My week in numbers (was "Tiny steps towards shodan")

[RBerenguel]

Did the first 100 problems of the Nihon Kiin 1-dan life and death problems, got 19 wrong. Since number of wrong problems grew incredibly in the last problems (started with 6 wrong out of the first 50) I have stopped and decided to re-start it again. A neat tsumego book.

Only 19% wrong answers? That's 81% correct. Sounds like the book is too easy for you now. (50% wrong is about right, both in terms of information -- obvious--, and in terms of psychology -- not so obvious.) As for the difference between the first 50 problems and the second 50 problems, it seems unlikely that the problems are so finely grained in difficulty that the difference is anything but noise.

Oh, having 50% wrong feels "so wrong" when solving tsumego! I'll raise the bar, then. Thanks!

By the way, look what the cat dragged in yesterday!

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Sorry for the quality, I took the picture with low lighting and just enhanced it mildly before posting.

LCH's tesuji and tsumego. I'm missing one of Vol4 (don't remember if tesuji or tsumego.) I returned vols 1 and 2 I had from a friend, now I have my own version

Also...:

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Picture taken by the seller, but my own board is strikingly similar

7mm slate & shell stones.

[Bill Spight]

Did the first 100 problems of the Nihon Kiin 1-dan life and death problems, got 19 wrong. Since number of wrong problems grew incredibly in the last problems (started with 6 wrong out of the first 50) I have stopped and decided to re-start it again. A neat tsumego book.

Only 19% wrong answers? That's 81% correct. Sounds like the book is too easy for you now. (50% wrong is about right, both in terms of information -- obvious--, and in terms of psychology -- not so obvious.) As for the difference between the first 50 problems and the second 50 problems, it seems unlikely that the problems are so finely grained in difficulty that the difference is anything but noise.

Oh, having 50% wrong feels "so wrong" when solving tsumego! I'll raise the bar, then. Thanks!

Well, how do you know the level your game in general? It's where you win half your games.

But yes, you do want to review until you get 100% correct, and then review some more. But the best challenge is where getting the right answer is a toss-up, not too easy, not too hard.

[RBerenguel]

Well, how do you know the level your game in general? It's where you win half your games.

But yes, you do want to review until you get 100% correct, and then review some more. But the best challenge is where getting the right answer is a toss-up, not too easy, not too hard.

That actually sounds pretty spot-on

[RBerenguel]

Week in review:

Solved ~ 540 problems these days (had two 5 hour train trips and two idle afternoons while on holiday). For vols 1 of LCH tesuji and tsumego I had roughly a 10% failure rate, same for tesuji vol 2, tsumego vol 2 more like 25-30%. Somehow this book does not suit me... I also finished the tsumego assignment from the Nordic Go Academy.

I finished reading Come Up to Shodan (got it as a gift 2 years ago already) and also skimmed over old issues of the British go Journal. Next week I'll tackle another tesuji book, maybe the Japanese graded go Problems for dan players (tesuji.) Let the tsumego feast continue!

[RBerenguel]

Got new books!! A friend's brother has been selling away his go book collection, and I have gotten my hands in a few (the LCH tesuji and tsumego above, as well as a neat set of bowls and slate and shell stones before.) Now arrived the bulkier things. Seems like I need to split the post in 2, since I got 5 items and I can only attach 3 things.

How to improve on 5x5, a problem book by Fukui Masaaki I had been looking to purchase since I saw JFs post in the long-dead MindZine website

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Improve your Intuition by Takagawa Kaku. This was an added gift by the seller

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Another gift by the seller, a kifu recording booklet, I think. I don't know how to use it, though

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In the next post the largest things in the purchase

[RBerenguel]

The second largest thing in the purchase was volumes 1-3 of Fujisawa's Dictionary of Basic Tesuji:

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And the reason I made the purchase and added all the rest... Go Seigen's collected games (Chinese edition, 8 books):

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Don't know where to start (well, learning some basic Chinese characters for Go is now a must..,) probably it will be wrapping all the books to avoid damages (some stupidly time consuming thing I do to all my go books!)

[Ember]

It looks like you got yourself some very nice books! I own the first two volumes of Shuko's Tesuji Dictionary, too, and I really really like them. They're like a workbook and a reference in one so that's a very nice thing to have. I hope you'll enjoy them, too, and that you'll learn lots of great new stuff!

On the kifu paper I can help a little, at least in the case if you don't know how to write the game down with it. If it's that, it's pretty easy to explain. There are basically two methods to record the moves and it depends on personal likes which one you prefer:
1) The first method is using two differently coloured pens, one colour for black's moves and one colour for white's moves.
2) The other possibility is using just one pen but drawing a circle around the moves of white (or black if you prefer it that way). T
he "=" below the grid are for ko moves.

I tried both methods before switching to my Nintendo DS for recording and I liked the second one better because it is less messy and you can concentrate more on the game because you don't have to pay attention to using the right colour to write down each move. Still, I think that recording the game like this distracts me a lot and as it is also prone to lead to mistakes (my favourites: using the same numbers twice for two sequences or skipping numbers), so I very much prefer using my DS. Or a tablet. Or any such thing. It's also much more comfortable when you analyse the game because you don't have to hunt down every move from the bulk of numbers. Although I must admit that I come back to kifu paper whenever the battery has fainted, it's still better then having no record of your mistakes at all.

