Hi! I usually haven't got much to say (I'm a lurker by nature; I don't understand go at all, let alone well enough to help others; I've got no time; I don't play enough games, I think, so when I do have time, that's what I should spend it on; I ramble, so even if I do have something to say, it may be better to keep it to myself anyway), but it seems like having a study journal might be a good thing, so here's a start at one. I really do ramble, though, so I'm writing this mainly for myself & don't expect anyone else to read all this garbage.

Some stuff about me:

• I started playing in January 2011. I've been of the annual-goal-setting type, but my goals are usually modest. 2011: reach OGS 12k (made it Sept/Oct 2011). 2012: reach OGS 8k (made it... at some point late in the year). 2013: reach KGS 1k (not there yet. I'm 3k, maybe.).
  
• I don't play enough real time games, I think, though I'm getting better about this. Spent my first year-ish playing correspondence games almost exclusively, mostly on OGS. I read a fair bit, too. Everyone says these are not the best ways to learn, which may be true, but I do think they've helped me.
  
• I tend to play moyo style. It's not a conscious choice, but in most exchanges of territory for influence, the influence looks better to me. Maybe this is related to my attitude in RPGs? Better to be weak in early levels (behind on territory) and tough at higher levels (walls for fights).
  
• As far as I can tell, I manage not to get too hung up on wins & losses. Beating me isn't much of an achievement--I'm not that strong. Likewise, beating people I can beat isn't much of an accomplishment, either. This is nice for my development & happiness, maybe, but it also means I sometimes don't resign as soon as I should.
  
• What do I do to study? Right now I'm reading Rin Kaiho's Dictionary of Basic Fuseki, because I understand the opening even less than I understand the rest of the game. I've been going through John Fairbairn's Kindle books on Shuei (up to 3rd volume of Shuei's games) over the board now & then, mainly for enjoyment rather than serious study. I don't think I really know how to learn from pro games, except by subconscious osmosis. And I play when I can. My university's go club meets on the only day of the week I can never make it. Plus I got no time!

I've got some things I've been thinking about that I'll probably write about here later on, but I haven't got time for that now... or very often. Meanwhile, for your amusement, yesterday I played the most ridiculous game I've ever played. Presented just in case you like to laugh at giant exchanges in territory by players who can't read and can't count:



The slapstick starts around move 220 or so. Not that you shouldn't also laugh at the earlier moves.

Here's a (bad) pattern I've noticed recently in my thinking during fights:

1. Move A is the first option I think of. I reject it for obvious reason R, ("aha! it's a trap") and look for another option.

2. Move B is the next option I think of. I read it out for a while, and it looks possible, or not, or whatever.

3. Move C is the next option I think of. I read it out for a while, and it looks possible, or not, or whatever.

...

n. I've been looking at lots of options, or reading them a long way, and things have become complicated enough that I reopen Move A for consideration. I see that I was wrong about obvious reason R ("wait, the trap doesn't work!").

n+1. I conclude I was wrong to rule out Move A, and so I it not long after reaching stage n.

Then my opponent demonstrates (in the crudest way possible!--stones on the board) that I needed to read Move A out a bit further, and catastrophe ensues. ("oh. the trap does work after all. ")

I'm not sure what general lesson to take from this realization except that I should try to recognize this pattern when it happens, and avoid it. Catchy proverb version: Better to think enough than not enough.

Bought Bruce Wilcox's Contact Fights a couple days ago. It's really engrossing! Maybe partly because it's so different from any other study material I've seen. I'm up to stage 3 of 4, and at least so far, the problems/"tests" aren't about finding the right or best move, they're about finding the move dictated by his rules as you've learned them so far. In other words, it's training you to follow his algorithm. (I skimmed ahead a bit, and it looks like once you get to the final, "advanced" stage, he's no longer got you quite following an algorithm: looks like it's up to you to override what the rules say if you think that's called for.)

This is not normally the sort of thing I'd be looking for--some amateur's eccentric system (albeit an amateur much stronger than I) without any principled justification for why the system works. E.g., why is 5 the magic number of liberties for string stability? *BUT* for this particular topic--contact fights that aren't simply life & death problems--it's really useful to me at this stage to have these kind of hard-and-fast rules as a basic heuristic. I seem to always get into these pushing contests in the middle & don't know when to stop. It's useful to have a place to start rather than reading from scratch every time, especially as I'm a bit too slow for KGS automatch's "medium" time setting.

