Life In 19x19

Following the tradition.

After fulling partially my 2013 Go resolutions (Japanese 1d and going to the university Go club), this year I want to:
- Reach at least Japanese 3d
- Take class regular extra classes from a pro that I know
- Claim to European Yunguseng League D
- Do lots of L&D problems
- Learn a bunch of new josekis

Good Luck!

You can always start a study journal in the study journal section to help you track your progress. It has helped me.

KGS 9k by June. We'll see what happens after then.

Simply play more. My health was rather poor in 2013 and life was very busy with my wife finding work that involves a long commute. I hope to get more games in this year, I've made a start on it with a turn based tournament and I hope to go to the Irish Go Congress next month but I'm unsure about entertaining any ideas about progress, just getting my body to the board is hard enough at the moment.

Not very aspirational so for the sake of a target, EGF 5k by the year's end. That's around a stone every two months or so.

This year i just want to understand my mistakes.

My new year's resolution is to play more ASR games, and fewer rated games. I had a good period of progress up until the end of last year following my professional advice method, but got too caught up in my ranking and got off track, which culminated in my taking a long needed break from go. Even if it was only two weeks, it helped me re-focus and remind myself that good go takes time, and better go requires processing afterwards, and the ASR offers both. I'm hoping to get better at reviewing when I play weaker players to help strengthen my fundamentals, and to get in a mindset of expecting strong responses by playing stronger players. The ASR is a great place , and a further resolution is to do what I can to make it a valuable experience for as many people as possible.

新年快乐！

nacroxnicke wrote:This year i just want to understand my mistakes.

That sounds like a good one — I think I'll adopt that as a goal, too.

I would like to play without fear. I experience fear when playing online and it undercuts my normal abilities (and my enjoyment). Reading changes from a reasonable exercise to repeating the same two slippery mental moves over and over-- like trying to run from a wolf in a dream. It is that bad sometimes. Positional judgement is reduced to an instinctive worry over local moves as opposed to the global picture-- visually that part of the board is zoomed right in to my eyeball. And because my reading is screwed, the zoomed apparition is not just huge but also hopeless, reinforcing my spiral of fright.

Playing online, I don't know what it is but it just makes my mind 'hot' and foggy. It dismays me because problems I can do easily from a book can take the length of a game to solve, and basic principles of where to play are scrambled into nonsense. Meanwhile my opponents are making 'comments' typing a period or question mark.

Over-the-board games are fine. I have fun and greatly enjoy games at the go club, no worries, it's all smiles and reading sequences and branches and comfortably seeing the board. I think it's the faceless test of playing online that just activates some base fear response in me.

I've started meditating. It's working. I'm hoping to improve a couple of stones this year because of it.