Uberdude's Go holiday journal

[Uberdude]

Round 7: beat Barbara Knauf 3d of Germany. Rather to the surprise of Su Yang 6d (aka JeffChang) who was watching my game and reviewed it after, I went for moyo rather than territory as used to by my style when he taught me in China 6 years ago. I had a very good position after c10 but screwed it up soon after with a massive blunder. k8 atari was driven by fighting spirit and was ok, though connect also good, probably better, but g9 was stupid: in my reading I thought e5 was atari on the f5 stones but they had 2 liberties! But I managed to win anyway; Jeff said the loss from that blunder wasn't actually so huge (maybe 10 pts) as the k8 atari was already very valuable. Once I got r17 I had enough, she had to try something on the top side or else in the lower side.

http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/download/file.php?id=3658

Round 8: lost to Denis Karadaban 4d of France. This half point loss was a rather annoying end to a long (overran into the rapid) game which I was leading most of the time. I played better in the lower left fighting and built up my moyo on the right. I should have played more simply in the upper right as allowing him to cut in sente gave him chances but even though I lost a lot of points to win the ko I was ahead as the ko gave me a lot of points on the top side. But the final losing move was the too-much-fighting-spirit-not-enough-counting descent at t7. (Actually as it was a half pointer maybe a later small endgame mistake was the final losing move, but t7 was a big one).

http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/download/file.php?id=3659

[Uberdude]

Round 9: beat Pekka Lajunen 3d of Finland. Lots of fighting in this game with many ups and downs, but I won because I finally found someone who plays even worse than me in byo-yomi. (I really screwed up that upper right fighting when I traded corner for uber-thickness but he could live in corner anyway.

http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/download/file.php?id=3660

Round 10: beat Wai Yi Chung 4d of China. Finally my first win against a 4d+, and a fairly strong one at that as she had beaten Benjamin Teuber 6d and Alexei Lazarev 6d earlier.

http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/download/file.php?id=3661

[Uberdude]

I didn't take a lunch break and this game started at 10 am and ended around 3:45 pm and my play really deteriorated through hunger/tiredness/headache so I resolved to take a lunch break in my future games.

The question of food and drink during tournament play is not an easy one, and everybody is different. Lunch in particular is difficult, because there is seldom time to digest it before play. Bridge great Barry Crane always skipped it, and recommended (demanded) that his partners do so, too. I guess it made him sleepy. I did not have that problem, but, let's face it, the brain runs on glucose. If you can eat healthy so that your glucose level remains fairly constant, great! At bridge tournaments I used to nurse a sugary soft drink, sipping it from time to time. One 16 oz. bottle was fine for several hours of play. OC, it did not stay cold, but . . . .

Yeah, usually I don't like to eat before playing: in 1 day 3 round tournaments I am often drowsy and play badly in the 2nd game right after lunch. Also it can take some time to get back in the zone after a break and you might forget some things that were going on, sequences you had read, aji to bear in mind etc. But that 5th game changed my mind as I really couldn't concentrate with the pounding hunger headache. I do sometimes eat biscuits and drink fruit juice when playing which helps keep the blood sugar level up, I think that game I wasn't.

[Uberdude]

Last weekend I played in a tournament here in Thailand. There were 7 games over 2 days, one hour absolute time each. There were several hundred players in total, nearly all children or young adults (very few over 30), with about 90 players in the dan division. Go has had a big boost in Thailand over the last decade or so with lots of teaching in schools. One of the sponsors was IQ Up, an organisation that teaches go to kids and promotes the mental improvements it can give. I get the impression a lot of the success of Go in Thailand is down to Mr Korsak Chairasmisak, the CEO of CP All (which runs the 7 eleven convenience stores ubiquitous throughout Thailand, part of CP group the boss of which is South East Asia's richest man with some ten billion dollars) and 5 dan Go player. CP All puts a lot of money into Thai Go. Being a dan player helps you get a job with them, and you get a bonus for ranking up! Most weekday evenings Mr Korsak can be found playing Shi Jin Bo 3p (who he sponsored to come to Thailand) at the Thai Go Club in Bangkok.

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Here's Mr Korsak Chairasmisak playing some other guy (4d?) with Shi Jin Bo watching at the Thai Go Club in central Bangkok.

Back in Britain we often wonder about how to make Go more popular. The answer from Thailand seems to be have one of the country's top businessmen be a Go fan so he pumps loads of money into it, with the focus on children and big up the educational benefits of it (even if not scientifically proven) so the parents think it makes their kids smarter.

Anyway, back to the tournament. There was 100,000 baht ($3000) of prize money up for grabs what with the sponsorship by CP All, Truevisions (TV company), the Mall whose convention centre we were playing in. The opening ceremony (which rather annoyingly started mid-way through the first game so the bigwigs didn't need to get there so early) featured some Go-themed dancing.

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For the first round I played on the top board against Sang Hono, a Japanese 6 or 7 dan. I was winning but lost in the end as, unsurprisingly, I played slowly to start so rushed and played worse at the end. Sai said her ex-teacher Xie Fui (a Chinese 6d) and some other were impressed with my play .


To be continued...

