Cho Chikun's elementary
*Went over game #5 in Invincible

No time to study go today. I got home at 17:00 and was tired. Couldn't even concentrate on reading.

How many stones have you improved??

Rated games I have played since I started this thread:
http://i.imgur.com/gPLFveM.png

Rank graph with the red line approximating the 20th of April:

http://i.imgur.com/wh4t7Ts.png


I wish there was a timg function on this site.