I didn't get a (grade-wise) promotion either, despite getting (literally) excellent performance reviews and even discussing the promotion with my superiors. They told me, they would look into it and later when I asked how it was looking, the relevant partner told me: "He wouldn't know, why the promotion shouldn't go through."

Since I already know him for a couple of years I knew this sentence meant, he has no clue about the status of my promotion-process and mostly he does not care about such things either. But that would been okay, if he actually had entered my promotion into the process. Turns out he didn't.

I'll adress this with my more immediate supervisor after my vacation because I want to know why. If they don't care about my career, I won't care about delivering excellent results, too.

That makes me wonder: how would I have to play differently in order to have a better chance giving 5 stones to a 2k? In this game, my plans had some holes that were too obvious - if you just read a few moves deep, you could find those holes. And he often did, whether explicitly or by intuition. So to win, one hypothesis I have is that I need to have a deeper plan. It can't have holes at the shallow branches, which are easy to find. That means that I can't just play something that I know isn't completely working. I need to search deeper - look deeper for the answer.

My psychological takeaway from this game is: search deeper - don't leave obvious holes in my plan.

Kirby, to help you not try to win a handi game too quickly I think you need to grok that you only need to win by half a point at the end on move 250. Against a 5 stone weaker player you can quite easily pick up 10+ points in endgame, so being 10 points behind at move 150 is fine. Maybe an example will help, here's a 4 handicap game I played at the club recently against Phil, now 1 kyu but generally 1 dan. Beating him on 4h is tougher than another 1k/1d Matt who likes to fight so gets himself into complex middle-game positions I can out-muscle him, but Phil has quite an annoying "I'll just grab these points and be simple and win cos I started so far ahead right?" style (he's an accountant). This was a tough game, and it felt pretty hopeless around move 126 but at least I had a big space I could attempt to live inside and stake my chances on that. Despite living there (black 178 had an amusing tesuji he missed to break both miais) KataGo showed I was still behind but at least I didn't need to resign and around move 190 finally took the lead when I made my dodgy groups live whilst grabbing big endgame. KataGo is useful for handicap games because the winrate stays super high for black for ages, but you can see the point deficit slowly erroding over the course of the game. You don't need the gradient to be that steep at the start. Have a look at your game against Ryan Li for another example, how many points had he caught up by move 50, 100, 150?

Therefore it is necessary to be patient and create lots of opportunities for Black to lose.

Well, tomorrow is the tournament. I’ll be driving there this evening, and plan to play several games this weekend.

Because of that, today I’m going to skip my lunchtime game and do some problems instead. Today’s set will be from a set of books I bought in Korea, roughly translated as “The Top 1%”.

I think the problems are too easy to have that title, but meh, I guess that’s marketing.