My Week of Go Activities - Yilun Yang Returns

 

I spent 32 hours on Go Activities this week. 

Tsumego at 101 Weiqi came in at the number one spot.

The big news this week is that I am starting lessons again with Yilun Yang. I first started lessons with Yang in 1998.  I had taken a workshop with him in 1997 after which I attended my first U.S. Go Congress. It was a half a year after that when I began lessons with Yang.

My first round of lessons with Yang lasted for 5.5 years. The reason I stopped in 2003 was that I was still teaching and I felt as if I was not devoting enough time to go to justify continuing with lessons.

This is from our final lesson in 2003.

In 2007 I retired from education and started up lessons with Yang again and began blogging. My second round of lessons with Yang lasted for 8.5 years. I got to the point where the only games I played were with Yang and at the yearly Go Congress. I should have gotten more active with go and continued with lessons, but I stopped once again believing that I would never start lessons again.

Things changed though in 2019 when I joined the American Yunguseng Dojang. I made many friends online, and got a lot more active with playing and studying. I took on two teachers for private lessons, Shawn Ray and Ben Mantle. 

As the Go Congress got closer I started thinking that I should start up with Yang again to complete my excellent team of teachers. I had my first lesson back yesterday afternoon. I numbered it 337a using the same numbering system I had used in my previous lessons. Those lessons were two hours each and almost always resulted in two files so I would append the number of the lesson with a letter. Sometimes I would have Yang review games and end up with four files for a lesson. My new lessons with Yang are an hour and a half so if we do a teaching game it will only be one game rather than the two games we used to play, but there will still be occasions when I have him review games rather than play a teaching game, so I'll continue to use the letters.

So I just had my 337th lesson with Yilun Yang. I hope there will be many more.

I'm a little late with posting this week. I am already four days into the next week and it is looking decidedly unbalanced so far.

Ben streamed for 12 hours straight three days in a row and I managed to be in attendance for about two thirds of the time. He was doing a speed run up the ranks from 8k to 8d. He didn't get all the way because the weaker players especially don't seem to know how to resign.