My Go Teacher: Clossius

This is the fourth post in my series about my go teachers. Today I feature Shawn Ray, better known as Clossius. He appears above doing a DDK lecture at the 2022 U.S. Go Congress.

I came upon the Clossius Twitch channel in the Fall of 2020 through links on OGS. I spent a good deal of time watching Clossius do game reviews and lessons on his stream. I liked what I saw and decided that I wanted some of that for myself. Rather than try to get in on the free game reviews, I decided to go all in with lessons.  I subscribed at the level of four lessons per month.  The lessons were one hour each. I remember thinking to myself, "Let's give the AGA 4 dan a try." That was the beginning of a long teaching relationship. I am still with Shawn after three years.

My first lesson with Clossius was on January 13, 2021. Since then I have completed 145 one hour lessons with him. At first I would take a lesson every week. More recently I am taking two hour lessons on alternate weeks. I do this by combining two of my one hour lessons. I have found that I like the longer lessons. It has been over a year since I took a one hour lesson.

My lessons with Clossius are taught publicly on Twitch. I have a regular time for my lessons which is Friday afternoon at 2:00 PM EST. If you don't see me on the Clossius stream at that time it means that it is one of my weeks off from lessons.

A year and a half after I started to study with Clossius we finally met at the U.S. Go Congress in Estes Park, Colorado.

It was for Clossius that I came up with my spreadsheet for recording my games. I used to put links to my games in my blog for him. At first we used my blog as a springboard to start our game reviews, but creating a spreadsheet allowed me to customize the information I provided for each game.

Since I play on multiple servers it made sense to use a spreadsheet. I didn't want to limit our reviews to only the games I played on OGS, and I wanted to be able to give Clossius the big picture of how I was doing for the week. He likes to see details on all of the games I have played when selecting which games to review.

I also record links to my lessons on my spreadsheet and keep track of how many lessons I have backlogged as well as my ranks for different servers and leagues.

This is what a recent week looked like on my spreadsheet:

Clossius teaches DDK and SDK players up through about 4 kyu. He is best known for his Clossi Approach Method  for which he created a series of videos called  The Clossi Approach Series in which he plays games with players from 25 kyu through 5 kyu. The series starts with 9x9 progresses to 13x13 and at about 15 kyu it moves on to 19x19. There are about 50 hours of video content in the series and access to it is free.

More recently Clossius has developed a go problem web app called Tsumego Dragon. His app has 31 different categories of problem types. The problem types include Capture, Connection, Net, Ladder, J Group, Throw-in, Crane's Nest and many more. The app can be used on your phone or your desktop. I prefer to use it on the phone. It has recently come out of beta and has a subscription fee of $10.00 a month, but the app can be used for free to solve 20 problems per hour. If you have the patience to come back with frequency throughout the day you can solve quite a few problems as evidenced by a non-subscriber who manages to maintain a position in the top ten of the Monthly Leaderboard despite the problem limit. I subscribed during the alpha stage of development and use Tsumego Dragon daily.  I recommend subscribing for those who want to support the development of this app. 

Using Tsumego Dragon religiously has brought me to 5th place for All Time on the Leaderboard just two places behind Clossius himself.

My favorite feature of the app is the ability to limit the level of problems I am doing.  I am currently completing every level 0-1 problem in the app. It is taking me more than one day to do so. As much as I enjoy the Daily Challenge I especially like solving problems by category.

Take a look at the Tsumego Dragon app. Also tune in to the Clossius Twitch Stream to watch Shawn teaching lessons and doing Open Game Reviews.

At the current time I believe that I have more lessons under my belt with Clossius than anyone else. If you are interested in lessons you can find out about them on his web site. Clossius offers a sample lesson you can view,

Now for my usual go content:

Last week was a moderately active week for Go Activity with over 16 hours with the largest chunk devoted to Live Play.

I played five games which took three and a half hours.

My new thing is playing even games with any level player. I have been enjoying it as an opportunity to experiment with playing a low pincer to the high approach to the 3-4.

I had a disastrous start to the new season of the NAOL. I ended up playing a 7 kyu who is listed as an 11 kyu for the NAOL league which didn't seem right to me. He totally outplayed me, though I did get a good result in the lower left corner from the joseki I am working on. Ben told me that I could have pushed one more time at b8 though.

I am white.

Back to my concern about playing a 7k in an NAOL division composed mostly of 11k players. I happen to be a 9 kyu who is listed as an 11k kyu in the NAOL league based on the results of six seasons in the league. Perhaps I appear to be under ranked as well. I am allowing my rating to adjust naturally in NAOL, and perhaps my opponent became a lot stronger in the recent season that he spent away from NAOL, so there is that to consider. The way I figure it is that if everyone whose OGS rating is not in sync with their NAOL rating asks for it to be adjusted, then we are really just using OGS ranks rather than creating a new NAOL rank system.  I think the ratings are still adjusting and I suppose I should be patient with that. I'm going to trust that things will work themselves out over time. I'd like to see a chart showing the AGA and NAOL ranks for all players who actually have an AGA rank and whose OGS rank is current. I'm not letting my 11k rank bother me and I actually go out of my way to add it to my Zoom name because I find that rank amusing. I started as 10k then dropped to 13k and fought my way back to 12k and finally to 11k. I'm inclined to want to play rated again on OGS again just to see if I can get to 8k again there for an even wider gap with my NAOL rank. It isn't important though. It is just a mystery. 

Let me be clear that I think the NAOL is great, and that the people who are running it are doing a fantastic job. Each season gets better with more reviewers participating. Any ratings issues will eventually be solved. I've been playing in the NAOL since it was in beta and I am very glad we all have an opportunity to play in it if we are association members in our respective countries.

That is all I've got for this week.

Those of you who come to my blog from the Go (Baduk, Weiqi) Players on Facebook group may find my mid week post about my recent Go Resolution interesting.