Almost 2 months without writing! Whoah, this explains why stalkor is always nagging me about my lack of writing!
Well, what's new? I had a confidence slump from the beginning of April until a few weeks ago, around a month. All my games crumbled without any kind of spirit whatsoever, I just made stupid mistakes I was the only to blame. I did nothing special to get over it, I just played another game. I made a quite stupid corner approach that got easily pincered, the pincer was also an extension from another corner. I thought I had thrown my fuseki there, and thought "why bother"? And just played freely. I got some neat thickness, but didn't use it correctly, then I exploited some weaknesses from my opponent... And lost by 0.5 points. Quite relieving, after all, I had played pretty well. Namii's review was quite helpful, too. He had just returned from placing 7th in the WAGC (congrats sensei
!) by the way. In the afternoon after that game I checked the last game I have of Honinbo Shuei. I had just finished reading John Fairbairn's Kindle book,
The Life of Honinbo Shuei and then thought reviewing Shuei's game wasn't a bad idea. I only have around 200 game records from him, and after all his "ability explosion" wasn't until late in his life, so I can get away with having a look at the latest 50-100 games. Far better than the huge amount of Lee Ch'ang-Ho's games!
Today I played another game, lost by 15 after making a stupid endgame blunder, without it it would have been a 1.5-2.5 loss. Overall I'm happy about how I played overall, but of course, I still have a lot to improve.
Next month I may enroll the ASR again, starting from delta (of course) to get some field training. I've been neglecting play a lot lately. I have to consider also moving to 3 NGA games a week, I have to think about it. Quality of play is far, far higher, and the reviews are of course better than what I can get. You bet: the reviewers are Antti Tormanen (best Finnish player in the EGD, former insei in Japan) Jeff Yang (second best Finnish player in the EGD) and Juri Kuronen (7th placed in the WAGC 2012, 6th best in the EGD... odd, he should be higher!).
EDIT: Uh, sorted by rank instead of by GoR in the EGD site: Jeff is the best Finnish player, closely followed by Antti (just 4 GoR points) and Juri is getting close as 3rd, trailing by around 90 points.Clearly my path to 1 dan is being far slower than what I expected, but not playing rated games is also stopping my rank growth. In any case, I don't think I'm any better than 4k in my best days currently, meaning that when I got my 5k rank I was more like a lucky 6k.
@ 
and this kos is good for black
but I could be missing something.
I'm relieved to see redundant having the same answer as I had and being so convinced as I was... This book is tricky!