Life In 19x19

After a little break of 10 years I decided to comeback, I was 1k on kgs back then but never managed to beat a 1d player. Probably the biggest reason why I stopped playing was ladder anxiety, I want to believe that it wasn't the rating that trigger the anxiety but the feel of being something important, so while playing caused no issues clicking the "play" button was oddly painful. Anyways years have passed and is a small issue now.

On my return I find out that kgs is kind of a ghost town and the community has split on several servers, ogs seems like the best choice at first but damn it's so hard to find any game after 1k and create this weird cycle where Dan players can't find games so they move to another server which cause that no new Dans players join ogs. I'm a linux user now and the only client that works almost out of the box is pandanet (actually I had some issues with a library but the FAQ section solve it) so it's right now the obvious choice for me, still want to try more ogs but isn't really fun to wait 15 minutes on queue. Fox server works on lutris but if the window get out of focus (like alt-tabbing) I can't click it anymore so it get annoying really fast.

The introduction of incredible strong AI tools are amazing, like most of kyu players my middle game knowledge has a lot of weak spots to the point of frequently having no idea what to play and having this tools available for everyone is amazing. After only 2 weeks of playing and testing what the AI think about a position I have learned a lot. There are some ideas that I really don't like such as 3-3 invasion but still going to use them for time to time because it's important to try new things.

Anyways after all that being said my current igs rank is 2d with a starting point of 5k (I thought it was going to be a slow process after 9 years without playing) with a record of 18 wins and 2 losses, either I magically got stronger by not playing or igs ranks are incredible weak. After a little research seems like kyu players on igs are considered stronger than average (probably sandbaggers) but dans are incredible weak, I'm going to need to get used to all those rank systems now.

The most interesting game so far is against a 1D player where I made a lot of big mistakes but had a hilarious ending



I'm following a simple approach for studying, around 100 tsumegos a day and 1-2 games a day. 100 tsumegos seems like a lot but i'm using 101weiqi which allow me to do 10 problems for each rank with 45 seconds per problem so it's quite fast honestly, I start every day from 10k to whatever I manage to end, currently finishing 4k most of the time and losing 3k every single time. The other problems are from tsumego-hero sorted by difficulty so it take me only a few seconds to solve most problems.

10 years have passed and there are fantastic tools to improve, a lot of youtube content to watch and many new things to learn!

Well, congratulation on dropping the question mark!

NoSkills wrote:Anyways after all that being said my current igs rank is 2d with a starting point of 5k (I thought it was going to be a slow process after 9 years without playing) with a record of 18 wins and 2 losses, either I magically got stronger by not playing or igs ranks are incredible weak. After a little research seems like kyu players on igs are considered stronger than average (probably sandbaggers) but dans are incredible weak, I'm going to need to get used to all those rank systems now.

In my experience people get overly worked up about online ranks. The way it works on Pandanet is that you just play games and if you are not wildly alternating between playing good and bad (for example if you have connection issues, a glass of beer, etc.) then you can reach a rank at which you are winning approximately 50% of your games. My data on friends and acquaintances is that one Pandanet rank is approximately 85% of a European rank and the 6 dans are sometimes real world EGF 5 dans. If you have a lot of energy then you can overshoot this comparison by a lot but on the flip side you can undershoot by a lot if you play to relax.

Regarding kyu sandbaggers. I don't know what research you did, the Office is very strict on sandbaggers and all kinds of misbehaving.

Anyway, congrats on the rank

I have been messing around with other servers now, I manage to work around the out of focus problem on Fox and played a little more on ogs too. Most notably I decided to track my performance on tsumegos, here a list of my first 15 days of the month on 101weiqi:
The way you need to look at it is that starting from 10k I lose at the marked rank (less than 8 solved problems) and the result tab is the final score of those 10 problems so a 6-4 means 6 solved and 4 wrong.

While 15 days isn't enough training to really get better at reading I can already see the problem on why I'm "stuck" (with the small sample size) on the 4k-3k area, usually it's either because I see a non trivial shape and there are too many variations to calculate and end up losing by time or the winning variation it's a ko and even if I read it still play other moves because I try really hard to find other alternatives and in the last seconds I end up playing the wrong move which isn't the ko.


On the game part of things by far the most interesting game was against a 6k on Fox, the player had a record of 75-4 and stomp me without sweating at all, I can easily lose against other players even in this rank when things get really messy and don't calculate properly but this game was kind of simple and just got beat by better understanding of the game. Probably a Dan player messing around with a new account.



It takes quite a lot of games to progress on Fox but decided to stick with my 5K account as a way to "warm up" for other servers.