Yang Workshop In Evanston

I spent last weekend in Evanston, Illinois at a two day Yang Workshop. This is the fourth year I have attended this particular workshop, and it was a great event as usual, even though it was a day shorter than usual this year.

After the Oza I decided to have Mr. Yang review all six of my Oza games using about thirty minutes of my regular lesson time for each game. Although I had reviewed games with Mr. Yang online during my lesson time previously, that was many years ago, and I had never reviewed my tournament games. I had only reviewed games I had played online. So this was the first time that Mr. Yang had seen any of my tournament games.

I enjoyed reviewing the games, and definitely got value from it. But one of the main reasons I wanted to do it was because I wanted Mr. Yang to get a feel for what a typical tournament is like for me. It was my hope that seeing the situations in which I end up with other players might impact in some way the situations that Mr. Yang might choose to create in our lessons games. I believe that everything he sees about the way I play has potential to influence what he does in our lessons, if not consciously, then subconsciously, based on what he knows about how I play, and what I need to practice.

Mr. Yang said something at the workshop which confirmed my belief that he had"filed away" some information from those Oza game reviews, and added it to his knowledge of "how Terri plays". There was a point in a game review or a lecture at which it was appropriate to play a 2nd line move against a 3rd line move which would then allow for a double sente move on the side. He said, "Terri makes this kind of move often." That would not be so impressive a statement if I actually got the chance to play such moves in our lesson games. But given the fact that our lesson games don't often get beyond the middle game, he had to have made that statement based on what he had recently observed in my Oza games, which we reviewed to the end. I am only one of many students that Mr. Yang had taught in the past month, which makes his observation even more impressive to me.

At the workshop I made it a point to show Mr. Yang one of the video recordings I had made of our lessons. He said he had never seen anyone make that kind of recording before. It was just like watching a KGS lecture only it was our lesson.

We did experience some significant lag in our last lesson, however, which makes the video recordings less valuable since stones and text sometimes appear very quickly in spurts when lag occurs. In those cases it is necessary to look at the sgf file to make sense of things. I told Mr. Yang that it is more efficient to view the sgf file from a time standpoint, but it is nice to be able to watch the lesson in real time as well.