My Week of Go Activities: A Three Way Tie for First Place in the Go Magic League

It was a moderately active week with over 23 hours spent on Go Activities.

Two Tsumego categories came in with over 28% of activity combined.

It was a light week for Live Play with only four games being played, one of them a Correspondence Game with Clossius which he reviewed during my weekly lesson.

The big news for the week is that I finished the first season of the Go Magic League (in beta). I came in at first place, but not alone. It was an amazing three way tie with each of the winners beating one of the other winners.

Division 15 was the second Division to finish play. We might be the only division to finish with such an epic three way tie. 

The Go Magic League was fun, but there were major scheduling issues which will hopefully be improved for the second season which is currently on hold while the Leago Team works on improving scheduling moving forward.

The main problem with scheduling with Go Magic is that the default time suggested for games is not very friendly for North American Players which requires that every game must be rescheduled. I managed to do that, but it required a lot of effort. 

I'm taking a break this week because NAOL and Go Magic are both between seasons, and because I don't have a Lesson with Clossius on Friday, so I won't need games for review. As a result I will be short on games again in my next report. 

My Week of Go Activities

 

I spent over 28 hours on Go Activities for the week. Many of them on Tsumego Hero and on Live Play.

I played six games all of which were League Games.

I'm a week behind on reporting and a new report will be coming in a couple days.

My Week of Go Activities: Doing well in NAOL and also in the Go Magic League

 

It was a heavy week of Go Activity with nearly 29 hours spent. The top activity this week was a BenKyo Baduk Hangout with Ben and other Patreon supporters. Ben spent 12 hours on stream and I was there for a good portion of it.

I only played four games this week. All of them were league games. Two Go Magic League games, one NAOL game, and one Clossi League Game.

My Week of Go Activities: Taking a Break From Rated Games

 

This week was really short on Go Activity with fewer than 16 hours.

The Western Server Challenge is over and I am a bit burned out. As a result I am taking a break not only from rated games, but from playing in general. It was easy to do that because I didn't have a lesson with Clossius on Friday so I didn't really need to make sure I had enough go material for game reviews. I also felt like I deserved a break after playing 100 rated games last month. Occasional breaks are good.

I'm actually planning to do more studying than playing in the weeks leading up to the U.S. Go Congress. I am already registered for the Congress and have purchased my airline tickets. 

I have a lot of material to study in my recent lessons with Ben Mantle, and it is my plan to rewatch my lessons. I want to take a few notes so I can find certain material again to revisit it. There is so much to study and I feel as if I have not taken advantage of it and can't even find the things I want to study without rewatching at least six of my most recent lessons.

I am currently playing nothing but league games that I am required to play.

I am continuing with the NAOL League, the Go Magic League, the American Yunguseng Dojang, the Clossi League, and the BenKyo League, so I have plenty of league games I am obligated to play. I estimate that I will probably get in at least six games per week moving forward simply by meeting my obligations.

My Week of Go Activities: 100 WSC Games Played

 

My week runs from Friday through Thursday. I played 18 games last week. Most of them counted for the Western Server Challenge. The two that did not count were American Yunguseng Dojang games played on KGS.

In spite of a great many games being played, Tsumego Hero still came in as the top activity for the week at exactly 8 hours. 

I really need to keep working on Tsumego.

In my list of games above I am showing the first six games of the current week because I needed to play six games on Friday because it was the last day of the Western Server Challenge. I started the day five games short of completing the challenge, and I knew I only had until 8:00 PM EDT to get those games in because the challenge would end based on UTC time.

I decided to play two games before my 2:00 PM lesson with Clossius. That left me with three more games to play. Shawn and I started off the lesson with a chat and then we moved forward into me playing WSC games. He commented the games as I played them. He muted himself in Discord so I could not hear anything he was saying. He left my mic live on Discord so I could comment as I played.

I was playing at a speed of 1m 5x15s so there was not really much time for me to comment. The games were so fast that there wasn't much time for Clossius to comment either, but it was good fun, and a bit hilarious. I finished the three games with time to spare. We reviewed the third game and then used the last 25 minutes of my lesson to play a game.  

I enjoyed watching the lesson later to hear what he said to the observers. There was a particularly funny moment when I played a move in a joseki that Shawn figured I wouldn't know. In fairness Ben had gone over it with me in the past, and I had not really remembered it.

Here is the moment I played the move and Shawn's reaction.

He asked, "Do you KNOW this?" 

I could not hear him because he was muted but I expected a rise out of him when I played it, so I responded, "I know this is a thing, but I probably don't know how it continues." 

I think the reason he cracked up was mostly because I actually answered his question even though I had not heard him ask the question. That was funny as all heck.

