My Week of Go Activities: Pie Charts are Back

 

After deleting my Now Then app from both of my iPads I was finally able to regain functionality on my iPhone. Unfortunately in the process I lost a few weeks of data.

While I was patiently waiting for things to update I did keep track of my activities manually by writing down what I was doing. I was able to enter those activities retroactively which is how I was able to get a chart for the week just finished. I am quite certain that I didn't record everything. I know I did a lot more tsumego than I have listed here. 

Live Play came in as the top activity this week I played five games. Three of them were league games and two of them were played on Fox.

There is something new in my games list. I played some games on Fox.

It had been quite a few months since I had played on Fox. I use a Mac, so it was necessary for me to run the Fox Client under Parallels Desktop. It never really worked properly. I was unable to update the client in the normal fashion so every time there was an update I had to trash the old client and download the new client. This wasn't too inconvenient until even that became impossible. At that point I had to have someone with a Windows machine download it for me and make it available through a link in Dropbox. My games list never populated so I had to ask a friend to download every game I played. It was a pain in the butt so I stopped using Fox.

Last week I found out about a way to play on Fox through the web. If you are on a Mac this just might be the best way to play on Fox. The developer has a Discord server devoted to this web client. The link will probably only work for a week so join the server if you are interested. If you want to see more detailed discussion of the client you can find it in the general_go_development_chat channel. You would probably need to joinr Shawn Ray's Online Go Club Server for that link to work. Read about it to be fully informed.

Upon signing in to Fox via the web client I clicked the auto match button and played this game which I uploaded to my OGS library. It was a thrilling game because it was 1 minute of main time with 3 periods of 20 seconds of overtime.

I got a resignation after a skillful kill. I am very proud of myself. I am black.

I finally figured out how to change the time settings for auto match and tried 20min 3x60. 

I have a 6k account on Fox where I am buzzsaw as on most servers.

I also have a 3d account on Fox named buzzkill. I am planning a demotion speed run. Let's see where I end settling in with the account that I started at 3d.

My Week of Go Activities: No Pie Charts Until Next Week

There will be no pie charts until my next report. I'm working on the issue.

I'll start with mention of an account I created on KGS specifically to play experimental games. I resurrected that account after returning from the Go Congress last year and was quite surprised to do really well with it. I maintained a rank of 3k with it for a number of months and then I stopped using it. 

Oddly KGS now thinks I am 2d?

Obviously I am not.

I tried to get a game with the account last night to knock it back down to size, and to see if I could still maintain 3k with it,  but I was not getting an auto match after waiting quite a while. I will try again soon. Or I may even create a totally new account that I will keep secret which is what In-seong Hwang wants me to do.

Look at that crazy graph.

 

I played six games last week. All of them were league games.

All of them were reviewed. In fact one of them got reviewed three times.

The AYD games got extra attention.

The last game has not yet been reviewed because neither I nor my opponent was present on review night so In-seong Hwang will review it offline. He'll do that soon so I credited him (crowis) for the review. It was the weekend game and had to be scheduled ahead of time because my opponent could not play it on the assigned day. 

I had a week off from lesson with Clossius the week before and he was able to review all of the games that had not yet been reviewed from two weeks. He covered a lot of material in my two hour lesson.

I'm really hoping to hav e my pie charts back next week.

My Week of Go Activities: Pie Charts on Hold

 

Ordinarily I would begin my blog post with a colorful Pie Chart of my Go Activities followed by a list of Go Activities with the percentage of time spent on each. 

Instead this week I offer a screen capture by way of explanation as to why I can not provide my usual chart and list.

I had purchased an iPad mini to use to record my U.S. Go Congress games last year and I had not used it since returning home after the Congress. I recently charged it and checked to see that its is operational for the Congress this July. 

I opened Now Then, the IOS app I use to record my Go Activities. It started to update data from iCloud yesterday, and it is still updating. Eight months of data is a lot to update. This process has made the app unavailable on my iPhone where I normally use it. Based on the above screen capture I would expect it to take a few days for this situation to resolve. In the mean time I will keep a rough estimate of time spent on various actives to enter retroactively once things are back in order.

In the meantime I'll just present my game information for the week.

I played only four games during the week. The first two were BenKyo Main League Group B games. The third was a Go Magic League game. The fourth was an AYD Game.

The AYD Game was interesting because it was so close. I had a lot of time on my clock so I was abel to count multiple times at the end of the game, and I was quite certain that I was going to win by exactly half a point. 

Unfortunately, I was not so careful about clicking the dead stones when it came time to help the computer score. I am black. This was a Points Lover game.

You can see that the failure to click the dead white stone in the lower right created an inaccurate score of W+8.5

I uploaded this game to my SGF Library on OGS and you can see it there.

We agreed that the score should have been B+ 0.5 and I reported it as a win for me and In-seong agreed because he presented it that way in review. I have to be more careful about checking for dead stones. I was so sure of the score I just clicked to accept it and then realized my mistake immediately.

This game put me at 2:0 for the current cycle in Group C3 of AYD.

Update:

It has been a couple days since I uploaded this post and the situation has gotten even worse with the updating of the data for the NOW THEN app.

Notice that it is now estimating that it will take over 95 hours for the updating to complete whereas a few days ago it was estimating that it would take only 42 hours.

I will admit that there is something freeing about not tracking my activities. Perhaps I will take a vacation from that. What isn't fun is manually taking a notes about my activities to enter the data retroactively. I might stop doing that if a few days if things don't get better.

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.