Life In 19x19

Nearly two weeks gone after my last post.

Week39 (27.09.10 - 02.10.10)
One game on KGS on monday, as my rank had dropped to 3k, i played against a 4k. I won after some serious overplays by my opponent, which i managed to punish.
I also did 10 minutes of tsumego on Wednseday, not much but better than nothing. Apart from this, no time devoted to my go study.
Though i spend the weekend at a convention (Fantasy Days) to explain the game to newcomers. I think i played more 9x9 games in these two days, than in the last two months.

Week40 (03.10.10 - 10.10.10)
I've been a lot more active this week, than the last one, despite the cold i seemed to have catched. I've currently played 6 games in total, 3 on IGS yesterday (won two, lost one), the rest on KGS. The games on IGS were heavy fighting-orientated (i would say, heavily overplayed) games, especially the second one, where we both traded corners and big groups quite often through some big kos. I won by 5,5 points (and lost the rematch with 1,5) but i feel i played to fast and could have done better. But playing against such aggressive players is good practice, even aggressive KGS-games seem tame against that one. It's the one in this post, if you want to take a look.
I have a good feeling for the coming tournament in Bochum this weekend. I make less silly mistake, more and more of my game-loosing mistakes are strategical misjudgments. Maybe my tsumego-practice shows effect, though i doubt it.
Only 7 minutes of tsumego this week.
The problems in "Graded Problems for Dan Players - Volume One" are getting more and more difficult. But as in the past weeks problems marked with "Solve within five minutes - 1 dan" seemed to be impossible for me to solve, i have now managed to solve some of them - within roughly five minutes. I hope this will increase my motivation, as solving such a "hard" problem is deeply satisfiyng. But knowing myself, i doubt i will spend much more time doing tsumego than in the past. (Also in the book two "Solve within 10 minutes - 1dan" problems came up, difficulty is rising again)
I have another day for this week and the tournament at the weekend. Maybe one or two 5-minute problems and perhaps another game are managable. As for the tournament, i strife for a 3-2 or 4-1, anything less would be a failure (and be blamed on my cold )

Games
Only one, for now. I haven't analysed this game by myself yet, so i can't pinpoint any game-turning events. But i think the game is just worthwile watching. (I haven't played on IGS for a long time, so i'm not sure wether my rank - 7k+ - there is correct or not)

Bambus Bochum (Tournament)
I failed. I only won my last game and therefore played 1-4. Interesseting is, in all but one of the lost games i played well and could have won, if my reading were a bit more careful or if i actually did read in some crucial moments.
What can i learn from this tournament? Reading is crucial and while i feel that my reading improved, using this improved reading in a tournament game is another thing.
I probably lack games against stronger opponents. Most (all?) of my games in the last month were against player with a rank of 3k or weaker.
In the second round i played against a 3k and lost (by 1 point..), though its the only game where i have no idea where the game went wrong. He was ahead in the middle game until he made a mistake in the endgame allowing me to kill 8-10 stones of his. I managed to blew the game some moves later though.
I will probably send the game to the teaching ladder, to get a full review by a stronger player.

Week41 (11.10.10 - 17.10.10)
No go study, apart from one or two tsumego in short breaks. I'm preparing my bachelor thesis which is consuming a huge portion of my time. I don't know if i can get some go-study done during my bachelor thesis. So this study journal is probably "on hold" until the thesis is completed.

MagicMagor wrote:I will probably send the game to the teaching ladder, to get a full review by a stronger player.

Why not put it here? You'll get more ideas and faster...
I'm also interested in viewing your matches

Why not put it here? You'll get more ideas and faster...

Maybe, maybe not. The amount of comments here vary greatly. With the GTL i thought i would be guaranteed a full review by a stronger player.

However, if you (or any other) want to watch/comment this game, here it is (with some of my own thoughts and questions).
I'm white, black is a 3k.

I'm still alive and i still want to improve. But haven't really made an effort over the last weeks.

Since my last post i have played some games on KGS and attended two tournaments. Apart from that, nothing. If i want to achieve my goals i need to do more.

Tournament in St. Augustin 30.10 - 31.10
The pairings in this tournament were done based on the GoR-rating, which explains why i didn't played against any 2k but mostly 3k-5k.
Because at the same time the german championsship took place i only played 4 rounds in the tournament. I opted out of the second round to transmit one game of the championsship on KGS.
My result after 4 rounds were 3-1. The lost game against a 4k is interesseting because i thought i had killed a huge center-group of his and were therefore quite ahead.
I could have killed it, but i didn't in fact he managed to live in a seki, which i only realised in the very late endgame. Thanks to some endgame-mistake i managed to make the game close again, but in the end i was short by 2 points.

