SDK here we come

jts · Post by **jts** » Tue Sep 06, 2011 9:03 pm

Look at the times in the second game. Your opponent spent 13 minutes thinking about the crucial sequence (21:00 to 8:30); you spent two minutes (22:00 to 19:30). Towards the end, you began playing really fast, as though you were hoping to trick him into doing something sloppy, or had given up hope.

Tsumego would help too. That false eye/snapback/shortage of liberties would look glaringly obvious if you had practiced it more. But you should try to give yourself time to read things out, too.

Suji · Post by **Suji** » Tue Sep 06, 2011 10:53 pm

jts wrote:Before even thinking about solving the problems - do you think the content of the Davies' Tesuji book is mind-boggling?

Sometimes, yes.

jts wrote:Look at the times in the second game. Your opponent spent 13 minutes thinking about the crucial sequence (21:00 to 8:30); you spent two minutes (22:00 to 19:30). Towards the end, you began playing really fast, as though you were hoping to trick him into doing something sloppy, or had given up hope.

Yeah, I really need to slow down. It's a really bad habit. I like your idea of a checklist, so I'm going to try and see if I can come up with a decent checklist.

jts wrote:Tsumego would help too. That false eye/snapback/shortage of liberties would look glaringly obvious if you had practiced it more. But you should try to give yourself time to read things out, too.

Okay, I see your point, and I *might* have to be beaten with a sludge hammer here. I'm stubborn, but you have made the point beautifully that tsumego is actually a necessity in order to get better. I may not like it, but I'm going to have to do tsumego.

Suji · Post by **Suji** » Tue Sep 06, 2011 10:56 pm

moonrabbit wrote:In the second game, at move 93, Black to move can save his stones. Think about it for a minute.

M19

Thanks for pointing this out. It gave me a chance to actually find the >correct< move.

Also, Tsumego - 1, Suji - 0. Argh.

Tami · Post by **Tami** » Wed Sep 07, 2011 6:34 am

Hi Suji,
As the others said, you need to get stuck into the tsumego. If you get a book of easy problems and just do 2 or 3 at a time, but often, you should not find it too hard or boring. Do you have James Davies Tesuji? If you read that little and often it should have you in the SDKs in no time. I hear the Graded Go Problems for Beginners are also really good.

Suji · Post by **Suji** » Thu Sep 08, 2011 9:54 pm

Okay, my new study plan. My goal: 9k at the 1st of December.

1. Play at least once per day. The most important ingredient. Practical knowledge is always good to have. Playing will help hone the skills that I will hopefully develop.

2. Do 5-10 minutes of Tsumego daily. Although I absolutely hate problems, I'm going to do them. The reasoning is simple. I want to improve, and the fastest way to improvement is to do tsumego. Just to draw a parallel with chess, I've rarely done tactical chess problems. I've also not improved in years. Basically, my chess rating on FICS would skyrocket if I did tactical problems, but the fact that I'm too lazy to do problems means that I'm stuck at my current level. I don't want to be the eternal DDK who never advances past 10k and bounces between that and 15k. My desire to improve is starting to outweigh the dislike of problems. Also, I don't want to burn out, so I'm not going to overdo this part.

Another thing, I'll learn patience doing problems, which will be worth it's weight in gold.

3. Slow down while playing games. This is the biggie. I'll admit that I'm scared to lose on time. I need to slow down and think during the game. I, also, need to learn to calculate and evaluate rather than just use my intuition. jts suggested a checklist, and I find this to be a good idea so I'm going to make a checklist and follow it.

This has roots in my exclusive chess days. When I made the switch from Yahoo! chess to FICS, I made up my mind to never lose on time. To this day, I've never lost on time (while at my computer) in a game 15+ minutes long. I'm also afraid of making a mistake in time trouble. Another related thing, too, is that if my opponent plays fast, I feel that I have to play fast as well. This is going to be probably the most challenging thing for me.

4. Obviously, have fun. ALL of the forum members, I feel, are pretty good about being willing to help. This creates a sense of community that, I feel, that the chess community lacks.

Without further ado, here are my latest games:

Game 1: My laptop decided to blow up (It couldn't detect the processor. It probably cooked itself to death.) just hours prior, so even though that my friend was letting me borrow a laptop for a few days I wasn't in the mood to give 100% this game, so I eventually resigned.

