JG journal and family rivalry games

Create a study plan, track your progress and hold yourself accountable.
mitsun
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Re: JG journal and family rivalry games

Post by mitsun »

When your opponent is this aggressive, look for opportunities to punish overplays, but make sure your own positions are strong. In this game, W was stronger at fighting. Here are a few places B could have thwarted W.

:b15: leaves a cutting stone at Q15. If you are sure you can handle the fight, then it might be OK to invite W to run with this stone. But why not simply capture at P14 (geta)? The resulting B thickness is superior to the small W corner territory, and there is no aji left for W to exploit.

:b59: might be playable, but it is risky. The previous W extension was not an obvious overplay. The W position may be a bit thin, but there is no need for an immediate invasion. If W later has to add an inefficient stone around D12, that would be good enough for B.

:b83: First thought is simply connect at Q5. After that, P9 would make territory while attacking. (If the territory below P9 looks too narrow, that might be an indication that :b81: was the wrong direction.)

:b93: Can this be P9? (Please verify that W cannot cut.) B would like to get out as fast as possible, to split the W positions here, creating two weak groups.

:w94: and :b95: are big moves, but the right side fight is still urgent. Play around O9 by B would initiate a severe double attack, while a W move there would force B to live small underneath.

:b127: was a blunder(?), but consider continuing with O8 anyway. After that, B can capture the entire upper W group cleanly with one more move, while the B stones below are not all completely dead. This looks like a good trade for B, especially considering the alternative.
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Re: JG journal and family rivalry games

Post by BlindGroup »

I am at about the same level, but after struggling against opponents like this for a long time, I have found a few things that seem to work for me:

1. I think mitsun has the most important one, which is to prioritize the strength of your own positions. If you leave a cutting point, there is a good chance you'll get cut. So, leave the cut only if you are certain that you can handle it. If I can't clearly see how to deal with the cut, then I err on the side of caution and fix it.

2. Don't get caught up in your opponent's game. This kind of hyper aggressive place forces one to focus heavily on the local position. There are two things that I try to watch out for:

a. Once you are alive, solid locally, I find it importantly to force myself to take a mental step back and look at the whole board -- find the biggest move on the board. For me, black 59 is a good example of this. It is much too early for this move. Black is better off playing one of the corners or thinking about how to profit by attacking the weak group in the top center.

b. Along these lines, it is also easy to get caught up in the local fight and miss that sometimes the fight just is not worth having. Better to play elsewhere and take a local loss for a global gain.

3. I have also found it very important to actively think about how your groups interact with each other. Yes, this is something we should always do, but given how easy it is to get lost in the local fight, I find I have to remind myself of this more in these kinds of games. While I don't think this was a mistake, black 23 is a good example. Black definitely wants to keep white separated, but this move is likely to elicit white 24, which then makes the black group on the right a bit more vulnerable. Personally, I could easily forget to consider how 23 would affect my group on the right.
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Re: JG journal and family rivalry games

Post by jgr314 »

another recent game. I am going to review this with someone offline, so no need to comment. I just wanted to have it easily accessible.

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Re: JG journal and family rivalry games

Post by jgr314 »

We have been debating about ways to measure improvement over time.

Does anyone care to opine on these two KGS rating graphs?

I think they are basically flat over the past year. One (jingo) is fairly stable (y-axis is 4k-1d) while the other had a really strange drop to 8k at the end of last year, but is otherwise in the range 2k-2d.

Our feeling is that this doesn't represent how much effort they are putting in and suggests they aren't spending their time efficiently. In normal times, both play at least 15 games a month, do a moderate amount of tsumego, and have a weekly game with a 5d player that they review afterward.
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Re: JG journal and family rivalry games

Post by SoDesuNe »

First let me chime in about ways to measure improvement over time: This can be done in many ways. But one of the worst ways is your rank. Ranks measure progress within the ranking system not skill.

Since I'm watching Hikaru no Go again: At the end of the series, after many losses due to unattendance, Hikaru is the "strongest Shodan". Due to the (now old) oteai system he had to win games to gain ranks (more precise, he needed a certain win-percentages if I'm not mistaken). So his skill was definitely above Shodan but his rank wasn't. The EGF has similar problems with players who join one tournament a year or even less and - if they seriously study go inbetween - considerably overperform (lets not start to discuss rank comparison between EGF member states...).

To measure improvement over time, you need to have a focus point (often a specific weakness). The easiest way would be solving problems (liberty races!, tesuji, life-and-death, direction of play from your own games, ... - by reading out every line you can imagine and as deep as you can), mark the wrong ones and in the end note the overall percentages of correctly solved problems. Overlearn the wrong ones after some time has passed. After even more time has passed, check the problem collection again and see how your overall percentages of correctly solved problems developed.

This way involves one of the most important aspects of improvement: immediate feedback. A problem can either be solved correctly or not - the solution will tell you. On the other hand a game can be won while playing badly and vice versa - one blunder or connection loss is all it takes. (To gain perspective, most of our won amateuer games are won undeservedly in the eyes of bots ; ))

Another important aspect in improvement is challenging yourself. You have to be pushed out of your comfort zone to grow. Again this is easy with problems, just mix in harder ones. Recommendation goes from around 30% to 50% of problems you will learn from (meaning: you will get wrong, the first time at least) - see what's still fun for you.

In a nutshell:
1) Identify a weakness
2) work at that specific weakness while tracking this "work"
3) start over once in a (longer) while and see if you can do your previous work better than before

Regarding the rank graphs: As rank is a snapshot in time I'd say both players improved two stones in one year - that's pretty decent!
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Re: JG journal and family rivalry games

Post by jlt »

The drops are due to the fact that the players didn't have many games during the preceding months. When there aren't enough data, KGS ranks become erratic.

Otherwise, gaining 2 stones in 1 year is a nice improvement.
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Re: JG journal and family rivalry games

Post by dfan »

This doesn't look flat at all to me; two stones in one year is real improvement. Also KGS ranks can have a fair amount of inertia, though I don't know if that's true in this case. Finally, remember that rating is effectively a logarithmic scale.
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Re: JG journal and family rivalry games

Post by Bill Spight »

dfan wrote:Finally, remember that rating is effectively a logarithmic scale.
Yup. :)

Years ago, when I devised a ratings system, I had the ratings be linear, while the ranges of the ranks increased exponentially. ;)
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