My Week of Go Activities

 

It was a week low on Go Activity with just shy of 20 hours. I increased my Tsumego Activity, but only played five games and lost all of them. 

I'm taking a bit of a break until the new year begins.

My Weekly Go Activities - 1500 Day Streak for the Internet Go School

 

I've achieved a new benchmark at the Internet Go School run by Guo Juan, 5p.

I have completed a 1500 day streak. This is only possible due to the fact that I earn a vacation day for every seven days completed. In recent months I have missed doing my problems often enough to lower my number of vacation days to what I consider to be a dangerous level of only 22 days. I've set reminders on my calendar that will hopefully allow me to raise my number of vacation days back up to a much higher level. I had 70 vacation days at one point, but got careless.

I highly recommend the Internet Go School for its lectures and Spaced Repetition Problems. More recently they have added additional Decks of problems that you can study.

This week my activity was way up with over 30 hours of Go Activity.

I am still a little light on games.

I'll try to do better next week.

My Week of Go Activities - BenKyo League Membership Explodes

 

I played only five games this week, and didn't have any lessons with any of my teachers. There are only five different types of activities recorded for this week, and I spent most of my time doing something that I don't even record... building community.

Why so few activities?

I was actually quite busy with my admin responsibilities for the BenKyo league because membership recently EXPLODED with the addition of 12 new members coming in at nearly the same time. We needed to schedule Placement Games for new members to fit them into our own Elo system, and we needed to Onboard those new member so they became familiar with our procedures and the proper use of channels on our friendly Discord server.

Granted, some of the increase in league size was due to a recent giveaway. However, nearly all BKL Giveaway Members become paid Patreon Members after their free month is over. So we are on our way to getting really big really soon.

You can read about the BenKyo League to see all of the perks that you get when you join. If you join on the basis of this blog post please tell Ben that Buzzsaw sent you.

If you are not interested in League Play you can join Ben at Tier 2 of his Patreon, which comes with three interactive Study Group Classes per month as well as access to the entire library of past classes.

The library includes:

• Class 1 - Study Group vs. Study Group (Opening)
• Class 2 - Study Group vs. Study Group (Invasion, Sabaki)
• Class 3 - Study Group vs. Study Group (+ More Invasion, Sabaki)
• Class 4 - Like & Death + BenKyo's "Outside-Inside Looping Strategy" (renamed)
• Class 5 - Opening & Early Mid-game + "The 3 Pillars of Early-Game Moves"
• Class 6 - Invasions
• Class 7 - Joseki Punishments
• Class 8 - Simul Teaching Games + Reviews
• Class 9 - Reading Training Session
• Class 10 - Pressure (Attitude & Power on the Board)
• Class 11 - Students vs. Teacher Live-Commented RenGo!
• Class 12 - Trick Joseki & Their Value!
• Class 13 - Class vs. Class RenGo (Team Go!) No video due to significant audio issues, apologies)
• Class 14 - In-seong Hwang's 'Points Lover' Opening + Counter
• Class 15 - High-Handicap Strategies as White
• Class 16 - Endgame: Move Value Concepts & Counting

Ben is planning another giveaway soon which will be targeted specifically at the DDK level. That is likely to happen on his Discord Server rather than during a Twitch Stream. So if you are DDK, and want a chance to get a free one month membership to the BenKyo League, make sure you join his Discord if you have not already done so.

Our D League in November was our largest League, and one of our most active Leagues as well. It is growing, but is still a bit short of being able to split into two groups. We're going to get that done soon. If you are not DDK yourself please tell your DDK friends to join the BenKyo Discord Server.

My Week of Go Activities - My First Jubango

The news for this week is that I have started to play my very first Jubango with a player in the Clossi League. 

My opponent, fudogami, and I have agreed to play ten games alternating color with both of us playing the Points Lover Fuseki when we play black. We have already made plans to follow this Jubango with another Jubango during which we both play Sanrensei as black.

We've played two games in the Jubango, and so far black has won both games. Active links to the OGS games are under the screen captures of the final positions below.

Jubango Game 1

Jubango Game 2

A good friend of mine, Gn

Gnarly Rags on OGS, has agreed to do text reviews of all of the Jubango games. You can find those reviews as links at the bottom of the chat in the game records.

Fudogami and I will be trying to play one game in our Jubango each week moving forward.

I guess I now officially have a rival. We are both not only in the Clossi League, but we are also both in the BenKyo League where we are the only two 8 kyu players. If either one of us manages to advance to a higher rank, or drops to a lower rank, during this Jubango we'll have to decide how to deal with that complication. Clossi league games are handicapped so it is a complication. We may need to ask him to allow us to play non rated so we can continue our Jubango as originally intended.

