My Week of Go Activities

 

This week is the second week of my vacation from playing Go. I am finding It very refreshing. I played one YD League Game this week. I spent an hour and 13 minutes on that game. That was the extent of my playing for the entire week. There were times when I actually felt like playing last week, but I wanted to give myself a rest. I'm glad I did.

In spite of not playing I managed to put in over 33 hours on Go Activities. Watching Others Play came in first followed by Clossius Lesson (Others). I was catching up on lessons played by my YD friends who are also Clossius students. I also focused on Spaced Repetition Problems from Guo Juan’s Internet Go School.

I’ve made a good start back with playing even though my company has not yet gone home. They will be here through tomorrow afternoon. However, if I were to achieve my 20 game goal for my lesson next week, I needed to start playing four games a day on Sunday. Here is my progress so far for the week. I won four out of five of my games plus I ranked back up to 8k on OGS.

The one loss was embarrassing, but instructive. I lost focus, and got confused about the status of some stones. I had previously cut off three stones which I could capture easily to get myself out of trouble. I got flustered and forgot that fact. If I had kept my focus I would have easily gone on to win that game even though I lost a few points in the middle of the board. Here is the game for anyone who is interested.

I play a little trick on myself in setting my goal for 20 games by putting the day of the week I intend to play games into the handicap cell on my spreadsheet. That helps to keep me on track.

Something big that happened this week is that I had a frank discussion with my husband about the time I spend studying go. It turns out that I had been focusing on Go Problems and Go Videos above Live Play because I wanted to be able to be interrupted from my study if my husband wanted my attention. I explained this to him, and he agreed to accept the fact that, in order for me to play my games during the  day, when I am more fresh, that I will need to be inaccessible to him for periods of time in the neighborhood of 30 minutes at a time. I think this is going to be a literal game changer. It will definitely make me more willing to play in the middle of the day. I had often been postponing my game play for the late evening after my husband was asleep, which was not optimal for me at all.

I'm feeling a lot better about playing again.

I Made the Leaderboard on Guo Juan's IGS

 

I've stopped trying to do extra problems to get into the top 10 of the Leaderboard on Guo Juan's Internet Go School. Some days, however, I manage to make it onto the board simply by doing my due problems early enough in the day. Today was such a day. I hit number 9 today. Yea me!

I love the Internet Go School. It is an essential component of my go study.

Last week I played only one game because I was on a vacation from playing for two weeks. I did spend a lot of time on go activities, however, spending over four hours on Spaced Repetition Problems from the Internet Go School site.

I also spent nearly two hours listening to new lectures in order to add more problems to my due problems set.

If you are interested in more of what I have to say about Guo Juan's site, which I highly recommend to all go players, please check out this recent blog post.

My Week of Go Activities

 

I engaged in over 33 hours of go activities this week, which is low for me. I have company in the house for two weeks, so I cancelled my next two go lessons and cut way back on game play this week, playing only four games. I am amazingly happy not playing. This week I only played my required league games for AYD and the Clossi League plus a teaching game with Clossius during my lesson on Tuesday.

I stole moments from family time to watch others play, to watch videos when possible, and to review my own lesson as well as the lessons of my friends. I pretty much kept up with my go problems, which I consider my most essential go activity.

I created a new category this week because I was teaching my grandson how to play go. He is visiting for two weeks. I set up an account for him on OGS. The first few games he played I coached him a bit. Then I told him it was time to start learning from his mistakes. He played so I could not see the game in progress because we learned that I can’t help but butt in if I can see what he is doing. We review the games after they are played. I am hoping that he keeps up with this after he returns home.

I’m not going to bother sorting out essential go activity from non essential go activity this week.

My goal next week is to spend time catching up on YD game reviews.

My Week of Go Activities

 

This week I put in a little over 50 hours on Go Activities. I fell short of my goal of 20 games because I had to clean the house and do other preparations for a two week visit from family which is coming up soon. In spite of that, I still managed to play a respectable 15 games. You can see my list of games for the week in my spreadsheet.

