My New Opening for April is The Chinese Opening

Clossius has suggested that I stick with one opening for a period of time and then switch to another, and play that one exclusively for a while. I started off playing two hoshi points as black. I have been doing that for the month of March. I was actually planning to stay with the hoshi opening through April because I wanted to spend the month of April researching the Chinese Opening. I did not want to start playing it until I had fully digested In-Seong Hwang's latest lecture on the Chinese Opening titled "Chinese Opening Again!".

I knew that others in the American Yunguseng Dojang might have the upper hand if they had already learned the content, so I wanted to study the Chinese Opening more before switching openings.

Since we have a full month between Season 29 and Season 30, now is the optimal time to begin playing the Chinese Opening. I can consider the games I play in the month of April as part of my research.

Here is how I am going to prepare to play the Chinese Opening in AYD starting this May:

• Review the lectures on the Chinese Opening by Guo Juan on the Internet Go School.
• Review the lectures on the Chinese Opening by In-seong Hwang in the Yunguseng Dojang.
• Review the Chinese Opening Theory video by Shawn Ray.

I had previously watched all of the Typical Mistakes lectures for the Chinese Opening on the Internet Go School. I am watching them again and reactivating the related problems as I do so. I am up to Lesson 3 so far. Guo Juan has modern variations to study too in addition to lectures on the traditional Chinese Opening. I will watch them all. I intend to do these first because her lectures are shorter and I find them more easily digested than the YD lectures. They also have Spaced Repetition problems sets associated with them which is a big plus. Studying these problems may actually help me understand the YD videos when I revisit them.

After completing the IGS lectures I will attack the two lectures on the YD site. I have watched them both already and had started to construct an sgf file of the "Chinese Opening Again" lecture. I will work on that this month. 

The marks to the right of some of these lectures below indicate that I have taken notes on the lectures. It is a feature on the YD site that you can add comments to lectures that no one else can see. I use this feature to time stamp lectures to break them into more digestible chunks. That way I can leave a lecture and find my place again when I come back even if I have to start the video over. 

I also create time stamps for review videos to find the starting points for all of the individual reviews.

Shawn Ray, Clossius, just posted a lecture on the Chinese Opening on Patreon under his members only content. It is just the beginning of a series of lectures he is going to make. It is also posted in YouTube.

The first lecture in the series started with a presentation of things he already knows about the Chinese Opening. He then moved on to look at the opening in games using a Pro Database, and also examined moves with AI. He has plans to include reviews of games with the Chinese Opening played by subscribers in this lecture series. 

I found it helpful to see him using the database and AI resources, and was glad to have the links to them so I can use them myself in reviewing the games I play this coming month using the Chinese Opening on OGS.

The next step is to start playing the Chinese Opening again on April 1st. It used to be my preferred opening until In-seong seemed to discourage it, but now he says the Chinese Opening is back, so I am excited to try it again.