Life In 19x19

xcaissa wrote:I'm going to practice recording...

Yes, practice (before the actual tourney) is very important.
Another method worth trying is the simple point-and-shoot digital camera --
make sure it does NOT have a POP-OUT lens (mechanical movements drain the battery much faster),
that it does have a very fast response time (under 2 seconds total from Off to photo taken and back to Off again),
disable the flash, disable all beeps and chimes, use the lowest resolutions (e.g. VGA 640x480) --
advantages: no need to "find" the moves on your iGadget/galaxy/Surface/laptop,
much less "thinking" (conserve your brain power for the actual game), less chance of recording wrong moves.
I've been doing this since 2007, 5 years, and have taken tens of thousands of photos this way.

One opponent of mine just brought a laptop with integrated camera and set it beside the board. It would be tedious to reconstruct the game, but it is then zero distraction.

I've recorded all my tournament games since I started (sometime around 2003), and beginning about 17k.

Yes, its distracting. And I figure I lose about 2-4 stones in "handicap" strength (not as much any more, but more back then). But to me its worth it to have a record for later review.

And with practice, I've since gotten better with remembering most of my games (but I'd still rather record them for now).

IMHO, do it for several reasons :

* You can have a review by a stronger player when you want.
* According to my experience, touching a screen after playing don't distract me.
* You can more easily disconnect from a local series of moves to have a more global view (depends of people).
* ...

I have recorded all my games @ EGC excepted one because I made a mis-mannipulation and the soft get back without saving. (I won 7 games out of 9)