I added two new categories to my activities this week. I did that to fine tune the time I spend on all things Clossius. These new categories also help to obscure the amount of time I am actually spending on Clossius related activities. For those who are curious it came to over 14 hours this week. 

There are now five Clossius activity categories. Clossius Lesson (Others) is new. I watch the lessons of two of my fellow YD members who are also Clossius students, and I decided to give that activity its own category rather than counting the time under Clossius Patreon, YouTube. 

Another new category is Clossius Group Class. This class is something new that Clossius is doing for Patrons at the $25.00 tier level. Being at a higher lesson tier I will get this benefit as well. The first month of classes is free for everyone as details are worked out. I not only participate in the class live, but I find it valuable to review the class through the recorded video the next day. We are practicing stone visualization, so being able to pause the video to concentrate on where the stones are supposed to be can be helpful.

Now for the important stuff:

My rated win loss ratio is 4:6    (40% Wins)

 20:18    Essential Go Activities  

 7:49      38%    Live Play

 7:15      36%    Go Problems

 5:14      26%    Game Review

 

I'm having family visit for two weeks. Therefore I am cancelling my next two lessons with Clossius and cutting down on go activity for the next two weeks. I will be playing my league games.  I also hope to participate in the Clossius Group Class either live or by watching it after the fact. 

I'll be back to taking lessons with Clossius in July.

My Week of Go Activities

 

Surprise! Live Play came in first, for the first time ever.

I am giving it a place of honor in the blog post.

This week I put in nearly 53 hours on Go Activities. I am proud that I increased my Live Play time to nearly ten hours. I increased my number of games played to 20 at the suggestion of my teacher. I agree that this increase in play is going to be good for me. I also agree that the number of games is probably right. 

However, the sharp increase turned out to be painful for me. However, the pressure was entirely self imposed.  My issues are my own, and no one else's fault.

I don’t think I have ever been quite as miserable playing go as I have been in the last half of this week. I felt compelled to fit in the games I needed in order to meet my quota. I had started my week at a rate that was better than usual, but not nearly good enough if I were to meet my new goal. I put myself under that pressure. That was my decision. I could have started playing four games a day on the fourth day rather than attempting to make up for lost time. I could also have built in a rest day on Saturday as I hope to do moving forward. Lesson learned.

I was doing quite well at the beginning of the week. On Sunday I resurrected my goddess account and got her to a healthy 5k. I even got a resignation from a 3k on Tuesday. But after playing two games on Tuesday with 14 more games to be played in the final four days, the pressure set in. It got to me, and it was down hill from there. I managed to stabilize goddess at 5k even after losing four games in a row.

However, after most of the week was over, I had one more day to play, but I had five more games to complete. The rating of goddess was looking tenuous, so I decided to focus on OGS for those last five games. I thought I could hold 8k there even if I lost since I had recently been as high as 7k. That expectation proved to be folly on my part. I went on to lose four games in a row, dropped to 9k, and finished up the day with a 1.5 point win.

I was on a downward spiral from Wednesday on. I was miserable. I’m not sure if I was miserable because I was losing or if I was losing because I was miserable. I don’t remember which came first. Regardless, it was a most unpleasant four days.

That being said, I am not giving up on playing 20 games a week. I just need to figure out how to do it without making myself so miserable.

In my spreadsheet for next week I have committed myself to playing four games for five days. Putting the days of the week into the Handicap cell may help me to meet my goal. It is my plan to rest from Live Play on Saturday and Sunday. If I slack a little during the week I will still have Saturday to make up for it. Or I may choose to forgive myself the slack for my mental health and promise myself both Saturday and Sunday off.

It is Sunday today. I am really happy to not be playing. I took advantage of the time today to review my lesson from last week which is a real gem. That video can be found here. My lesson starts at about minute six into the video.