I don't usually share links to my lessons but I'm going to in this case for entertainment purposes. Bear in mind that this is not a typical lesson. We tried something different with the commentary which probably would have worked very well if I wasn't playing at blitz speed. I really wasn't even using the 15 seconds of time for the overtime periods.  One thing I did to to lower stress was to make it so the lady did not start to count until 5. By the way, when you do that the lady actually says 10 on the way to getting to five and the lady was not saying ten very often so I was playing quite quickly.

I do two hour lessons with Clossius these days, and I am probably the only person who is doing so at the moment, though a few other people have expressed interest in combining lessons into two hour units.

If you enjoy viewing my recent lesson with Clossius please know that you can watch lessons during his streams, and if you become a member of his site at the $10.00 level, you will have access to all of the lessons he has uploaded to his site.

March is over and the WSC is done for this year. I'll be participating next year again. My strategy is going to be to actually play blitz games since I am playing at that speed anyway. I would have an actual shot at placing as number one for my rank level group for blitz if that is all I played. I say that based on these results from this year.

I have two awards for WSC so far. I wish I had played the first year.

I'm a little burned out right now and I am taking a break since I don't have a lesson this Friday. I will be staying away from rated games for at least a week and playing only League games that have been scheduled with me.

My Week of Go Activities

 

I played 15 games this week and am keeping in pace to finish my 100 games for March for the Western Server Challenge.

I look forward to concentrating on unrated league games for a while. Maybe I can even slow down a bit and figure out how I should be using my time.

My Week of Go Activities

 

Not much to say this week. I am still working hard on trying to stay on track with the Western Server Challenge. That's all.

My Week of Go Activities: Half Way Done With the Western Server Challenge

 

At the time of the writing of this post I have completed 50 games in the Western Server Challenge with a win rate of 48%. I've managed to get halfway done with the challenge before the month was half over. This means that I will be able to increase my time settings toward the end of the month and still complete the challenge.

You can see the results of the ongoing Western Server Challenge here.

My week looked like this:

I spent nearly 27 hours on Go Activities with Live Play coming in at the top activity again this week.

I have continued with Bugkitten's Tsumego Club and spent over three hours doing problems on the Tsumego Hero web site.

This week I played 30 games.  All but one of them were WSC games played at a 5min 5x20sec time setting. I got pretty comfortable with the time setting. On two occasions I hit 9k for one game. I bounced right back though each time. I've been comfortably maintaining an 8k rating now which is just a bit below my usual 7k rating. Given the fast time settings I am using it makes sense that I would lose a stone temporarily during the challenge.

I decided to show a lot less information on my spreadsheet this week than usual. I was playing so many fast games and didn't want to spend a lot of time documenting them.  I ended up writing up notes for some of the games so Clossius and I could select games to review for my Lesson on Friday. I had my 100th and 101st lessons with Clossius last Friday. We had a great lesson and we managed to review a good number of games, not necessarily all the way through. 

Clossius was impressed that playing at blitz speed made me play more aggressively. The time setting is not actually blitz, but I was playing at blitz speed since my average number of seconds per move for these games was in the neighborhood of five to seven seconds, which is definitely blitz speed. My opponents were usually using a good deal more time than I on these games.

My week runs from Friday through Thursday. By the end of my week I had 35 WSC games under my belt. It is now four days later and I have added another 15 games since then to get to 50 games.

I am enjoying the Western Server Challenge this year. I don't intend to play this many games this quickly more than once a year though.

It is worth noting that the one game I played that was not a WSC game was an AYD game. I won that game by a large margin because my opponent failed to protect against a peep and something died. Before that I was ahead by about three points, so it was a really close game.

My Week of Go Activities: Getting a Slow Start on WSC

 

There are three people who have already met the challenge of playing 100 live rated games in the Western Server Challenge. I am not among them. I wanted to start out strong and managed to get in six games in the first two days, which is not bad, but I didn't get in a single game yesterday, so I have ground to make up.

It is not too late to join the Western Server Challenge.

Here are my games this week. I played 17 games. Seven of them turned out to be practice for the WSC because I jumped the gun the day before play was to begin.

I am keeping track of my WSC games on my spreadsheet but am not logging all of the details related to each game. I am using a fairly fast time setting of 5+5x20 for my games. I am holding on to my 7k rating, but as it becomes necessary for me to increase the speed of my games in order to catch up it may not be possible to avoid dropping in rank. I knew that going into this. The challenge is not about getting stronger. It is about playing more and not getting hung up on protecting one's rating.

My domestic situation makes it difficult for me to play during the day and I am not sure I am going to be able to get the games I need at night, so it may be necessary for me to do bursts of games with 1+5x10 settings in order to crank out some games quickly in the middle of the day just to keep pace and have a fighting chance of completing the challenge.