But overall i left the tournament with a good feeling.

Tournament in Duesseldorf 13.11 - 14.11
Last weekend i attended the tournament in my hometown. To make things short, i played horribly.
In all of my games i messed up big in the middle game, getting several weak groups or even losing huge groups. Maybe i'm just to careless, maybe my judgment is getting worse than before, or am i on the road to improvement? I don't know.. I hope its the last, but i can't be sure.
In the first round i managed to come back by starting a huge ko (actually i tried to kill the group, but only managed to get a ko - better than nothing), the resulting profit from an ignored threat was enough to win the game.
Unfortunaly, this was the only game i managed to win, i played 1-4 like in Bochum. With the difference, where in Bochum i played well and made 1 or 2 crucial mistakes, in Duesseldorf i played crappy most of the time.
The only good thing at this tournament was a player, who quit Go (which of course isn't a good thing, but i'm unsure one CAN quit Go, you can only make a very long break ), and therefore gave his go-books away for free.
So i got another problem-book, aimed at 1k-3k. Now i only have to find time and motivation to do more tsumego

Interesseting side note:
In St. Augustin i played a 5k in the last round and won (he played 4-1), in Duesseldorf i played him again in the last round (still a 5k - though i think he is at least 4k), but lost.

Bundesliga
Oh yeah, last week was also Bundesliga (German team-league), i played at board 1 against a 1k. Should be a game i could win, or at least make it close, shouldn't it?
Well i resigned halfway, not only was i behind, i was disgusted by my play.

Future
End result of the last week? I will play the next tournament as a 3k. If i look at my rating since i promoted myself to 2k, i lost more points than i won. Sure, rating isn't everything, on KGS my 2k-rank seems to be right, but somehow i can't show the same strength in tournaments. So i decided to play in tournaments as a 3k until things change.
The next tournament will be the Berliner Kranich. A big tournament, which i also wanted to attend last year (but got sick a few days before).

Also some more gaming-practice is on my plan for the near future (meaning today and this week). I need to play more games.

I am sorry no one commented your match above. I would, but I am 5 stones weaker than you

I am sorry no one commented your match above. I would, but I am 5 stones weaker than you

Well, i got my review from the GTL. In fact the commented sgf came just before the tournament in St. Augustin, it may have helped me.
At least i know that i didn't play that crappy as i thought - it's just my judgment thats crappy =).

The review is avaible here if someone want to have a look. The game was commented by a 2dan.

On the other hand, yesterday i played a game on KGS - and lost. I could have killed his corner-invasion, but didn't read deep enough and took the variation, that leads to a Ko - which resulted in disaster.
Well, to play more games and get more practice i joined the ASR League. So hopefully i will leave my current tournament-slump pretty soon

Well, to play more games and get more practice i joined the ASR League.

It helped. Though i have only 4 games played this month (minimum number to stay in the league), there is clearly more motivation to play. Also, most of these were played against weaker players - though i have put "give 1 review each week" in the list for my study, i never really did any reviews. Until i joined the ASR. Reviewing a game for a weaker player helps me to understand my own play. So the ASR has been, up to now, a major success for me.

So hopefully i will leave my current tournament-slump pretty soon

One Tournament may not be enough to say i'm out of the slump, but the games last weekend gave me a good feeling overall.
I played in the Berliner Kranich, and scored 3-2. While this score alone may be nothing spectacular, the games are (at least for me).
I said i would play the next tournament as a 3k, but in the end i decided against it and entered as the 2k i am.

Round 1
I got black against another 2k. The game seemed very easy for me. My opponent was intend on building a huge center moyo, sacrificing 4 stones in my territory. Actually i got all 4 corners and thanks to his generous sacrifice a really big side (probably as big as his moyo). In the end i won by around 40 points.

Round 2
Playing as white against a 1k. This game was very intense and may be the best i played at the tournament. I played for influence and got some nice moyo in the center. He managed to reduce it but got probably a bit greedy. I cut some part of his reduction-stones off and a big semai emerged. Somehow i managed to be 1 liberty ahead.
However i was behind by 10-15 points at this time. I'm confident in my endgame, so one option i had was to play the endgame and catch these points up. The other option i had, was attacking some strong-looking (but only 1-eyed) group in the center. I feared i was becoming to greedy, but i cut this group off and acutally managed to kill it.

Round 3
As a 2k standing 2-0 i got a 1d, which stood 1-1 - and i had to take white. The game progressed peacefully at first, i didn't want to make things complicated. But somehow a running battle between 3 weak groups emerged. Two of these weak groups were black groups, one was my white group on the outside. I probably could have let him connect his group and strengthen my outside. but i don't know if this would be good enough point-wise. Also maybe i was to intend on "attack". So when i threatened one of his groups, he mostly killed my weak group, securing his other weak group through it. So all i got from this, was another free move on his weak center-group. But thanks to his big kill, i was that much behind, i had to kill his group to stay in the game.
Probably i wasn't strong enough on the outside to actually do this, but he managed to save his group by connecting. I was left with a thin position in the center and around 20-30 points of secure territory, compared to his 60+ points of secure territory.

