My Week of Go Activities: I Need to Rethink My Go Activities Based on Go Congress Review Session

 

I brought home a t-shirt from the Go Congress to remind everyone where my priorities lie. Go is more important than housework.

I've boiled my Go Activities down to three essential activities, and I have stopped recording other activities even though I am still engaging in other activities such as taking lessons and reviewing videos about go. For the time being I am just recording three essential activities. I'll be naming them later in the post and providing a pie chart of how my week stacked up.

I was prompted to rethink my plan for my go studies based on some feedback from In-seong Hwang.

I had my two hour Special Training review session with In-seong Hwang on Tuesday. It was part of the Special Training for the Go Congress that I decided to take part in. In a two hour session we reviewed all five of my U.S. Open games. After that we had enough time left to review one of my Die Hard games which I happened to lose by only 1.5 points.

I made it a point to tell In-seong that I believed that one of the reasons I did poorly this year is because I never play over the board except at the Congress, and it had been three years since I played over the board. And it has been about ten years since I played over the board anywhere other than once a year at the Go Congress, and I have not attended all of them in that time period.

In-seong said that after going over my six games that he believes that my territorial intuition is much stronger than he previously recognized. He said that my opening play was sometimes Dan level. I think that one of the reasons my territorial intuition was shown off to best advantage is that I was not playing even games against players three or four stones stronger than myself as I often must do in Yunguseng Dojang. I think it makes a difference. 

We talked about playing to one's strength to win in a tournament, which I was attempting to do at the Congress at his suggestion, as opposed to trying to play well, which is what I need to do when I play games for Yunguseng Dojang. Some of the moves that were proper for me to play in a tournament game In-seong would not want to see me playing in a Yunguseng game because he would want me to be playing more aggressively. I think I understand what he is saying about the difference between tournament play and Yunguseng play.

He wants me to get more game experience, specifically related to technical things.

He wants me, over the course of the next few months, to play150 aggressive games. 

Last week I had actually decided to play nothing but required league games for a while, but I think In-seong is right that I won't get any stronger if I don't change my emphasis and get more technical experience. I don't think I will miraculously get stronger just by playing a lot of games and getting a lot of game experience, but it won't hurt either.

He asked me if I had ever played any 10 second games, by which I assumed he meant blitz with only 10 second overtime periods. I told him that I had actually done really well with blitz, but that it hadn't helped to break my tendency to play too fast, and it had not helped with my reading either. But I think he wants me to do some intuitive playing. I guess that won't hurt.

He asked about how many lessons I am taking, and he felt that four hours of lessons a week is too much. I told him that I didn't want to have any of my teachers unemployed. I'm not about to cut back on lessons. But he does have a point about the way I am using that time. I should probably stop doing teaching games with Yang and start reviewing games instead. I am sure I can cover three games with Yang in one 90 minute lesson. And spending the time necessary to review my games to find the right three games to get reviewed by Yang would have to be beneficial.

After double checking how much time I am devoting to lessons it actually comes to a little less than three hours a week rather than four hours a week, so it isn't as much as it appears to be at first glance.

I am going to rise to the challenge of playing more games for In-seong and see how it goes. I'll even play some blitz so I get more experience.

I've decided to change the way I keep track of my study time for awhile, and clock only three activities: playing games, reviewing games, and solving go problems. That doesn't mean I won't be doing other things like taking lessons, reviewing past lessons, or watching people play. I just won't be recording that time. I will only be recording those three essential activities and see how that goes.

Here is how my week panned out according to my new system:

I put in a little over seven hours on what I am calling Essential Go Activities during the last two days of my week. If I continue at close to that pace I'll be putting in about 20 hours a week on Essential Go Activities moving forward.

I set up these three activities as child activities of the parent activity Essential Go Activities. By doing this I will actually be able to filter my chart so it shows only the Essential Go Activities incase I add back tracking other activities.

Take a look at the difference between last week and this week.

I lost every game last week except the one game I played with the app called Just Go.

This week I won every one of my games. All of them were won by resignation except the escape on Fox where I was winning by about 27 points and my opponent refused to accept scoring.

I managed to achieve a ridiculous rank on KGS in my quest to establish a rank for my BuzzKill account. That rank won't last for long. I expect to settle in at about 6k.

I chose 7k as my estimated rank when I started to play on Wednesday. After an undeserved win by resignation I was 4k?. After a deserved win against a 3k I became a 1k?.

In the week ahead I am going to try to play more games than usual and review them all. I'll keep doing go problems too.