Yet Another Close Loss

[Bill Spight]

Aidoneus, why don't you play humans?

Where? KGS seems to have very few DDKs.

When I was starting out, I didn't have any computers to play against. Or DDKs, either. I had to make do with a 5 kyu and a couple of dan players.

[Aidoneus]

Aidoneus, why don't you play humans?

Where? KGS seems to have very few DDKs.

When I was starting out, I didn't have any computers to play against. Or DDKs, either. I had to make do with a 5 kyu and a couple of dan players.

Lucky you!!

Sort of like my situation with chess as a kid, except that there were no masters in Northwest Indiana. As a matter of fact, there were no masters in Indiana, though we did have grandmaster Robert Byrne in Indianapolis.

[Aidoneus]

Waiting for my wife to get ready to go to an open house for one of my relatives, so I started playing 9x9 with Igo. I just won my first game with White! According to one discussion--http://senseis.xmp.net/?RankAsGivenByIgowin--my strength is now 17-13 kyu. I'll have to have a drink at the party to celebrate!

Edit: Maybe it wasn't a total fluke. I now have won back-to-back games with White. I guess I'll have to have two drinks now! I'm kinda afraid to play again before we leave and ruin my excuse for drinking.

That is, if my wife ever gets out of the bathroom...

[Mike Novack]

I don't have a good feel, yet, for what is a slow time setting with Go. So, when the program plays instantly, I too often take its lead. I really haven't had that problem playing people online.

Just do the math. A 300 move game is not an exceptionally long game so that's 150 moves by you. If your time for that were 30 minutes, that'd be an average of 12 seconds per move. Normal go blitz is like chess blitz, 10 seconds.

Like chess, modern serious go is being played faster (same thing about sponsors).

But I think right now what you should be working on is breaking the habit of "following" and "moving in tempo". See what happens to your play if you use a 10 second timer (don't touch a stone till it beeps).