Now for my usual Go Activities report:

First of all I would like to mention that the color mix of my Activities Pie Chart may look a little different this week. Those interested in why this is so can check out my mid week blog about Tweaking My Categories for Time Tracking. I refrained from posting my mid week blog post to Go (Baduk, Weiqi) Players on Facebook as a curtesy to those who might have been annoyed at seeing two posts from me in one week.

I've exceeded 30 hours of Go Activity this week which is up from recent weeks.

A good deal of the Miscellaneous Study time was spent discussing the WAGC games of Ben Mantle over voice on Discord with other BenKyo League players. We met a few times to do this after his games were over. Ben is representing Canada in the World Amateur Go Championship.

In spite of only playing four games this week I managed to bring Live Play in at second place with over three hours of time spent. My games are still fast. They are fewer than ten seconds per move with the exception of my most recent Jubango game with fudogami which still came in below the green zone of 18 seconds per move.

I need to play more games and do some slow play practice again.

Tweaking My Categories for Time Tracking

For a few years I have been using an IOS time tracking application to account for the time I spend on various Go Activities. 

It is Now Then Time Tracking Pro available only for IOS in the App Store.

I started with relatively few categories, but as time went on my categories increased. To make things easier for myself I organized my categories by color and by teacher. 

Clossius, BenKyo Baduk, and Yang all have their own color, and certain types of activity have their own color as well. In-seong Hwang falls under Yunguseng Dojang.

For a while it was sufficient to group activities of the same color next to each other, and to scroll through the list to get to the specific activity I wanted. Over time, as more activities were added, scrolling became cumbersome. The scroll to get down to Yang Lessons took some time.

A few months ago it was suggested that I only bother to count certain essential Go Activities in my tracking, which I did for a while. In order to achieve that goal I learned how to to create a nested list for a category that I named Essential Go Activities.

For a couple months I continued to track all other activities in the background but only reported on the Essential Go Activities on my blog using a filter to show only the subtasks of Essential Go Activities. 

Since then I have decided that I will track my activities for my own pleasure, NOT to convince anyone else that I am doing enough of certain activities. So the Essential Go Activities category is no longer in use, but it remains at the bottom of my list.

The most important thing I learned from that experiment of reporting on Essential Go Activities was how to nest subtasks below a main task. This offered me a way to clean up my list.

Each task in the image below has sub tasks as evidenced by the existence of a right facing carrot. I'll illustrate of few of the sub task lists.

Each Teacher has his own set of sub tasks. Ben's sub tasks are shown above.

The Miscellaneous Study category is a catch all category. If I don't have a sub task for an activity even in this catch all category I will use Miscellaneous Study without selecting a sub task. So at any time that I feel as if I am putting in the effort to study, and I have no category to describe what I am doing, I will default to using that main category. The color of this category was designed to feel neutral.

I've added some names to what used to be a generic Twitch Category which was designed to show time spent watching people other than Clossius and BenKyo Baduk on either Twitch or YouTube.

Here we see the activities of just one day showing that I had watched a Nick Sibicky video for 17 minutes.

If you are considering tracking time with Now Then, I would recommend starting by allowing the application to assign colors to your task. You can always edit them later. Start small and decide how you want to organize things as you go along.

My Week of Go Activities

 

I still am taking a bit of a break from go. I only put in a little over 16 hours on Go Activities this week, though I did mange to play six games. I had three wins and three losses. I'm still not playing slowly, but I only had one game that fell below an average of 10 seconds per move, so I am making a tiny bit of progress in that respect. 

I am concentrating on Sanrensei for my openings in even games. I managed to win an AYD Game using Sanrensei and had it reviewed by both In-seong and also by BenKyo Baduk. Even Clossius opened the game during our lesson to click through it to see how I had done because he had seen in chat that I had done well with Sanrensei.

In my two hour Lesson last Friday Clossius reviewed games the entire time for me rather than playing a teaching game in the final half of the lesson. One of the things that came out during that lesson is that I am not doing so well during end game. This was confirmed by the review of my most recent AYD Game where it was pointed out to me by Kimsamsam that I had actually been ahead, but had lost during the end game. That game will appear in the spreadsheet for next week. I lost it by 8.5

My Week of Go Activities - BenKyo League is Going Strong

 

I must shout out the BenKyo League again. It is really growing, and it has a fantastic community. Below is a picture of Ben featured in his new Promotional Site. it is a very attractive site.