And to be clear, I know that it is totally my own fault that I was miserable this week. I put the pressure on myself. There was no pressure from my teacher, merely a suggestion to play the 20 games.

I think I need a go psychologist.

Now for the important stuff:

My rated win loss ratio is 6:10    (38% Wins)

 30:00    Essential Go Activities  (over half)

 9:53      33%    Live Play

 12:06    40%    Go Problems

 8:01      27%    Game Review

I am hoping for a happier week.

My Week of Go Activities

 

This week I put in more than 47 hours on Go Activities. My spreadsheet can be viewed here.

I increased my games to seven which is up slightly from last week. It is not as many games as I would like to play, but I am still a little afraid to play. I am seriously thinking of playing “secretly” for the game experience. In-Seong suggested to another player in YD during review last week that he do just that.

All but one of my games was rated this week, and they were all played on KGS.

I lost my first game in the D1 league. That is not surprising given the fact that the first game of the cycle pits the top player in the league against the lowest player in the league.  So someone who came down is playing against someone who came up. I am the weakest player in the league and will, therefore,  lose all ties based on initial placement.

It was superior initial placement that earned me the spot in D1 even though I had an identical win loss ratio as another player, my good friend Andrew. When games are very evenly split in a league advancement and demotion often come down to initial placement, which was the case last cycle. Andrew had been slated below me in D2 placement at the beginning of the season because his YD rank was a few points lower than mine. We were both pleased to make the cut for D2 last month.

I created a new category this week called Studying With YD Friends. This new category is designed to account for going over aspects of YD Lectures with others in an attempt to learn things like 3-3 invasion variations. I felt like I needed a new category because it is not game review. Andrew and I spent some time going through lecture details this week.

Now for the important stuff:

My rated win loss ratio is 2:4    (33% Wins)

15:31    Essential Go Activities

3:04    22%    Live Play

5:45    37%    Go Problems

6:25    41%    Game Review

My Week of Go Activities

 

I am a little late with my weekly activities post probably because I took a break from playing this week. I needed the break and I am now ready to get back to playing again, so all is well.

I put in nearly 40 hours on Go Activities this week, but played only four games. They can be seen in my spreadsheet.

I had a really bad week of games the previous week, and it really threw me. I had a YD League game I had to play on Wednesday and had a surprise victory. I was shocked yet encouraged by that event. Then I discovered that my one remaining game in YD for the cycle had very high stakes attached to it. The winner would move up one league and the loser would move down one league. I had never noticed a game with such high stakes before, but the reason for it was that the games in league were very evenly split.

Once I learned that I might go up or down based on my next league game I did not want to jinx myself by playing in the meantime and ruining my mental state. I wanted to remain invincible for the next two days if only in my mind.

The video review of my YD victory from Wednesday came out with my best review ever from In-Seong. This encouraged me.

In the time between Wednesday and Friday I did lots of go problems. I studied by pouring over D League game reviews. I worked on keeping a calm mind the day of the game. I got a pep talk from Clossius on Discord after telling him about the the stakes of the game.

The game was watched by many YD friends who were rooting for both sides. We are all friends. There was going to be joy and sorrow for the spectators no matter who won this game. I managed to win the game by 9.5. Unlike the game on Wednesday this was not a surprise upset. I did not need to kill something at the end. I got a bit ahead in the game early on and managed to hold onto enough of it to win the game.

The best news of all, which we discovered during the league review, is that while I went up to D1, my opponent did not need to fall to D3. A stronger player is leaving YD mid season, and is being replaced by a D3 player which meant that my good friend in YD was able to stay in the D2 league for the next cycle. That made me very happy.

Now for the important stuff:

My rated win loss ratio is 0:2

15:17    Essential Go Activities

3:43    24%    Live Play

8:29    56%    Go Problems

3:05    20%    Game Review

My goal for this week is to play more games. I am changing venue though. I am going to be playing all of my games on KGS this week. I have already used my fearless account to play two games.

My Week of Go Activities

 

I put in slightly fewer than 40 hours on Go Activities this week. I managed to get in ten games which is an improvement over the week before. Now that my games spreadsheet has been made public, you can see those games here.

I had a terrible week. I played five games on Friday with disastrous results. As a result, I have taken Saturday and Sunday off from game play. It’s Monday morning, and I am still afraid to play, though I know I must. I’ll try to get in at least one game today.

Now for the important stuff...

10 Games Played (rated and NR)

OGS - Holding on to 7k by a thread

Essential Go Activities:     

13:43 (hours : minutes)

Over a third of total time spent. (over 38 hours)

4:40       34%      Live Play

6:44       49%      Go Problems

2:19       17%      Game Review

Win/Loss Ratio Rated

3:5      38% wins

My Games Spreadsheet

My games spreadsheet is now public. 

Initially I made it as a launchpad for my lessons with Shawn Ray, AKA Clossius. I shared it only with him, and with two friends from the American Yunguseng Dojang who are also Clossius students.

Rather than continuing to keep my spreadsheet to myself, I have recently decided to make it so that anyone with access to the link can view it. 

I'm writing this blog post because I've found the process of documenting my games to be valuable, and I would continue to do so even if I were not taking lessons (which I have no intention of discontinuing). I thought others might benefit from having a spreadsheet as well, so I wanted to share it with my readers.

I've enjoyed keeping the spreadsheet, and adding features to it. The most recent feature added has been links to the YouTube videos of my lessons.  I've also added links to my Go Activities blog post for the associated week. After adding those links I realized that this sheet is going to be a great record of my year of games, activities, and lessons. I would encourage others who are studying seriously to consider a spreadsheet, especially if you play on more than one server, as I do.

Those who have been following my blog may recall that when I started lessons with Clossius I used my blog as a launch pad for game reviews with him. Here is what that looked like:

This worked pretty well for providing game links, but it was lacking in visual detail. After a few weeks Clossius was asking if I could color wins as green and losses as red. At that point I decided to figure out how to set up a spreadsheet because simple information as text with links on a blog post just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

I started out by emulating the games record pages of OGS as much as possible. I came up with a system of coloring my wins and losses. Over time I added things like a column to indicate whether games were free or rated. I added links to reviews conducted during lessons as well as links to AI-Sensei reviews for losses. Here is a screen capture of part of the May tab in my spreadsheet:

Weeks run from Sunday through Saturday. Games are color coded so that wins and losses of 3.5 or fewer points are colored a light gray to indicate a fairly neutral result. Wins between 3.5 and 14.5 are light green. Wins between 15.5 and 29.5 are medium green. Wins of 30.5 and over, including resignations, are dark green. Losses have similar point values with the addition of a shameful, even darker, color of red for any loss in excess of 29.5 because it should have been a resignation. Since creating that new color, and using it for past games to which it should apply, I have not had to use it with any new games because I resigned when appropriate.

Links open games on OGS. Games were either played on OGS or the sgf files were uploaded there from KGS. There is a notes column. If you hover over a note cell with a black triangle in the upper right corner of the cell you will see a note about the game.

Opponents from the Yunguseng Dojang are colored orange. Light orange represents a casual game or a Free League game with a YD friend. Dark orange games are league games. Those rows are shaded gray to indicate that the game is not available for review because it has been reviewed by a YD teacher.

Cells under the Server column that are colored violet indicate games that were reviewed during the lesson. Clicking on the active link in those cells will take you to the game review with the variations. There are no text comments in the reviews because they were conducted by voice over Discord.

You can watch the full lesson by clicking on the active link for the Lesson. That will take you directly to the YouTube link for the lesson video. These links are not publicly available, but the videos can be accessed by anyone who has the link. You can also read the blog post for the week by clicking on that link.

The violet cells next to "Lesson 17" hold links for reviews of teaching games conducted during that lesson.

There is a column to indicate which games are rated, and there are links for AI-Sensei reviews of losses. I may be adding in links for wins later after a lesson has been completed for the week. Leaving off the links for wins makes it easier to click on the losses during the lesson incase Clossius wants to access the AI review.

The spreadsheet is a work in process. I do not have links for all of the lessons yet, but I should be obtaining them within the next few weeks. I also do not have games for weeks previous to the creation of the spreadsheet though I may reconstruct those weeks at some point from the relevant blog posts.

So now that you know how things are set up you can have access to my go life by viewing my spreadsheet and taking a look around.  

Please enjoy. And let me know if you decide to create a spreadsheet of your own.

A funny aside: If you want to see me fumble with technology you can click on the January link and view my first lesson. The first few minutes of the video I have to figure out how to mute Twitch and concentrate on Discord and OGS. Most of my lessons have been live streamed with the exception of a few that were recorded on days when a live stream was not taking place. You'll see comments on the left side of screen from observers in on Twitch. 

My Week of Go Activities

 

I put in a little over 44 hours on Go Activity last week.

While I only played eight games, my Live Play category came in at nearly six hours. That is because my two free games were both quite long. A free Fisher Time game came in at over two hours, no thanks to me, since I ended that game with about 30 minutes on my clock, after starting with just 10 minutes of basic time.  It was 10 minutes to start with 30 seconds added per move played. I am familiar with Fisher time from playing in the New Jersey Open, yet I believe the settings were quite different with a larger main time and a much smaller number of seconds added per move. 30 minutes + 10 seconds comes to mind. My AYD League game came in at about an hour and a half. So these two games took up more than half of my game playing time.

The big news for the week is that I won my 2nd Round League game in AYD against the highest rated player in my league. He is an opponent who had beaten me in all five of the games we had played previously in AYD. 

I used the Chinese opening in our game, and I managed to keep an invasion on the right side from living. Here is the game for anyone who is interested. I made a thin move in the upper left that went unpunished. I should have known better. 

I had checked KGS analytics before we played. Here are the results after we played. All of our previous games had actually been quite close though I had lost them all.

Now for the important stuff...

8 Games Played (rated and NR)

OGS - Ranked Up to 7k

Essential Go Activities:     

19:07 (hours : minutes)

Nearly half of total time spent. (over 44 hours)

5:49       31%      Live Play

7:18       38%      Go Problems

6:00       31%      Game Review

Win/Loss Ratio OGS Rated

4:1      80% wins

Win/Loss Ratio All Rated

5:1      83% wins

Internet Go School 1,000 Day Streak

 

A few days ago I achieved a streak of 1,000 days in a row of doing my Spaced Repetition Problems on Guo Juan’s Internet Go School.

Below you see a screen capture of the site on my MacBook Pro. The site works in a web browser. I happen to be using Safari and it works very well. 

It looks great on my iPad Pro too.

The Internet Go School consists of Lectures and Spaced Repetition Go Problems. Problems are derived from the lectures and reinforce the content you learn from the lectures. 

Most lectures are fifteen minutes or shorter in length. You watch lectures. Then you add problems from those lectures to your problem queue. Then you do your problems every day. You decide how many problems you want to solve every day. When you solve your problems you grade how difficult the individual problems are. This will determine how soon they appear for you again. 

I solve all of my due problems every day because I get extra points for doing that. Earning points gets you on the Leaderboard, or close to the Leaderboard. I am generally a bit shy of being among the top ten users on the Leader Board. I am buzzsaw in position 17 below.

I came in a few people shy of hitting the top ten on the Leaderboard the day I finally hit 1,000 days in a row.