Game 2: Meh. I won though I still played too fast.

Game 3: Again meh. I'm still playing too fast. Yes, this was right after the last one. I was behind at the end, but he resigned since the coffee shop that he was at was closing.

I still have a lot to improve on.

Suji · Post by **Suji** » Fri Sep 09, 2011 11:29 pm

I played once today. I'm using automatch for my games, so I'm sometimes going to play people weaker than I am. I don't see this as a problem, but I "need" to lose to someone stronger to get better. Oh, well, I'll play people like that 50% percent of the time.

I've also bought Go Grinder for my iPod touch. I'm going to go through the beginner problem set that they give that has 150 problems. After looking at the first three problems they seem to be acceptable. I'm going to do them, but here's the catch, I'm only going to do a few per time. That way, I don't get sick of it, and I can get better at Go.

Here's the game.

I still need to work on slowing down and doing tsumego. Though I'm glad that I won this, I still want to get better. Hence, the study journal.

Li Kao · Post by **Li Kao** » Sat Sep 10, 2011 1:10 am

21 Just capture the ladder stones
39 extent to O19. keep him seperated. Also notice that N12 is now useless and you captured anyways. So move 21 was wasted completely
J17 doesn't gain you much.
121 at D15. Then his stones are simply dead.
143 why take the ko? If you play at B17 he will have only one eye
147 Why take another ko? Defend at C18
150 Now he's alive
151,153,155 all very small. Three moves which gained you only a few points total. How about atari on the outside?
173 J10 kills his for stones. Connect and die.
195 Very small. Perhaps 1 or 2 points.
201 Very small

Suji · Post by **Suji** » Tue Sep 20, 2011 4:49 pm

I didn't make time to play last week and I've played two games this week. The second one was the L19 tournament game with gurujeet, which he won. The first one was some random person who tried to mass undo right in the middle of the game. I granted him two and decided that I wouldn't do anymore, so I clicked on never allow eventually.

Here's the first game.

Top things I need to work on is to slow down, and play simple moves.

Here is the tournament game with gurujeet, whom I immensely enjoyed playing. After he lived in the lower right, I kinda went on an aggressive spree. I eventually resigned.

I have a plan for doing tsumego. I'm going to treat them as math problems, and write down every variation that I can think of. Obviously, I'm going to do this from the initial position, and as I get better, I'm just going to do stuff in my head. I'm going to start off with five ish a day (Don't know when I'm going to start doing this, but it's at least in the works). As for playing games, I just need to slow down.

jts · Post by **jts** » Tue Sep 20, 2011 9:09 pm

Just a quick note on your first game: you should capture with :w20:

. The sort of move you're making only makes sense if a black move at G6 is extremely valuable. Because you don't capture, black gets two more sente moves locally, and you still don't capture, so then the ladder becomes broken a few moves later (although I don't think either of you realize).

I get the sense that many players learn "when you have meaningless stones in atari, don't waste a move capturing until the endgame", and then somehow get the idea that it's a crime to ever take stones off the board if they can come up with some complicated plot to keep them dead without capturing instead. More often that not, if your opponent makes a threat and one way to defend against the threat is to capture some stones, capturing the stones is the best move, robbing him of all possible forcing moves, peeps, ladder-breakers, and other miscellaneous aji in the future.

Suji · Post by **Suji** » Tue Sep 20, 2011 11:07 pm

jts wrote:Just a quick note on your first game: you should capture with . The sort of move you're making only makes sense if a black move at G6 is extremely valuable. Because you don't capture, black gets two more sente moves locally, and you still don't capture, so then the ladder becomes broken a few moves later (although I don't think either of you realize).

I get the sense that many players learn "when you have meaningless stones in atari, don't waste a move capturing until the endgame", and then somehow get the idea that it's a crime to ever take stones off the board if they can come up with some complicated plot to keep them dead without capturing instead. More often that not, if your opponent makes a threat and one way to defend against the threat is to capture some stones, capturing the stones is the best move, robbing him of all possible forcing moves, peeps, ladder-breakers, and other miscellaneous aji in the future.

Okay, that's nice to know. I don't think I understand the concept of aji very well. In fact, I *know* I don't.

Life In 19x19

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