The first thing you will see there is my testimonial which is only right, as I am the official BenKyo Ambuzzsawdor.

My games this week were all played as a part of the BenKyo League, BKL for short. I actually played four Main League games in two days this week. I am in the C League which is composed of 8k through 5k players. The B League is composed of 4k and 3k players while the A league is 2k and above.

We even have a D League now which is composed of DDK players all the way from 10k to 20k. It is not too early to join BenKyo League if you are DDK. It is actually the best way to power through the DDK ranks with the help of the friendly players in BKL.

I bet you can't read Ben's Promotional Literature without being inspired to join. If you do tell him that buzzsaw sent you.

I lost more games than I won last week, but I had fun.

Here are my stats for the week.

My Week of Go Activities - Rise to D1 in AYD

I'll start this week's post with the announcement that I rose from D2 to D1 in AYD for the final cycle of the current season. The rise was undeserved, but appreciated nonetheless. 

My opponent failed to show for the game that was supposed to be played on Friday. As a result I got a forfeit win. That game would have been very high stakes if it had actually been played. If I had won the game I would have gone up to D1. If I had lost the game I would have gone down to D3.

I find myself now in a league with players significantly stronger than myself. This has happened a few times before. Two of the players have come down from C3, and one of them came up with me from D2. The remaining two managed to stay in D1 for this cycle based on their records in the previous cycle.

I'm writing this post after my first game which was played with bugspray who came down from C3. The first game of a new cycle pairs the strongest player with the weakest player. He is the strongest player, and I am clearly the weakest player.

I had the pleasure of playing bugspray at the U.S. Go Congress this year in the Die Hard Tournament where we played an even game. We were both registered as 9k, though he was clearly stronger than I. 

Bugspray had a very good Congress, and I suspected I would not win against him in our league game, but I expected to make it past the opening.

Here is where I resigned. I am black. Ordinarily I would have continued to play after the loss of a group in the opening. In this instance I knew there was no chance for me based on the fact that this person is  significantly stronger than myself, probably more than his YD rating would suggest.

I hope it wasn't considered unsportsmanlike to resign a game I felt I had no chance to win, but I did not have the spirit to go through the motions.

Enough about that.

Here are the stats for the week:

I spent fewer than thirteen hours on Go Activities last week. I have been taking a break. I don't have a Lesson with Clossius this week coming up, so I took a break.

Only three games were played.

One of the games was a special AYD Game that In-seong arranged for me with a player whose opponent had also not shown up for their AYD Game. We goth go forfeits.

I had a lead in the game but fell victim to a problem that cost me quite a few stones. I considered resigning that game, but it was a far different situation from the game with bugspray. 

Something bad had happened, but I was ahead before it did, and my opponent was weaker than myself,  so I felt that there was still a chance. I did want to exert a little Mind Control by not rage resigning. 

The resignation in the other game had been a Despair Resignation rather than a Rage Resignation.

Here is what happened in the second game. Whoops. Even more of a woops because I could have saved the majority of the stones and maintained my lead.

Big Whoops

It could have gone this way.

I wasn't happy about this loss by 2.5 points, but I got quite a nice review from In-seong, and I took my loss in stride. It was very nice of In-seong to arrange a game for us.

In kindness to those on the Facebook Go Group, I did not post a link there to a recent blog I wrote about Creating Homework on 101 Weiqi. 

I'll make it a point to add any mid week blog post links to my usual Weekly Go Activities post to avoid controversy on Facebook about me posting once a week.

Creating Homework on 101 Weiqi

I recently shared this screen capture of my daily homework assignments from 101 Weiqi on the BenKyo Baduk Discord Server.

Every day 101 Weiqi gives me six new sets of problems in the categories listed above. I made the number of problems part of the name of the problem set.

I believe you need to have an account on 101 Weiqi in order to create homework. This post does not go into how to create such an account, but it will server to guide those who have accounts on how to create homework.

A user named bani on the BenKyo server helped me to create homework by directing me to an archived thread on another server. Rather than reinvent the wheel I am going to direct you there as well.

You want to join the "PogChamps Unite" Discord Server.

Once there you want to click on this icon at the top of the screen which will show you archived threads.

There is apparently only one archived thread and that is the one you want. You want to read the entire thread called "101 Weiqi set up".

It starts out like this:

You may find everything you need there to set up your homework.

I use the Firefox browser for 101 Weiqi.

The screen capture below will show you that I have not been good lately about doing homework, but I hope to do better.