My First Go Lesson With Clossius

 

I had my first hour long lesson with Clossius (Shawn Ray) yesterday. I enjoyed it, and I look forward to continuing on a weekly basis with lessons open to public view through his live stream on Wednesdays at 2:00 PM Eastern time.

Before the lesson got underway I noticed that someone in the Twitch stream chat had spoken up to say that he was in the stream for the first time due to reading my blog. Thanks for showing up and I hope you come back again.

I was a little nervous about the technical aspects involved in doing the lesson. Shawn and I met in a private conversation on Discord at the lesson time and started a private chat there. I was using wired ear pods that came with my phone. They worked fine, but we had some difficulty getting started because there was an echo for which we had trouble identifying the cause. It turns out I didn’t realize I had to mute the Twitch stream. My voice was being echoed because it was being picked up by the Twitch stream on my microphone. Once we got that problem solved we were ready to go.

I know that Shawn reviews using OGS, but I prefer to play on KGS, so I have been uploading my KGS games to SGF storage on OGS. To make things as simple as possible I provided a link to the game I thought would be good for review in our private chat on Discord before the lesson began. That worked well.

Shawn brought up my most recent blog post during the lesson and provided a link to it in the Twitch chat, which was really nice. I hope I have some new readers as a result. It occurred to me later that he could easily start a review by clicking on any of the links I provide in my Weekly Activity Report. This gives me motivation to continue with the reports, as they will provide him with information about how my games are going on both servers.

Once Shawn started the review he asked me to follow along on OGS instead of Twitch because there is a lag on Twitch. Being away from Twitch was a good idea for another reason. I was not distracted by viewer comments during our game review. The board was bigger too.

We talked a bit before we started the review about a few things. We did only one review, but did so in depth. 

Shawn types up notes for his students and provides them through private Discord chat at the end of the Lesson. That is a nice touch.

I’ve decided to create an Evernote file for each lesson I take. It will include the url of the video as well as urls for the game on OGS, ai-sensei, the review of the game on OGS with variations, as well as Shawn’s lesson notes.  After I review the video again I will add notes of my own. I will also open up the review file from OGS with variations and add a few comments specific to board positions.

I’ve created a new category to account for the time I spend on my Clossius lessons. I will include time I spend reviewing the video from those lessons as well as lesson time itself. The image above is from yesterday.

If you did not show up for my lesson yesterday, but want to see it, you can look up Clossius on Twitch and view any of his recent Videos On Demand which remain available for a couple weeks. You can even view the chat from the stream. My lesson is from the January 13 stream starting about 12 minutes into the stream.

I won’t be posting about every lesson, but I do invite you all to join me Wednesdays at 2:00 PM Eastern Time on the Clossius Live Twitch Stream. My lessons will be four times a month moving forward.

If you want to support Shawn you can look him up on Patreon. He has a waiting list now for lessons which you are free to join without obligation.