A beginner's journal of little interest

Boidhre · Post by **Boidhre** » Tue Jul 15, 2014 7:32 pm

Long depressions followed by much messing around with other health stuff (they keep finding new things, sleep aponea and non-24 hour sleep wake disorder as well now

). I'm hoping to get back playing go but mostly I just wanted to say hello to people and to apologise for my absence.

Boidhre · Post by **Boidhre** » Sun Feb 15, 2015 4:15 pm

I finally kept my promise above and got an over-the-board game in. I think it's been a year since my last game or something like that. I've started a couple of turn based games but have only been playing in them the last few days. I met up with Tom for a game and honestly neither of us are in particularly good shape at the moment, he's not playing that well and I've an ever present fever and other crap to deal with (probable autoimmune thing going on) so the game was rather messy. The endgame is out of order, I messed up the recording. Our chat afterwards was mostly about the what ifs of me not misreading the cut in the top left and if I'd seen what Tom thought was a killing sequence in the bottom right along with if I'd handled the top right much better where I essentially collapsed. My play is a bit all over the place, I think I'm playing some strange moves, but experimentation is good I guess.

skydyr · Post by **skydyr** » Sun Feb 15, 2015 8:59 pm

This looks, for lack of a better way to put it, like the game of someone who knew what he was doing at one point but is missing the finer details for lack of practice.

Boidhre · Post by **Boidhre** » Mon Feb 16, 2015 2:12 am

skydyr wrote:This looks, for lack of a better way to put it, like the game of someone who knew what he was doing at one point but is missing the finer details for lack of practice.

The game felt wrong midway during the midgame. It's been a long time etc.

EdLee · Post by **EdLee** » Mon Feb 16, 2015 2:30 am

Hi Boidhre,

:b9:

P5: lots of vars to study; enjoy.

C10 local shared vital point.

:b63:

were you keeping an eye on W's o12 group ? For example: K12 cap.

The game up to here, I thought you did well, esp. after such a long break.

Boidhre · Post by **Boidhre** » Mon Feb 16, 2015 2:32 am

EdLee wrote:Hi Boidhre,

P5: lots of vars to study; enjoy.

Yup, my instinct was P5 but I backed off as I couldn't even begin to read out the variations so I chickened out. It was interesting to look at when I got home last night.

Boidhre · Post by **Boidhre** » Sun Feb 22, 2015 6:30 pm

Nice evening tonight, went to the club meeting, it was very small just three of us, myself a regular and a new person. I ended up playing simultaneous five stone games with them. I'd forgotten how draining that is even when the games aren't serious. My concentration didn't really hold up and I made two large errors in the end game of both resulting in losing two groups. It was nice to see a new face at the club though, the regular who was there tonight has been making a bit of a push to get more people involved which hopefully works out. I haven't been getting much study done, sick + kids + tired. I've a few games going on Dragon Go though.

Boidhre · Post by **Boidhre** » Fri Feb 27, 2015 8:10 pm

I think my play has started to stabilise and look more like go again. I've been playing on DGS, my rank had slipped back to 12k due to timeouts but not knowing how much the break would affect me I decided to play games using that handicap. This turned out to be not such a good idea and I've had five straight resignations basically due to the games being very one-sided. My rank is 9k now so things should start getting much tougher but hopefully better for learning.

This was probably the hardest game for me out of the lot, it was a reduced handicap of five stones but it still felt too high. I felt my play at the bottom and on the lower left was quite slack. I also made a bad misreading in the fight on the top giving the white group an eye. Overall I thought my play was quite sloppy and I coasted by on points made in the early game. I think I was still far ahead if my opponent had played Q18 and given up those two stones but eh, so much to improve on from this game.

EdLee · Post by **EdLee** » Fri Feb 27, 2015 9:16 pm

$0.02

Boidhre · Post by **Boidhre** » Tue Mar 03, 2015 4:55 am

I'm trying to put some structure on my study, at the moment I just pick up whatever book I feel like and do some problems or read a bit of theory. Is it efficient to study ko and the tesuji for creating them at my level? Or should I just focus on general tesuji and life and death problems to improve reading accuracy/depth instead since that's never a bad idea? (I realise I've only two weird games thrown up since I got back so it's hard to give any specific advice)

tentano · Post by **tentano** » Tue Mar 03, 2015 5:27 am

Tsumego only for ko feels a bit wasted. Most of the work in a ko fight is evaluating how many ko threats each side has which are larger than the ko being fought over. You need to be able to make an informed choice on whether that ko fight should be started or avoided.

Most tsumego collections contain problems which deal with avoiding or finding a ko, in between all the rest. It's fine to work on whatever you think you can get yourself to do, though. It's a lot better than not doing it.

Bill Spight · Post by **Bill Spight** » Tue Mar 03, 2015 8:22 am

Boidhre wrote:I'm trying to put some structure on my study, at the moment I just pick up whatever book I feel like and do some problems or read a bit of theory. Is it efficient to study ko and the tesuji for creating them at my level?

Interesting question.

I don't know the answer, but there are certainly books that include a lot of problems where the answer is to make ko. Perhaps because the results are unsettled, studying such problems may help to develop your judgement in assessing life and death.

Boidhre · Post by **Boidhre** » Tue Mar 03, 2015 9:40 am

Thanks both of you. My thinking was the only way to really learn about ko is to play through a lot of them. To play through a lot of them means being able to spot them. Tsumego for ko seem to have a lot of interesting things going on with shape and liberties and I can't really find a reason not improve on both of those. That said a good L&D set will have a fair amount of ko in it so doing both wouldn't be a bad way to go perhaps?

Boidhre · Post by **Boidhre** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 5:50 pm

Had a 3 stone game with topazg. I think with better endgame I could have won this but there were unforced errors that did enough to lose it earlier. Still, it was a good game and I think my go has sharpened in the past few weeks after so long away from the game: