qianyilong's journey of adventure

[qianyilong]

So I am a fairly new/poor go player and I really am just looking to improve my understanding and enjoyment of the game.

I am currently 14kyu on OGS although i think that rank might be lagging a bit as recent games I think I may be more 13-12ish.

I am working full time and going to school part time so at most I will maybe get an hour or two every now and again I don't have time for really consistent study like I would like.

I am currently reading tesuji by james davies(a little advanced for me I can't follow all of it but it still seems to be helping) and have been working through problems occasionally online.

I also have an interest in computer go(machine learning is my thing) so as i study go I will also be playing with writing a go program.

Hopefully here I can record my progress as I try and improve.

[emeraldemon]

Welcome! If you're interested in go programming, I recommend checking out michi: https://github.com/pasky/michi

It's written to be simple to understand, but still uses modern go search techniques. The same author has a faster more competitive program called pachi that's also open source if you're curious: http://pachi.or.cz/

[qianyilong]

awesome thanks emeraldemon. I have peeked at pachi a bit but didn't know about michi. This will be really useful to play with.

[qianyilong]

Well I have been lame and not made much progress recently.

I have bounced around from 14k-12k and currently sit at 12k on OGS. One thing that I have noticed though is that my correspondence is much better than my live game playing.

I don't allow myself to use the analyze game tools or to look things up until after the sequence has played out but playing live I don't do as well. I suspect it is a time thing. for correspondence I am willing and able to sit and look for several minutes whereas with a live game I typically get caught up and play much faster.

I want to start re-reading some of the resources I have found and get some regular go problems in. I am at about 10-11 months of playing go of which sometimes I have played more than others.

Maybe by christmas I could be solid sdk. <=9k. I suspect I can make it there pretty easy as long as school and work don't collude to do me in.

[EdLee]

Welcome.

[quanloh]

OMG finally found someone having the same experience as mine!
I also work full time and attend part time degree course at night,
which makes me almost no time to play go!
Let's try to improve together

[Majordomo]

I got stuck on OGS 12k for a while (felt that way anyway) - what made a breakthrough for me was Cho Chikun's Encyclopedia of Life and Death Elementary, which is available as a pdf on Tsumego.tasuki.org.

I uploaded it on my Kindle - and since it has no answer keys you really have to sit there and stare until you're sure - much like the way described in the opening chapter of Tesuji. It really taught me patience when reading as well as a much better "library" of shapes (which speeds up reading by recognising when things are reducible to dead shapes etc etc). Took me almost two months - but I didn't spent that much time really - just some everyday - and sure I still don't have the answers but I'm confident in my reading for almost all of the 900 problems and my rank has improved a lot since then. Most games I lose are the ones where my patience to read slips and I just play something because it "looks good". Especially for close games that go to the end this is how you'll bleed points by playing out gote sequences and such.

I also read Attack and Defence by Davies in the same time period and that is also very good for illustrating key concepts like leaning & surrounding, which stopped me from imploding so often because I became more patient and not just carelessly stretching myself too thin by attacking something without adequate support.

So if I were to offer any tips it would be those two - Go problems on paper or pdf and Attack and Defence.

[qianyilong]

woohoo. So I did end up making 9k by the end of the year. I squeaked in and may lose it but I will count it.

Hoping that this year I can make it to 5k or so. Planning on doing some regular tsumego(maybe using the life and death encyclopedia as suggested above).