My Journey Towards the PA State Championship Tournament

badger1243 · #1

I tried doing this on reddit before I was directed to this site which seems much better for this kind of post. I wanna do this as a temporary series of posts/updates leading up to the tournament next month. My goal overall is not to win or achieve any high position in the tournament but this will be the first time I'll have had the opportunity to play with other experienced and serious players in person and it has filled me with more inspiration than before to pick up my studies and play a lot more seriously and frequently online than I ever did before. Previously I was on a fairly long hiatus due to a lack of interest in playing the game online simply because I saw no point in it if there was no interest in the game where I lived and I was never able to attract new or experienced players through some of my attempts. My goal for this post is to share my games for the next month to track my progress and my study routine and then look back on it after the results of the tournament to take inspiration for what I've accomplished to push me even further afterwards.

For this first post I'd like to share 3 games of my first day that I played on KGS. These were my absolute first since my hiatus so I felt very rusty. My previous KGS rating had also deteriorated to unrated for not playing in so long so I chose to start at 15kyu estimation. Before my hiatus I was between 12-10kyu. I am currently back up to 10kyu after 10 games. After this post I think I will post updates every week for 4 weeks with a handful for highlight games to discuss what I think I learned from them.

This was my first game, I made a custom game w/o handicap encouraging people around 15kyu to join. Almost immediately I got a request from this guy, he changed the game type to free and was unrated, I didn't think nothing of it so I played it. I held my own but I was utterly demolished I felt for the most part I think. After I noticed a snap-back move I misread, I gave it to him with my last move and then resigned and thanked him for the game as I didn't see myself recovering there on. In chat he noted that he was, supposedly, 5d rating and that the game had "good feeling" and that I was "stronger." I don't know if any of this is true but it certainly encouraged me a lot to keep going. What do you guys think? Was he yanking my chain so to speak? Do you think he actually was 5dan? I'd like to know.

This second game was vs a 10kyu through auto matching. I didn't want to play handicap games because well I don't enjoy them and suck at them but that's bad reasoning probably, but searching for players within 1 rating of 15kyu was taking forever so I bumped the search up to within 5 stones hoping that before the game started I'd be able to dispute rules and hopefully not play a handicap game. However that did not happened and I played with a 5 stone handicap on I think a 15 or 20 minute main time to which he played pretty fast. I made some mistakes in this game like losing my L7 group in the center and a bit of my corner in the bottom right, a capture I misread a lot in my games and something I need to be more aware of from now on. I ended up winning regardless by 38.5 points.

This was my last game of the night before I had to sleep for work in the morning. It says here he is 10kyu but on KGS I matched with him within 1 stone of my 15kyu estimation and we played an even game. He opened with duo 3-3s which I felt was very weird and slow so I attempted to play a bit faster and more flexible with the goal of beating him with a large moyo. In this game I not only made some reading mistakes but also some mistakes with determining urgency and sente which ended up costing me my center group. Overall I felt like he was much stronger than I and I felt a lot more behind than I guess I was. I ended up winning to time. This game had 30 minutes main with 5 30 second byo-yomi periods. I still had like 15 minutes left but he played way too slowly and I think didn't have sound or notifications on for when he hit byo-yomi and generally didn't watch his time but I can't be sure. I thought for sure he was going to win, but when I looked a this game further just prior to winning this, I wasn't as behind as I thought I was even with losing that group and would've ended up winning after securing my moyo on the bottom left. So I also learned to count and estimate score a bit better from this as well, along with generally feeling like I lost so much from 1 group dying.

Since these games, I've played 5 more over the past 2 days and have achieved a W/L of 6-2. I am currently at 10kyu. Besides these games I've been reading "Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go" by Toshiro Kageyama - 7 Dan. Before this I read a book called "The Basic Principles of the Opening and the Middle Game" by Rob van Zeijst and Richard Bozulich which I found to be an excellent book and one I remember still very clearly and still put a lot of the lessons to practice as best I can. Currently I have lent it to a friend, my former math teacher from high school who introduced me to the game. But he sucked and didn't take it as seriously as I did so I surpassed him pretty easily if I do say so myself xd.

If anyone would like to leave reviews of my games or advice of any type, I'd love to have them. Thank you to anyone who does so and also for reading. If I find enough enjoyment in this, perhaps I will continue to keep a regular journal like this in the future, but as I said for now the focus of this is just on the next month leading to the PA Sate championship Tournament.