My Week of Go Activities

 

This week is the second week of my vacation from playing Go. I am finding It very refreshing. I played one YD League Game this week. I spent an hour and 13 minutes on that game. That was the extent of my playing for the entire week. There were times when I actually felt like playing last week, but I wanted to give myself a rest. I'm glad I did.

In spite of not playing I managed to put in over 33 hours on Go Activities. Watching Others Play came in first followed by Clossius Lesson (Others). I was catching up on lessons played by my YD friends who are also Clossius students. I also focused on Spaced Repetition Problems from Guo Juan’s Internet Go School.

I’ve made a good start back with playing even though my company has not yet gone home. They will be here through tomorrow afternoon. However, if I were to achieve my 20 game goal for my lesson next week, I needed to start playing four games a day on Sunday. Here is my progress so far for the week. I won four out of five of my games plus I ranked back up to 8k on OGS.

The one loss was embarrassing, but instructive. I lost focus, and got confused about the status of some stones. I had previously cut off three stones which I could capture easily to get myself out of trouble. I got flustered and forgot that fact. If I had kept my focus I would have easily gone on to win that game even though I lost a few points in the middle of the board. Here is the game for anyone who is interested.

I play a little trick on myself in setting my goal for 20 games by putting the day of the week I intend to play games into the handicap cell on my spreadsheet. That helps to keep me on track.

Something big that happened this week is that I had a frank discussion with my husband about the time I spend studying go. It turns out that I had been focusing on Go Problems and Go Videos above Live Play because I wanted to be able to be interrupted from my study if my husband wanted my attention. I explained this to him, and he agreed to accept the fact that, in order for me to play my games during the  day, when I am more fresh, that I will need to be inaccessible to him for periods of time in the neighborhood of 30 minutes at a time. I think this is going to be a literal game changer. It will definitely make me more willing to play in the middle of the day. I had often been postponing my game play for the late evening after my husband was asleep, which was not optimal for me at all.

I'm feeling a lot better about playing again.