My Week of Go Activities - Happy Anniversary Clossius

 

This was a monumental week for two reasons.

Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of my first lesson with Shawn Ray (Clossius). In the past year we have had 47 lessons. Through his tutelage I have come to embrace the 101 Weiqi web site and appreciate doing Go Problems. At his suggestion I developed a kick ass games spreadsheet of which I am very proud. I look forward to another great year with Shawn, and hope to hit the 100 lesson milestone at some time in early 2023.

The second reason that this was a monumental week is that, purely by coincidence, I had my very first lesson with Ben Mantle (BenKyo Baduk) on the one year anniversary of my first lesson with Shawn. I won't be taking weekly lessons with Ben, however. Presently I am in a Patreon Tier that includes one monthly lesson and a significant amount of teaching time on his Twitch Live Stream. I am enjoying his Discord community, particularly the League.

This week was clearly dominated by a color I now refer to as BenKyo Blue.

My lesson was supposed to be 90 minutes, but you can see that Ben was generous with his time on this first lesson. He brought it in at over three hours. We played a teaching game and then reviewed it. We covered a number of topics aside from the game review and had a discussion about stone visualization. Ben referred me to a Patreon article he has written a few months ago for more detail. It was a great lesson.

Ben is currently only accepting new students for lessons through his Patreon Tiers which is one of the reasons I got involved at the lower Tier levels a little over a month ago.

I currently have a number of categories established for time tracking of my BenKyo time. I am entitled to unlimited Correspondence Games with Ben with Malkovich comments, so that is one of the categories. I have yet to start a Correspondence Game, however, and that is on my to do list. A number of Ben's Patreon Tiers promise additional lesson time on his Live Twitch Stream, so I will be tracking that separately from the general Live Stream time.

I have a number of categories for the tracking of my Clossi time as well.

Since coining the term "BenKyo blue" I have been searching for a color name for pink that starts with the letter "c".

I want a cool color name for my Clossi Pink.

Clossi Creamy looks like the right color, but my better judgment tells me to choose Clossi Carnation even though it is not quite the right color.

My first thought was to switch out the pink for the red I am using for Tsumego so I could have Clossi Crimson. It sounds so much cooler, but it would be a lot of work. I'll leave the color as pink for now and consider the switch for later. If I make Clossi time red that would put him at the top of the color list, but I am the only one that sees the full color list.

I was a little light on Go Problems this week with just over 1,000. I need more 101 Weiqi.

I played eight games this week, so I fell two short of my goal. I will make up for it next week. If I play two games a day I can get in 12 games and still have one vacation day.

My Week of Go Activities

I spent nearly 22 hours on Go Activities this week. A third of that time was spent on Live Play.

I did fewer Go Problems this week than usual, coming in at under 1,000 problems for the first time in a long time. I really have to spend more time on 101 Weiqi next week. 

I had an exceptionally good week. I played ten games. More than half of them were rated. I had seven wins and three losses. My largest loss was 2.5 in a game where I had to give handicap. The other two losses were 0.5 games. Look at all that "feel good" green! I think this might be the first week ever that I had an entirely green column for my games links.  It might be the last since I am going to be playing ten or more games a week moving forward.

I played five games in the BenKyo League this week. I am currently leading in the league, and hope to play as many games as possible before the end of the month. The league is handicapped which is interesting because I hardly ever take or give handicap by choice. Ben is encouraging rated games so I am playing rated with those who are willing. This seems to be helping with my fear of playing, and it is definitely helping with meeting my goal of playing at least half of my games rated.

I am riding the line between 8k and 7k on OGS which effects handicap in my league games. We are allowed to play the same person twice in the league, and something funny happened. I played someone when he was 2k and I was 7k and I got five stones. I dropped to 8k and thought I would get six, but when we played he had dropped to 3k, so it was still a five stone game. Funny.

I'm having my first lesson with Ben next Thursday and hope to rack up a few more league games between now and then.

My Week of Go Activities

 

It was a light week for go activity with just shy of 26 hours. Live play came in at the number one spot with more than six hours. A good portion of that time (nearly three hours) was spent playing a simul game in live stream with BenKyo. He was playing a good many other players with generous time limits, so I spent most of that time thinking on his time, not that it helped me much. I ended up resigning that game because I was behind by over 25 points. It was an even game with an OGS 6 dan, so it was to be expected that I would lose badly.

However, checking with AI Sensei the next day I was pleased to see that I had actually played well for my level. I am 7k on OGS, but I have my slider set to show 6k mistakes.

Check it out!

There were no 6k mistakes. That lead me to see just how far I would need to adjust the slider to detect a mistake for black in this game.

It turns out that I have two 2k mistakes.

The fist one really cost me.

I am going to start posting my stats for go problems on a weekly basis. I generally do nearly 1,000 Spaced Repetition Problems on the Internet Go School web site. They are listed in the GJ column. GJ stands for Guo Juan. When Clossius suggested I do fewer go problems I found myself cutting down on the 101 Weiqi problems which I did not really want to do. I am going to be trying to get in between 1,500 and 2,000 problems per week moving forward. I think it is important in developing my reading skills to focus on the 101 Weiqi problems. Ideally I would like to do 700 problems from 101 each week.

The year has come to an end, so it is time to look at how many games I have played for the year.

I played 471 games this year which is an average of 9 games per week. I want to raise that to a minimum of 520 games in 2022 for an average of 10 games per week. Maybe I can do even better than that. I am going to try to increase the number of rated games I play. At least half of my games should be rated.

My Week of Go Activities

 

I took a bit of a break from Live Play this week, but it was a week full of Go Activity. I clocked in over 35 hours. 

The BenKyo Live Stream came in at the number one position.