You get cool statistics about your activities on the site. The darkest green color is time spent watching lectures. I usually watch additional lectures when I am ready to add new problems to my queue, or if I decide it is time to review something. I think it makes sense to cycle through the lectures, which you can watch at various speeds. Yellow represents doing problems in what is called “Quick Look” mode. It is a great way to see all of the problems for a lecture one right after another. On the 24th I decided to click through a lot of problems on the Chinese Opening using Quick Look, thus the swath of yellow on that date. Blue is for New Problems. Salmon is for Learn Problems. Light green is for Review Problems.

You access lectures from the menu above which has drop down lists that expand and collapse. You can play around with how that works on the site once your start your free trial.

Every day when I wake up the first order of business is completing my Spaced Repetition Go Problems. I do them while I drink coffee in bed. My husband brings me a cup of coffee, and my problems are completed for the day before my feet hit the floor. Problems usually take me about 30 minutes. 

I could show more screen captures of the features of the site, but I urge you to just get the trial and get started. 

I wrote a review for the site which you can read if you navigate to the home page without logging into the site. 

There is a free trial so you can experience all of the Internet Go School goodness without spending a cent. Once you have gotten a taste I think you will be ready to subscribe. When you do, don’t bother with the monthly membership. The real value is paying by the year. 

If I had a limited go budget, a subscription to the Internet Go School would be the first thing I would buy. 

One of the things I love is seeing problems from the Internet Go School in my games. I had this happen just the other day.

Above is the problem.

Below is the solution.

And here is the game.

I did go on to lose this game, but not because I played that situation incorrectly. I remember thinking when my opponent played r6, “I can handle this. It is right out of the GJ Playbook.” 

Give it a try and see if the Internet Go School is right for you,

My Week of Go Activities

 

I spent nearly 49 hours on Go Activities this week. I am continuing to spend a lot of time Watching Others Play which often results in Reviewing Games of Others.  The time spent this week Reviewing My Games was usually spent with go friends who had watched my games as they were played.

I was unhappy with the amount of time I was spending with Live Play after playing 10 games. The time was low because my OGS games are taking fewer than 30 minutes to complete. This is especially true of the rash of resignations in my favor that I achieved this week. I wanted to play a few more games on Saturday, but I was feeling very protective of my OGS record for the week. I was 6:1. See below:

I wanted to play some more, but I also wanted a new account where I felt free to be more experimental in my play. I was actually planning to keep that account secret, without logging the details on my spreadsheet, while planning to count the time spent toward Live Play. Somehow that felt dishonest. Since my go life has been an open book all along I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I decided to own up to the new account and document the games. I ended up playing a total of 12 games this week.

The new account is named reckless. It is on KGS, and was inspired by a review I had last week in AYD. It was a very tough and valuable review. I was advised to turn off the part of my go CPU that defends. I was also encouraged to try more invasions. Some of them I would not have seen on my own. A new account, reckless, was created with these goals in mind. I can’t say that my first two games with the account have achieved my goals, but I have hopes that I can explore more invasions and last ditch efforts with my reckless account which is currently a remarkable 4k.

I have become conflicted about the way I have been reporting my win/loss ratio. the new season for YD has begun. YD games are always even. They are often played between players of disparate rank. The victories sometimes feel undeserved, as do some of the losses. Thankfully, YD games are always non rated.

Because OGS is where Clossius is hoping to see me rank up I’ve considered focusing on only OGS games for my ratio, but I should at least focus on only rated games. This week I will report it both ways.

I did rank up this week. I am 8k now on OGS with three wins in a row at that rank. I am unlikely to drop to 9k now unless I experience a really bad streak. Now I must work on getting to 7k.

Now for the important stuff...

12 Games Played (rated and NR)

OGS - Ranked Up to 8k

Essential Go Activities:     

23:07 (hours : minutes)

Nearly half of total time spent. (over 48 hours)

6:14       27%      Live Play

7:52       34%      Go Problems

9:01       39%      Game Review

Win/Loss Ratio OGS Rated

6:1      86% wins

Win/Loss Ratio All Rated

7:2      78% wins