I have been a student of In-seong Hwang now since September of 2019. I do not take private lessons with him, but I play in his league called the Yunguseng Dojang. It was at the Go Congress in Madison that I decided to join the American Yunguseng Dojang which I will refer to as AYD going forward.
I had attended a number of In-seong's lectures at the Congress of 2019, and I decided that it was time for me to start studying go again, or at least playing serious games with regularity. I was about five years into a break from my lessons with Yilun Yang and I wasn't ready to commit to lessons again. However, the idea of a league appealed to me.
I was playing almost no go games between my yearly appearances at the U.S. Go Congress. I used to play a few games a month with Yilun Yang when I was taking lessons, but those lessons had stopped. My primary reason for joining AYD was to guarantee 45 serious games before the next Go Congress. That was all I expected to begin with.
Before I go into details about my experience with AYD I'd like to share some group photos of AYD participants at the two most recent Go Congresses.
Here we are at Kent State in 2023.
Here we are at Estes Park in 2022.
Some of the people you see in these photos are actually in the European Yunguseng Dojang, EYD. It is not unheard of for some North American players who are retired, are students, or who have flexible work schedules to join EYD rather than AYD. Some people like to play in the afternoon rather than the evening.
I've played in 13 Seasons of AYD. Here is my ratings graph:
I am making some progress.
What is AYD like? It consists of lectures, games, and reviews. There is an extensive library of previous lectures which you can watch as well. You play 15 games during a three month season, and get a review for each of them. There are links to videos of the reviews, and they can be watched again later.
For more details about AYD please take a look at a blog post I did about my experience with the Yunguseng Dojang. I made that post back in 2020, but it still serves as a good introduction to AYD.
Unfortunately the timing of my post today isn't ideal. In-seong just started a new season of AYD which will last for three months. If you decide you are interested you can sign up on a waiting list. Sometimes a position becomes available because someone leaves mid season. On those occasions In-seong will look for someone near the level of the person who left and you might get lucky enough to join mid season.
This season I made the cut for the 2nd weakest group in AYD even though a few people weaker than myself had left AYD. I am in C2 and was afraid I was going to be placed in C3 this season instead.
We meet for games on Thursday evenings at 8:00 PM EST. Following that we meet again at 10:00 PM EST for reviews. If you can't make the scheduled times you can play ahead of time by agreement with your opponent and you can watch the reviews on video later.
In-seong is an excellent teacher and he really cares about his students. He gets to know your style of play very quickly and offers individual suggestions based on your strengths and weaknesses. He cares very much about his students and it shows. In-seong accepts students as low as 12k and students of that level can certainly benefit from the league game reviews, but to get the full benefit from lectures I think one ought to be 5k or above. I am only 9k and a lot of the lecture material is difficult for me. Yet I find plenty of value in the league reviews and I try my best to get as much value from the lectures as possible. There are very few members below 5k and we compose the bottom two groups of AYD.
If you decide to come to the U.S. Go Congress this year make sure that you attend at least one of In-seong's lectures.
Now for my usual Go Activities content:
My Go Activity was up last week with a bit over 19 hours spent.
I played only four games but spent about four hours on those games.
The final game of the week was my first AYD game of the new season. I played against a player new to the league and managed to win by a very narrow margin of 4.5 points. I was well behind in the game but managed to find what In-seong Hwang refers to as a Trouble Master. In review he pointed out to us that aside from the Trouble Master I found that there were a few other Troubles left on the board. My opponent and I may find portions of our game in a future Trouble Master book or in a Trouble Master lecture for YD.
In the review of my AYD game In-seong advised me once again to pay less attention to my own weaknesses and to look at my opponent's weaknesses. All of my teachers agree on this. So far no one has managed to figure out how to get me to see my opponent's weaknesses. In-seong tells me to look at my opponent's stones which is good advice. He has pointed out to me that if their weaknesses were my own I would see them, so I am capable of seeing them. I'm just not doing it. It isn't the type of thing I can change just by knowing it, but I am trying my best to do it for him and for my other teachers as well.
The number of games I play per week should be going up considerably soon. I am hoping to get competitive in the BenKyo League Title Tournament by playing on the fly in the evenings. AYD just started and NAOL will begin this week followed shortly by the Go Magic league. I see lots of serious games in my near future.
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