Life In 19x19

Was close to our local go book shop today and couldn't resist purchasing something. Got "Keshi and Uchikomi."

RBerenguel wrote: I barely won (2.5 points), my opponent missed a trick at the last moment. In this game the winner wasn't the one with the least mistakes but just who didn't make the last mistake.]

Tartakower wrote: The winner of a game is the one who has made the next to last blunder.

Bill Spight wrote:

RBerenguel wrote: I barely won (2.5 points), my opponent missed a trick at the last moment. In this game the winner wasn't the one with the least mistakes but just who didn't make the last mistake.]

Tartakower wrote: The winner of a game is the one who has made the next to last blunder.

Ah, Tartakower! Back when I played chess I hated this quote, it made chess look like a blunder contest. But I liked him (or what I read about him.) He was the "inventor" of the Catalan opening (a queen pawn opening with quick bishop deployment, it has seen a surge in popularity lately according to Wikipedia, back when I played it it wasn't en vogue) which was the opening I used the most until I decided to settle for something that kind of worked as black and as white: Réti opening/Indian king's defense, IIRC (that's opening with the king knight and try to get a fianchetto for the king bishop quickly).

I made a leather half-board to always have a tsumego/tesuji problem lying around. Also, I seem to read better when seeing stones rather than seeing pixels/dots. Half-board is the smallest useful area which is not a full board. Makes it nice to fit Segoe/Seigen tesuji problems, also makes it easy to set any kind of problem on the table (except full board opening problems, right). It's cow leather, for the lines I was lazy and used a calligraphic permanent pen (it's not as "wet" as a standard permanent marker.) I thought about burning in the lines (but making straight lines with a pyrographer is a PITA) or sewing them (quite a lot of lines, it's incredibly boring.)



The picture is blurry, my camera is kind of dead

I especially like your 'semi-star points'!

ez4u wrote:I especially like your 'semi-star points'!

The board ends there

Been reading a few commented Go Seigen games lately. All books from SmartGo Books, first it was Yuan Zhou's The Style of Go Seigen (which I found great, as The Style of Lee Chang-Ho is,) then JF's Go Seigen's Ten Game Matches (which I'm still halfway, after Zhou's it feels very dry but good anyway) and on Friday I got JF's new Unfinished Symphony (I have read the first game commentary already, very good.)

Won the Nordic Go Academny October tsumego competition (class B) with 34 tsumego solved out of 40!

Congratulations! =)

SoDesuNe wrote:Congratulations! =)

Didn't even open Seigen/Segoe tesuji though

Ha ha ha, winning the competition is more important ; )

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.

Been a long time since I wrote in the journal... Well, next you'll be reading is a review of Jasiek's Positional Judgement 1: Territory (spoiler: I liked it, but it's a heavy read. It will also make you improve at the expense of time used during games.) I hope to have it done by next week.

On other news, I finally relented against Namii's suggestions to play blitz games. He said I needed to play more, "period". Need more experience assessing strength-weakness balance to gauge attacking moments. The thing is, my previous encounters with blitz weren't specially good. They were more like a nerve-wracking, anxiousness-ridden experience. Mind you, when playing go I use to be tense-anxious. But it has been getting better lately: last year (err... the year before last, actually) I'd get sweaty and tense before starting a game, just thinking of a game. Last year I got it down to just before starting, and these days (I mean for semi-serious games like NGA or tournament play) I'll get only anxious in tactical situations (and I think it's because I don't trust my reading...) So, blitz play used quite taxing and not fun, so I'd rather not play or play rarely just a normal, 30'+5x1' game. But since things have changed (I have some more confidence in my play, and also, I know there are many things I don't control when playing a game) I gave blitz another try. It wasn't that bad! I played with KGS's automatch feature on blitz (that's 1' + 3x10") and in 10 minutes games are done, more or less. This is so fast I don't even have time to get tense: by the time the tenseness chemical reaction is getting down my veins the game is done. I've been able to play 5 games so far (4W 1L, getting a solid rank of 5k, but I guess it will fluctuate while I get used to fast time settings... after all one of the wins was actually a loss won on time!) and I can easily squeeze a 10 minutes game here and there during the day, since the experience is being far better than remembered. Yay!

PS: I'm not playing blitz with my RBerenguel account but another one, an account only for blitz play.

RBerenguel wrote: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.