Here is what my week looked like:

I put in nearly 29 hours in on Go Activity last week. Nearly 29 hours being spent seems to be the new normal. I've put in as many as 45 hours and I have dipped below 15 hours as well.

I spent nearly six hours on Tsumego.

My goal for this week is to play enough games in the WSC to bring the number of games I need to play per day down to about 2.5.

I have no illusions about keeping my 7k rank if I play that many rated games.

My Week of Go Activities: Finished NAOL Strong

The big news last week is that I managed to finish the NAOL with a 3:2 record. Up until last week I had only been able to win against 10k players. I am entered as 10k myself because that is my AGA rating. I managed to defeat an 8k opponent in my final game, and rather decisively at that, with a win of 14.5

I look forward to the next season of the North America Online League. I'm not sure yet when that will begin, but I definitely will be participating again. If you are interested in getting notified about the beginning of the next season send an email to naol@usgo.org They had a waiting list for the beta season,  and proceeded with 96 players only.  They wanted to learn how to make NAOL better, and they got a lot of good feedback. I'm sure the next season will be even better than the beta, which was great.

My rating went up. I am #75.

I had a Teaching Game with Clossius rather than a lesson this past Friday, which is actually a part of my next week, but I will mention in this blog post. The teaching game was really fun. It was a prize for having come in at first place in a previous month of the Clossi League. Shawn told me that I played really well in the game. This is what the board looked like at the end. 

I lost by 25.5 which I thought was pretty good against an AGA 3 dan in an even game. He told me that he was not being particularly easy on me. Of course he wasn't playing all out either.

Here is what my week looked like.

It was a good week for Go Activity with over 30 hours put in spread among the following activities.

Here is my time spent on Tsumego.

Live Play came in as the top activity this week which doesn't happen all that often. I played eleven games, two of which happened to be Teaching Games with Clossius. We practiced my new opening which involves a large knight's enclosure to a 3-4 facing a 3-4. I'm not sure if that opening has a name, but it is the one that Ben Mantle has been playing recently, and the one which he suggested I try to get myself out of my comfort zone.

Many of my games this week were practice using my new opening.

I managed to get my average seconds per move in the green zone in two of my games this week and I got my time in the yellow zone for two games as well. I achieved an amazing 23.9 seconds on average per move in my NAOL game by using a 15 second timer on my Apple Watch. I only really needed to use it through the opening. By the time the middle game started I was already used to playing more slowly and I could stop using the timer. I felt really proud of myself and I used the timer again during my AYD Game. I will be using that timer at the Go Congress this year. I wonder what my opponents will think when I set a timer for each move.

I had a great lesson with Ben. We were going to play a game with my new opening, but instead we ended up spending the lesson going over what can happen with the Large Knight's Enclosure to the 3-4 which is going to help me with my new opening. Ben really got into showing me the variations. By the time we were done it was too late to play but we needed to play at least 10 moves so Ben could resign the game so I would have access to the variations later. He played some silly moves so the game would look funny when opened.

Ben has a fantastic Study Group Class on the topic of the Large Knight's Enclosure, which I intend to review, but it is great to have my own personal lecture on the topic. Private Lessons with Ben are great. Ben went to the trouble of marking variations for me in the sgf file using the variation function available on OGS so it will be easier for me to review the lesson later by combining the sgf file with the video of the lesson. 

If you join Ben's Patreon at the $10.00 level you get access to all of Ben's past Study Group Classes including the one I mentioned, and you get to participate in three Study Group Classes live via Discord and OGS. Check out Ben's Promotional Site for details.

Let me make a pitch for the Western Server Challenge which is starting tomorrow. I am participating again this year, and I am looking forward to not caring about my rank. I expect it to drop like a stone, but after the challenge is over it will rise like a Phoenix so I am cool with it.  Last year it felt like a bit of a burden to try to play 100 rated games in one month. This year I look forward to it. It is not too late for you to sign up for the Western Sever Challenge. Please join me and over 100 other people who have already signed up. You can join the challenge later in the month so give it some thought and start playing rated games on OGS.

I'll keep you posted on how I do next week with the WSC. I intend to start out strong with six or seven games per day so I can ease up later in the month if I want to.

My Week of Go Activities

 

It was a fairly active week with over 30 hours spent on Go Activities.

Over eight of those hours were spent on Go Problems.

I had a really good week in terms of winning games. I played seven games and lost only one of them.

Two of my victories were nine stone handicapped games against an OGS 4 dan. I was under handicapped but I won both of those games.

I won both my NAOL game and also my AYD game. So I won the two most. important games of the week. 

I am still playing way too fast though I did manage to bring my average speed per move up to over 12 seconds in a Main League games I played in the BenKyo League.

I'm really not sure how to get myself to use more time in my games.