Still it was a nice game and i hope to learn much from it.

Round 4
Another 2k, again as black. He allowed me to play a cross-fuseki and i played a diagonal san-ren-sei (4-4, 16-16, 10-10). Maybe he was unsure of how to handle this, but i managed to get a nice amount of territory and by attacking a weak group, i got some nice influence to negate his major asset (a white wall, after a 3-3 invasion).
In an desperate attempt he invaded one of my corners. He couldn't live outright, but might have got a Ko (not sure if this would have been enough to win). Instead he played differently and died outright. (Probably thought the resulting position would be a seki)

Round 5
Again as white against a 1k. I played again for influence, but maybe some of the exchanges were bad for me, i would have to analyse the game to tell. The chance i got, was a weak group of his, which i chased towards the center. This group became pretty big and drove through the small amount of points i had in the center. In the end, after struggling for a long time, he managed to get a second eye.
I tried to use my resulting influence to attack another group, but this one managed to live very easily. No luck for me, as i was behind by a huge amount of points.

Conclusion
The two games against fellow 2k seemed pretty easy, the two games against the 1k were very intense and exciting. Maybe i am actually improving. My goal to play as a 1k at the Bonner Tournament won't be fullfilled (as i'm unsure wether i can attend Bonn at all - and the next tournament i play, Essen in january 2011, i will still attend as a 2k), but things are looking good, and who knows how much the ASR will help me till then?

I would judge opponents, especially those from Berlin, by rating not by rank. Not that rating is necessarily correct for fast improving players etc. but still it is probably twice as accurate and most people don't improve so fast as they tend to believe. I played my first tournament there and got elated after a 4:1 result. After instant self-promotion I had a hard time for one whole year with really bad tournament results, still playing as 2k with 4k rating. And psychologically it is probably healthier to have decent results and rank up slowly with increasing rating than claiming an oversized rank and then having to pass through a valley of tears with 1:4, 0:5 results in between. I know that it is hard to resist self promotion, and they even tell you to do so. But tournaments are much more fun when you are playing at an appropriate level than when you are desperately trying to defend your oversized rank. Desperation can increase so much, that people drop out of playing after bad results. So my advice would be: don't self promote to 1k unless you are at least above the standard 2k rating (1900).

I would judge opponents, especially those from Berlin, by rating not by rank. Not that rating is necessarily correct for fast improving players etc. but still it is probably twice as accurate and most people don't improve so fast as they tend to believe.

Yes, very often an "easy" opponent has a lower rating than a "tough" opponent, even if they both have the same rank. But in the tournament the pairings were done based on rank, not on rating - also how correct the rating is depends a lot on how many tournaments the player hase attended.
Before the tournament i had a rating of 1697, i had promoted myself to 2k when my rating peaked at 1827 or something like that - so i lost a lot of rating-points by then.
The ratings of my opponents were: 1820, 1961, 2134, 1684, 1956
The positive result of this tournament is, an opponent with a 19xx rating seems to be doable/exciting opponent for a even game, where last year a 19xx-opponent meant: Very hard game, i will probably lose.

So my advice would be: don't self promote to 1k unless you are at least above the standard 2k rating (1900).

I won't self-promote myself after this 3-2 now, i won't even promote myself if i play 4-1 the next tournament. Looking back at the promotion from 3k to 2k, it may have been a bit early. As a 2k i had far more 1-4 and 2-3 than 3-2, my rating graph shows pretty well how bad i have been doing since i promoted myself.
Therefore, i don't think i will even promote myself to 1k if i hit the 1900-rating, if i'm (very) close to the default 1k-rating of 2000 i will think about a promotion..

That is the spirit! (My experience was pretty similar with slightly different numbers. And I won't make the same mistake again. Even I try to self-promote in between, I will rate myself down again if it doesn't work out.)

Happy new year everyone.

I was busy the last month with other important things, and didn't got time for my go-study. (Or to be precise, wasn't in the mood to spend my free time with serious study)
I only played one ASR-game in december and therefore dropped out of the league. I will join again if things settle down (which they should around march-april). Apart from this one game on KGS i went to a go-club in Berlin the week before christmas.
Played 3 games, two against 6 stones, one against 4 stones. Only won one, but i had fun in all games.