[RBerenguel]

It looks like you got yourself some very nice books! I own the first two volumes of Shuko's Tesuji Dictionary, too, and I really really like them. They're like a workbook and a reference in one so that's a very nice thing to have. I hope you'll enjoy them, too, and that you'll learn lots of great new stuff!

Thanks! I still have not opened any of them, though... Just finished the workday, will pick one in a few minutes

On the kifu paper I can help a little, at least in the case if you don't know how to write the game down with it. If it's that, it's pretty easy to explain. There are basically two methods to record the moves and it depends on personal likes which one you prefer:
1) The first method is using two differently coloured pens, one colour for black's moves and one colour for white's moves.
2) The other possibility is using just one pen but drawing a circle around the moves of white (or black if you prefer it that way). T
he "=" below the grid are for ko moves.

I tried both methods before switching to my Nintendo DS for recording and I liked the second one better because it is less messy and you can concentrate more on the game because you don't have to pay attention to using the right colour to write down each move. Still, I think that recording the game like this distracts me a lot and as it is also prone to lead to mistakes (my favourites: using the same numbers twice for two sequences or skipping numbers), so I very much prefer using my DS. Or a tablet. Or any such thing. It's also much more comfortable when you analyse the game because you don't have to hunt down every move from the bulk of numbers. Although I must admit that I come back to kifu paper whenever the battery has fainted, it's still better then having no record of your mistakes at all.

The thing that kind of bothers me is that the move nombre should be written on the lines... This feels weird, maybe less weird with Japanese numbers (I know just a few, though) but Arabic numerals like we use have a lot of vertical lines, so 1, 7 and others will be hard to write. I expected kifu paper to be like a 19x19 array of neat circles to put the number in. But, oh, well, in any case I'd use my iPad. No need to translate it to SGF later But it's a neat gift, it makes you realise how things were done before (and this I say after having purchased a slide rule a few months ago out of geekness!)

[Ember]

On the numbers: Well, you could use a red or green pen from the start to avoid that the numbers become unclear to read. And I also saw other kinds of kifu paper, like where you write the number in the squares. But THAT would distract me a lot more. It would drive me mad even. Or where there were circles at the place where the vertical and horizontal lines cross and where you wrote the number inside the circle. There's some freaky stuff ot there.

Oh, and I totally agree on the sgf thing. Once I wrote a kifu on paper I was always way too lazy to transcribe it afterwards..

Have fun with Fujisawa-sensei!

[RBerenguel]

Week in review:

Got a shipment of neat books, as you can read above.

Solved ~ 260 or 270 problems these days, "only" (did almost double last week.) LCH Tesuji Vol 1 and Vol 2, a few from Tsumego Vol 1 (I forgot it at my workshop so I couldn't finish it this week...) 15 from Gokyo Shumyo and 10 from Improve on 5x5 (a great book!).

This time for the tesuji volumes I tracked the number of mistakes, got 11 in Volume 1, 10 in Volume 2. The problem is that I feel like I'm stumbling repeatedly in the same "stones." I've used tracking the number of mistakes as a minor kind of "loading" (taken from Bill's improvement page on Sensei's.) For my next run with these two books the loading will come from counting the points in the involved area.

I also played two games from the Nordic Go Academy, won both. I was pretty happy with my play in both, too (not like I didn't get a ton of remarks on improvement from the one that I got the review already). Didn't play any blitz, have not logged into my blitz account for almost 3 weeks.

[RBerenguel]

Live update: won my first game in the Barcelona Go Tournament... By half a point! The recording has a mistake somewhere that I need to fix, then I'll post it here. Let's see how it goes this afternoon!

[RBerenguel]

Live update: won my first game in the Barcelona Go Tournament... By half a point! The recording has a mistake somewhere that I need to fix, then I'll post it here. Let's see how it goes this afternoon!

And lost the two afternoon games, so today's score is 1/3. Let's see tomorrow (5 round McMahon)

[RBerenguel]

Live update: won my first game in the Barcelona Go Tournament... By half a point! The recording has a mistake somewhere that I need to fix, then I'll post it here. Let's see how it goes this afternoon!

And lost the two afternoon games, so today's score is 1/3. Let's see tomorrow (5 round McMahon)

Won today's two games (so 3/5), if I didn't make any mistake I'll end with 1189 GoR (+13 points) so my rank of 9k seems still appropiate :/

[alejo]

Booooh!!! You're such a bad player!!!

And I'm even worse!
We could upload our game where you beat me by 1.5 points and review it... If you want...

EGF rankings around 8-10k were such a mess. In the end, I couldn't wait for three final results to come out and I had to leave early. I'll check the European database every once in a while to see if it's updated...

By the way, I hope I can come back soon and defeat you. Hehe

[Ember]

Sounds like you had a lot of fun at the tournament. I definitely liked your live updates, RBerenguel! I hope you still intend to post this nail-bitingly close win, I'd like to see it.