So, all in all:

• The form is awesome. Super readable, just the right amount of interactivity. Example games are very well chosen.
• This kind of thing--giving a not-too-complicated algorithm as a heuristic to find a starting point for reading--is super super useful for someone like me who just doesn't play enough. There's that old chestnut about stronger players not necessarily reading farther ahead than weaker players, but starting their reading from the right moves. I imagine that's the sort of thing you get from lots and lots of experience. A good heuristic algorithm like this (assuming this is a good one--I'm in no position to judge) would be a natural substitute for that mass of experience.
• I would worry really new players picking up something like this without a good sense of how little is hard-and-fast in go, because this is all presented (at the initial stages) as very hard-and-fast.

Also, I won a game today. Had some fun fighting. AFAICT, I won because my opponent picked a fight s/he shouldn't have, & let it get huge. I let him/her off too easy in the opening (don't I always), but this time I wasn't the greedier player. It was a real morale booster--I've been on a losing skid lately, over the last 7-10 games. Yeah, don't pay any attention to that thing I said in the OP about having a good attitude to wins & losses

I'm fighting too much. I like fighting, but I need to figure out how not to fight. (Or how to fight better, which has been my approach previously.) Will make an effort at peace in next few games, and if I fail, I'll post here & ask how I botched it.

On the other hand, I'm playing more these days. Maybe I'll sign up for ASR next month. Did that once, but had to beat myself up to get the minimum 4 games/month in. I don't think that'd be a problem this time. We'll see.

A rambling and disjointed update.

1. I'm really excited about this: going to a tournament on Sunday! The 2013 Canada West Haihua Cup Go Tournament, at the Taiwanese Cultural Centre here in Vancouver. I've been to (exactly) one of these tournaments before, and it was a lot of fun. Teaches humility, too: the SDK section last time consisted of a bunch of kids between about 6 and 12 years old, plus me and another guy almost my age. And the kids beat me almost every time. One of my wins, I'm convinced, happened because my ~6 year old got distracted partway through & didn't want to play anymore. Anyway, it'll be about 8 hours of mostly serious go, and I can't wait. I think I can do better this time.

2. I love this Bruce Wilcox stuff. Finished contact fights, bought sector fights. Haven't had enough time to see if I'm improving by putting this stuff into practice, but unlike most things I read, I can tell that I am putting it into practice. One of the great virtues of his stuff is that it's absorbable. He does a splendid job of giving you very clear principles, and providing reinforcement through practice. As I said in an earlier post, I wouldn't take anything he says as gospel, but it is so, so helpful to have a starting point to one's reading.

3. Also picked up Jonathan Hop's So You Want To Play Go? Level 3. I haven't been reading it super avidly because (a) the Wilcox stuff is still fascinating me, and (b) presentation issues discussed below. But the material is very accessible, and the silly tone of a lot of the prose is disarming. I'm not far enough into it to be able to say much of substance, but so far it feels like a lot of reviewing & expounding on fundamentals I have some idea of already. That may not sound like an endorsement, but it really, really is.

4. [Caveat: the following may be just a quirk of my now-almost-2-year-old Kindle.] As I said, I like the material, but I'm finding the presentation frustrating for reasons outside the author's control. I bought the pdf from GoGameGuru, because I do most of my reading on a Kindle. Unfortunately, my Kindle sometimes does wonky things with some pdfs, and this is one of them. It cuts off the bottom ~10% of some pages, randomly, unless you rotate them to landscape view. Lanscape view is terrible for go books, because you can't finely control how far down the page you want to scroll, so you wind up cutting off half a diagram sometimes. OK, so then I saw that Amazon has a Kindle edition for sale, and I bought that too. Surely that would work right on my Kindle! Well, not so much. Unlike with (e.g.) John Fairbairn's Shuei books for the Kindle, the Kindle version of this one doesn't act intelligently about placing text above or below diagrams. You'll often get something like the following, in a way that I haven't been able to work around: one screen/"page" shows the end of some text at the top, then a diagram below; paging forward gives you the text that refers to that diagram at the top, and maybe another diagram below; paging forward gives you the text referring to the previous diagram. Relatedly, it's not always clear which diagram in a sequence some bit of text is talking about. It seems like the whichever editor/publisher/Amazon people does the conversion from pdf or from paper to Kindlese didn't put as much time into the conversion as could have been done. Or, who knows?, maybe it's just a quirk of my now-almost-2-year-old Kindle. Actually, that's an important caveat to all this--maybe there's no problem with the newer models. I'm going to copy & paste it at the start of this point.