I didn't made any new year resolution, but i hope to do a bit more for my go in january. Actually i started today with an audiogolesson, "All about invasion", as i seem to be very rectulant with invading i hope that a bit more knowledge on this subject will give me more confidence to try invading in real games.

Apart from this lecture, i played a game through automatch today. As my first opponent left the game during the 10-second countdown, i was promoted to 1k by the system through this empty win.
I got a japanese 1d? on my next try and it was a very interesseting game. He played some strange moves, but in the end i managed to kill his corner and won.
If anyone want to have a look and comment, be my guest.


#10: I don't think i ever saw this being played before. Maybe my answer was to soft.
#31: This is cleary a big mistake on my part. I thought attacking the white group around G16 would be difficult (actually i thought killing was impossible, and therefore an attack pointless), but the way i blocked i became extremly overconcentrated and he got way to much.
#50: Someone care to guess why he played there? I don't have a clue.
#68: Ignoring #67 was probably the mistake which allowed me to get back into the game. With the moves i got on the lower side e8 became almost pointless, my group became strong and i got to make a nice amount of points at the bottom.
#81: I was to lazy to read. I was afraid of the cut but thanks to e2 i had nothing to fear, i should have gone with k5 and fight.

I'm back.

My bachelor thesis is finished, moved in with my gf, and since yesterday, have internet in my new home.

Time to start some serious go-study again.

I managed to get in two games in the ASR yesterday, which brought me up to the minimum 4 games and got me promoted to delta. There seems to be more players around my strength in my new class, than last month, which means the ASR should become more interesseting for me.

On the part of real-life go, tomorrow i will attend a tournament. My first one this year, hopefully i'm not too rusted. I haven't really played that much in the last months, but overall i feel that the rise from 2k to 1k on KGS is justified, so i seem to have made some progress.

I will also start my master in two weeks, which means a 1-hour train-drive each day per direction. So roughly 2 hours a day or 10 hours a week, i can devote to tsumego =).

Potsdamer Panda 02.04.11 - 03.04.11
I finally did it
I played 3-2 in the tournament, but more important (for me), i won against a 1d in an even game in round 3. So i finally got my "Dan-Trophy" (game is posted below).
Overall a really nice tournament.

Baduk Embessador Cup 30.04.11 - 01.05.11
Because there weren't that many players, i got into the top-16, which resulted in a total slaughter (well, what can i expect against a 4d?), but in the end i managed to win at least one game against an equal 2k.

Apart from these two tournaments, the last month was very quiet in go-things, i only managed to get 2 games in the ASR and therefore dropped after april.
Hopefully the next month i will be a bit more active.

The Dan-Trophy
I'm white, the game was played with 7 komi (the sgf-software uses 7.5 as standard-komi).

Note: I don't treat this thread as a "study journal" anymore, because i don't really study in that sense any more. I will try to treat this thread more as a personal go blog in the future.

A bit more than 4 months since my last post in this thread says everything there is to say about my go-studys.

But maybe i have found a (hopefully the only one or most important) reason for my lack of regulary study. I took the game too serious.
This can be illustrated by my biggest handicap - i didn't play enough, in fact i rarely played at all. And if i played, it was like only one game during the day, maybe 2-3 games during the whole week. Followed by one or more weeks with no games at all.
The reason was, as i believe now, that the games were exhausting. Playing on KGS with automatch every game was 25 minutes per player. (The next timesetting for automatch would be 10 minutes, which is a bit too fast for my taste) I didn't always used these 25 minutes, but at least i mostly tried to play a serious game. Meaning a lot of reading, evaluating the position, counting etc... Which leads to these games being extremly exhausting, and me being rectulant to play another one after i finished one.

But then late in august i decided to try out Tygem. The registration and installation was smooth and i could easily find a game as a 2k. In the end, i played a total of 7 games on tygem that day. To a more active player this may not seem much, but it was more than i played in one month (excluding tournaments). These games were a bit faster than my normal KGS game. Something between 20 and 10 minutes basic time per player, however they never seemed too fast.
I managed to treat these games different than the ones on KGS. On tygem i was playing, in the most literal sense. I was just having fun, experimenting. Though i still tried to win and played what i believed to be a good move, there was no selfmade pressure to "play at your best", like there always seem to be when i play on KGS.
I don't know why these two server are so different to me, maybe because there isn't the same sense of community on tygem like there is on KGS. Maybe i haven't grown so attached to my tygem-account (yet?) as i have to the KGS-account, so losing doesn't hurt me that much.
Of course, the next question may be, wether i can transfer this to KGS, and also play there free of pressure like on tygem?

I don't know, and frankly i don't care. I'm just happy to enjoy playing go again, without all the pressure of trying to improve too seriously.

For now i'm off - to play another game on tygem (which will be third today)