My Weekly Go Activities

 

I spent nearly 40 hours on Go Activities this week. I only played seven games this week, but I spent nearly six hours playing them. That is nearly an hour per game. All but two of them were unrated league games played on either KGS or OGS. The only two rated games I played were on Fox. 

Based on my recent performance on Fox I knew that I was likely to rank down. I only needed two more losses to accomplish that. So relatively late in the night on Wednesday I bit the bullet and played those game. 

I now have a fresh start on Fox as a 6 kyu. 

I have continued my concentration on Go Problems this week. I met my goal of over one thousand problems on the 101 Weiqi web site.

I believe that working on go problems helped me win my most recent Canadian League Game. There was a life and death problem in the upper right of the board. I took the time to read it. I trusted my reading. After my opponent gave up and played elsewhere I continued to trust my reading, and I did tenuki as well. I was proud of myself. I got a good lead in that game which my opponent whittled away at in the end game. I managed to win it by 9.5.

Here is the life and death situation. 

AI would have preferred that I play at m19 rather than p19. A friend of mine, Drewch, who clicked through the game later, suggested m19 as well. 

During the game I considered m19, but was not sure of the continuation. It gave me comfort to make two rooms with the p19 move. 

I did manage to read that playing p19 allowed me to answer m19 with n19. That is one eye. I read that I could answer q18 with r19. That was easy. There was a more challenging move for black.  I read if black played s19 I could not r19 which made me a little crazy. But then I miraculously read that I could q18 because black could not r19. That would leave a three stones capture. That would give me an eye because a throw in would not spoil the eye of a three stone capture as it would with a two stone capture.

I was proud of my reading.

To be clear I had at least twenty minutes on my clock when I ran into the life and death situation. I have little doubt that if I was in overtime that I would have had trouble with it. I am just now beginning to actually read in my games. It is kind of a miracle that I have gotten as far as I have on instinct and principles. Be that as it may, it is now time to learn how to read.

Most of my life and death skills to this point have been based on the Life and Death Principles of Yilun Yang. You can read about his method of approaching Life and Death on Sensei's Library.

My goal for next week is to review more of my losses on a real board, and to play more rated games on Fox. I also need to learn how to avoid making stupid mistakes late in the game. I need to learn how to bring a won game home. I lost two games this week that clearly should have been won. One of them I lost because I trusted my reading, but I was wrong. I don't feel too bad about that. I just need to get better at reading.