I found his writing style like a drill to the head. I didn't buy it after the sample chapter on SmartGo. Which is a pity because the content looked interesting.

Tournament result: 3 wins, 2 losses in the 4k-9k division. If I'd won my last game, would have come first in the division, but there's a reason that guy won all his games. Finished just out of the medals. Lots of fun, wish I'd played better, but proud of what I did manage. 1 loss was from a colossal tactical mistake; in the other, I don't totally understand why I lost, nor do I remember the game. But in the games I won, I felt like I understood what was going on better than I usually do.

Next tournament is in November. I hope to come away without a medal again, hopefully on account of moving up a division and getting crushed.



I can understand that reaction. It's not even that I particularly like the writing, it's just that the silliness makes it feel different enough from the usual to be refreshing.

Occasional silliness I don't mind (though I do think he takes it too far), taking 10 lines to what you can say in 2 in something as short as your average go book is something I really don't like seeing outside of books aimed at complete beginners to the game. I found he was far too wordy and I felt like the book could have used a good editor to trim the fat.

New resolution: play komoku in every corner.

I'm too comfortable with 4-4, and too uncomfortable with komoku. Plus, asymmetric moves will force me to think more carefully about direction in the opening.

Signed up for the ASR League for June. Maybe that'll get me playing more. On the other hand, "real" life is busier than anticipated this month, so we'll see what happens.

I've never imposed a restriction like this on myself. But perhaps you could resolve to play asymmetric moves in the corners? I'm assuming that is you are unfamiliar with komoku, you are even less sure of the 3-5 and 4-5 points.(And I guess the 6-3 and 6-4 points if you're really want to get out there)

Maybe down the road I'll try those out. Part of the point (aside from the asymmetry/direction angle) is that I want to get more comfortable with 3-4 joseki, and I figure I'll learn that best through practice. I don't often run into 4-4 joseki that I'm totally flummoxed by, but I feel out to sea a lot of the time with 3-4, which is not as things should be. So: a steady diet of komoku for at least a little while.

Well. The bad news is that I've failed to make much time for go over the last 2.5 weeks or so. The good news is it's been because of job interviews overseas, and one of them has turned into a job. So I'll be moving to Belfast in August! Was able to play a game at the Belfast Go Club while I was there for my interview--and look forward to playing more there.

Now I'm back, and I have to catch up with my ASRing to avoid getting booted from next month's league... and various bits of "real" life that have fallen behind while I've been away. Hopefully will have some kind of progress to report here soon.

Here's [my day-old memory of] the game I played in Belfast, with [my paraphrasing of] comments from a 1d-ish(?) player at the club [as best I could remember them at time of transcription]. This was a case of my being outclassed in the opening, then clumsily picking a fight and being lucky enough to win it. The usual sort of story for us SDKs: my mistakes were merely huge, his were catastrophic, so I won. I haven't talked to anyone about posting the game here, so names other than mine are scrubbed. Hm... I wrote "see variation" on move 37, but I seem to have deleted the variation, and now it's been long enough now that I don't remember the variation suggested. Oh well.

Oh, Belfast! I'll look forward to meeting you at the Irish tournaments.

Dude, you went from beginner to 3kyu in 2 years!? That's better than most in longer time periods. I don't think anyone can tell you what the best ways to learn are. Not yet, anyway

Kind of you to say I'm happy with my progression, though I'll never be as strong as I'd like (reach, grasp, etc.). Making progress I'm happy with doesn't mean I know anything about how to make progress. Maybe I'd have progressed faster with more real-time games. Even if the opinion of the going experts isn't quite as expert as we'd like yet, it's the best shot at the truth from where I sit.

But really, the most important thing is that playing correspondence games has allowed me to fit go in to my life more than I would have otherwise, partly just due to my personality. I get nervous playing even real time games of no consequence, at least online, and I don't have a lot of chances for OTB play--though I think that'll change in Belfast, woohoo!