My winning streak in the Canadian Open was broken. I had increased my record to 6:0 on Sunday, but met my match on Monday when I played ucdavis. He took me down with a loss of 18.5. 

I only played four games this week. They are the four games at the bottom of the above screen capture of my spreadsheet. Part of the reason for lack of activity was because my lesson was scheduled a day early due to the holidays. Most of the reason was that I was just spending so much more time on other go activities, and I was avoiding Live Play.

I included the previous week in the screen capture to show that I have an active link in my spreadsheet to a BenKyo Twitch Stream review of a League Game I played with Kdar. He submitted the game to Ben to review in fulfillment of a 45 minute live stream Patreon Benefit. It turns out that Ben was exceedingly generous with his time on this review and spent a little shy of three hours doing it. He clipped the review as a highlight from his VOD so it will continue to be available here.

I enjoyed my lesson with Clossius this week. Because I had so few games to review I lined up my buddy Drewch to play a shadow go game with me. When I suggested it to Clossius he was very enthusiastic for us to proceed to play against Drewch. This was different from a usual shadow go game because the opponent was fully aware of what was happening to him. I insisted on generous time limits because I really wanted to be able to discuss things in detail with Clossius and I knew that Drewch would patiently wait for his turn to move. 

Above is the point in the lesson when Clossius said, "Just don't die."

When the lesson time came to an end I resigned the game even though Clossius and I were ahead. Then Clossius gave us some overtime to click through a few variations he had been considering during the game. It was great fun for Drewch and me. Clossius appeared to have had a good time. It was live streamed, so I hope the observers enjoyed it too.

One thing that became apparent from this lesson is my lack of reading ability. More go problems for me!

Breaking News!!!

I played my final game of Canadian League, and I won it. I finished with a record of 7:1.

My Week of Go Activities

 

My activities post is a little late this week, and I will keep it brief.

I put in over 29 hours this week. Over seven hours were spent playing nine games.

I played five League Games, and was short on rated games, having played only two of them.

As of today I am undefeated with a record of 5:0 in the Canadian League. 

I've played two games so far in the BenKyo League, and am undefeated there as well, but with only two games in that isn't really all that impressive.

I'm going to try to increase my number of rated games this week. That is my main goal.

My Week of Go Activities

 

Let's start out with the news that I have ranked up to 6k on Fox. I started at 6k and was actually set to rank up to 5k at one point before I experienced a losing streak that sent me down to 7k. Now I am back where I belong and I will start working on the next promotion.

Next I would like to announce that I am currently undefeated in the Canadian League with a 3-0 record. I do not expect that to last for long. Here is a decisive moment from my most recent Canadian League game. I managed to kill something.

AI analysis shows that I was really slow on the draw seeing the weak group, and making that kill, as illustrated below. Luckily I got to it before my opponent protected the group. I apparently didn't need the kill to win the game. AI shows me ahead by about 30 points without it. I think I played very conservatively after the kill. This opponent has put me in some precarious situations in previous games, so I needed to be careful. There may be chicken moves.

Now for the usual information:

In spite of no longer counting the time I spend watching others play, and reviewing their games with them, I still put in nearly 27 hours on Go Activity this week. My guess would be that I spent another ten or more hours working with my go friend, Drewch.

Live Play came in at the top of the list just above Spaced Repetition Problems, which got a big boost this week because Guo Juan created a slew of problems recently which I added to the Training System. They largely involved modern joseki.

Check out the Internet Go School for more information. 

You can see below in the Study Stats section that I added quite a few problems at once, and that I marked them repeatedly in a way to keep them appearing frequently as I was learning them. Once I was able to mark them as "Got It" things settled down. I love the Spaced Repetition Problems from the Internet Go School.

I have reached #39 for All Time on the Leaderboard for the Internet Go School.

Something else is new this week. 

You may recall that I skipped up to Level 4 Support on Patreon for Ben Mantle last week to experience the Study Group and League Play. 

After researching his lesson packages, and learning that he is planning to discontinue taking on new students through that means, I suffered a serious case of FOMO (fear of missing out). As a result, I upped my support to Tier 6 where I will get one lesson a month plus significant personal stream time as well as the Study Group and League Play. Once a month was really all I wanted, and the other perks for the lower Tiers will probably make it worth the investment. 

For details about the Tiers search for BenKyo or Ben Mantle on Patreon. You can see all I get on Tier 6 if you check out his Tiers on Patreon. It would be difficult to show the extensive list here.

Make no mistake. I am thrilled with my lessons with Shawn Ray, and will continue with them. Since I have the time, the means, and the interest to do more, I am branching out a bit to support another go teacher.

This week I played eight games, five of them rated on Fox. My losses were within very small margins. There were only two losses this week. All of my games got colored with "Feel Good" green.

I made a new rule for myself. After my husband has gone to bed if I have not yet played a game for the day I hop on Fox and play a game whether I want to or not. So far it is working.

My Week of Go Activities

 

It was a very low activity week. I had fewer than 18 hours of Go Activity recorded. I did spend a great deal of time watching my good buddy Drewch playing and reviewing with him, but I am not counting that as activity anymore.

I was short on games with only four this week, but I had company and needed to be social, so that cut down on my activity over all. I'm doing okay at slowing down my play. Games averaged more than an hour each.

My lesson with Clossius this week proved that I am doing a very bad job at reading my cutting points. I know it is important and I am trying to do better, but I am falling short. I will be trying to focus on reading the cutting points more this week.

On a positive note I have started to walk outside again. I'm hoping that being more active physically will help with stamina in my go games.

I increased my support of Ben Mantle this month by going up to Tier 4 from Tier 2. That will get me into his Study Group and will also get me into his League. I'm considering the possibility of purchasing a package of lessons too from his website. That would require me to play more games which would be a good thing.