My Love Affair with Correspondence Go is Over

When I rediscovered OGS about a year ago I started to play Correspondence Go. I spent an inordinate amount of time playing through variations and agonizing over the next move in those games. The “Analyze Game” feature was tempting, and I am ashamed to admit that I used it in tight spots.

I started to log my time spent on various go activities in July of 2020. The images below are from the end of my first month of logging my time. It was about 3/4 of a month of activity because I started using the Now Then app on July 7th.

Correspondence Play was clearly dominating my time.

Live Play came in as one of the lowest activities. I was usually playing only one Live Play game a week on KGS for the American Yunguseng Dojang. The rest of my time I devoted to study and to Correspondence Play.

It was when I started to watch Shawn Ray's live stream on Twitch that I really started to question the time I was spending on Correspondence Play. I began to realize that agonizing over moves in Correspondence Play was not building the skills I needed to make decisions in Tournament Play where I would experience time pressure. 

I started to play more games on KGS, and some Live Games on OGS as well. I then started to take lessons with Clossius (Shawn Ray). I increased my amount of Live Play significantly at that point to insure a number of games to choose from for review during my lessons.

In my lesson yesterday we discussed how I appear to be stronger than I was in January when I started taking lessons. Clossius is hoping to see me rank up soon. This started me thinking about how best to show my growth. I’ve been splitting my games between servers. About half of my KGS games are not rated because they are played with fellow YD members as either Official League games or Free League games.  The rest of the games on KGS are played under my fearless account as Auto Match. Those games are rated. 

I have a preference for KGS over OGS. I also play the occasional game on Tygem to insure that I get into some fights.

I came to the conclusion that it might make sense to focus on OGS games to show my improvement. That left me with a bit of a dilemma. I had foolishly decided to participate in a slew of rated Correspondence Leagues. I ended up playing the games in those leagues as asynchronous blitz. I wasn’t enjoying them at all, and I felt trapped.

I decided to bite the bullet and take a ratings hit in one fell swoop rather than continuing to get zapped repeatedly moving forward. I resigned from all of my leagues.

This resulted in eight immediate losses by resignation.

I was 7k before the resignations. I am 8k now, and will proceed to fight my way up with rated Live Play. I have not yet decided if I am going to stop playing rated Auto Match on KGS in the immediate future, or not. However, I tend to think that I will stop that in order to give my OGS rank a chance to recover.

It’s all good.

It’s all fun.

Plug For My Teacher:

Let me take this opportunity to say that I am very happy with my lessons with Clossius. He tells it to me straight, but he does it in a way that never makes me feel stupid or foolish. I am often amazed at his tact, not only with me, but with the multitude of primarily DDK players that populate his Twitch stream audience.

I am enjoying my hour of one on one attention every week. I get to spend that hour focusing on my go at my own speed. I get to ask whatever I want, and I get concrete advice.

Some of my YD friends have been watching my lessons through video after the fact. One of my friends is even contemplating lessons himself, and I am encouraging him.

If you are interested in lessons check out the tiers on Patreon for Shawn Ray. I’m on the four lesson per month tier.

There are live links to my games and lesson videos in my spreadsheet which anyone can view.