[Uberdude]

After that I'll be playing in the British Championship title match against my friend and rival Andrew Kay (he's also going to Poland and then the WAGC in Japan after that). He's currently a bit stronger than me (though I did beat him last weekend at the tournament to decide players for the title match) so winning that would be a nice way to top off the summer and measure the success of my study (though I am going primarily to have fun rather than work really hard to get stronger).

Time for a final update. In case you didn't see the news in the AGA eJournal, I lost the title match against Andrew Kay 2-0. The first game was a poor quality hack-fest after I got disheartened from a mistake in the first opening fight; but the second game was much better, though I lost on time having just made a mistake in a good position.

Here are the games in all their KGS-kibitz glory:

http://www.britgo.org/files/bchamp/2013/game_one_2013_bgarelay.sgf

http://www.britgo.org/files/bchamp/2013/game_two_2013_bgarelay.sgf

Alexander Dinerstein 3p commented the first game, you can see his demo with variations and kibitz here but without his audio commentary.

http://files.gokgs.com/games/2013/11/16/breakfast-2.sgf

And a youtube video of his commentary on the opening: http://youtu.be/W3kBVsW4g1s

Guo Juan 5p commented the second game and made a free audio lecture on here website about it here:
http://internetgoschool.com/lecture.vhtml?ls_id=950
And her demo from kgs with variations and kibitz but without her audio.

http://files.gokgs.com/games/2013/11/23/guojuan.sgf

Some blurb I wrote about the games:

For game 1 I resigned because I played a time tesuji that was too small and died, but even if I lived I lost a few stones and was quite a bit behind. The important stuff came earlier. I would summarise (or maybe detail!) the game as follows. I played the 5-3 point because I wanted to make the "Gu Li" variation of the orthodox opening that we had studied with Guo Juan at the strong player training weekend 1 week earlier as a present to Tim who was hosting. Unsurprisingly Andrew Kay answered my approach at the top left (r14 in the record due to being recorded from Tim's perspective) with his favourite 2 space high pincer instead of keima so we didn't get that opening. The fighting started when he didn't answer r9 (there is no particularly good answer) but took the corner at r3 so I tried to split his wall from his pincer stone (Dinerstein's commentary said my q13 was correct for this). He played aggressively and I made a big mistake with p13, which I knew was a bad move but was too lazy to look for a better move (such as p14). Thus he ko-connected his groups and I didn't get enough compensation for losing the corner. He even took sente for a big point instead of defending. I felt annoyed and like I had already lost and spent the rest of the game half-heartedly playing crap moves resulting in a poor quality game that I am embarrassed will be preserved in history as part of the British Championship title match.

I would say that in terms of abstract Go skill Andrew and I are pretty close now (before this match our ratings were exactly the same at 2368, a weakish European 4 dan). He used to be a fair bit stronger than me but I've improved over the last year or so and his rating has dropped though I don't think he's got much weaker, just had a few bad tournaments (maybe he feels differently?). His reading (which is the most important thing in Go) is better than mine, but conversely I have the edge in some areas of theory and knowledge. He thus prefers to skip standard openings and get straight to middle-game fighting, whereas I prefer a calmer game I can control. But I think this game showed the most important difference between us: he is mentally strong and I am mentally weak. I found it difficult to play well after a mistake (and nervous too perhaps) whereas he keeps on fighting and trying to win. And of course I play too slowly.

In the second game I played an early invasion which Guo said was dubious in her commentary. However, I have heard that Korean professionals like it, and it is also advocated by Go Seigen in his book "A Way of Play for the 21st Century". It resulted in me as white taking a lead on territory and black with some thickness. The result is probably a lead of a few points for white which Korean pros like, but Andrew Kay was quite happy with the result too as he prefers thickness for later fighting and I used a lot of time and am likely to make mistakes worth far more than a few points later under time pressure. I was leading for sure when I got to defend the top right (in record) corner and then he played a somewhat slow defensive move and I got the big point on the left side and he couldn't kill my group or hurt my lower right corner too much. But I had used a lot of time. The fighting on the left side was interesting and resulted in a trade with a ladder breaker. I now had a big lead of points but black had a moyo and a weak group of mine to attack. I managed to live in byoyomi without too much damage and then the life-or-death question of a 3-3 invasion under a 4-4 stone arose. If I lived I would have a comfortable lead, but Andrew killed most of it and I got some yose in exchange. With enough time to play good yose white should have won (I wouldn't say anything as exact as 4 points), but in the end I made another poor move in byoyomi that wasn't really sente in an attempt to get more time to read how best to patch up some weaknesses (was it sente to kill a huge group? the answer in later analysis was yes). Andrew ignored my time tesuji and exploited the weaknesses and I lost on time with one stone to play as I was trying to find a way to salvage my broken position and forgot to keep track of the clock.

So although I didn't get much stronger on my travels or become British Champion, I most certainly did have fun and consider it a great success . Here I am with Sai on holiday in the Lake District a few weeks ago:

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[Kirby]

Congratulations, Uberdude! I wish you the best.

[Milkman]

Hey Uberdude! I just came across this thread and wanted to say I found it quite interesting. Thanks for sharing, especially the pictures!

[Uberdude]

An update: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=12462