My Complicated Relationship with Rank Anxiety

I have much less rank anxiety than I used to. I care little about my online go ranks, especially the ranks of my NAOL and Go Magic leagues.  I care little about my OGS, Fox, and PlayGo sever ranks. My rank anxiety has recently focused mostly on my AGA rank and my BenKyo League rank.

I've ridden the fence between DDK and SDK in the AGA for a number of years now. I was actually 8k in 2012, but I think ranks have gotten tougher since then. It shouldn't be important, but I like being SDK, so I have been a bit protective of my rank.  I actually missed out on the opportunity to play in the DDK tournament at the Congress the one year they had it because I was 9k at the time. It was bad timing indeed.

In the past decade my opportunities to play in tournaments have been limited to the U.S. Go Congress. This is very different from the years of 1997 through about 2010. In those days I would attend multiple tournaments in a year, so I had many games to my credit. I went from 19k to 9k during that time, a bit less than a rank per year. Since then I have mostly stagnated in spite of being very active in the online go world, especially since 2021.

At the Congress I mostly limit my rated games to the U.S. Open.  One serious game a day is plenty for me. I even missed the Congress last year, so it has been nearly two years since I have played a rated game. I'm not sure if I will play in the Die Hard this year or not.  The Senior Tournament and the Women's Tournament are open to me, but I like to socialize in the time available to me outside of the Open Tournament.

Now, concerning my BenKyo League rank anxiety... 

There are two leagues in BKL.  The Main league games are rated, and the Title Tournament games are not. A little over a year ago I dropped two ranks very quickly in BKL. Due to a long losing streak I went from 7k to 9k in the course of a couple months.  I wasn't psychologically prepared to drop another rank, so I set myself as inactive for Main League play, and I focused my attention on the Title Tournament where you can play anyone in the league from 5d all the way to 20k up to three times per month. We have a rank floor of 20k in BKL.  All that means is that if you are weaker than that you will be ranked as 20k.  We invite anyone who feels ready to play 19x19 games. It isn't too early to join us.

I'd been thinking about my rank anxiety, and a few days ago I decided to set myself active for Main League again. I invited the members of my group to schedule games with me via my Calendly link. I got one taker and we played.  I was nervous, but willing to accept that I might be on my way to 10k by the end of the month. I just resolved to do my best. It turned out to be an exciting game in which I managed to kill a corner. It should not have died actually. It should have resulted in seki at worst.  I was pleased to have killed it, but even more pleased to discover later that I could have won the game even if my opponent had made the seki. I think I would have been fine with losing the game. I had prepared myself for that, but I have to admit that getting a win on my first game back felt good. It also helped to get a bit of a hedge against falling to 10k.  I would need to lose four games now before the end of the month to fall to 10k for the May Season of BenKyo Leauge. I know I made a lot of mistakes in that game, and missed a lot of things too, but I feel as if I played flexibly in the center of the board.

Here is the final board position:

If you are interested in clicking through the game you can find it here.

With all of this mention of BenKyo League, I would like to make a special offer to players with OGS ranks of 20k through 25k.  (Just for that range of ranks). We have a generous referral program at BKL.  If you join and tell Ben that buzzsaw sent you, I will get a 30 minute Semi-Private Lesson with Ben.  Message me on Discord to tell me that you are responding to this offer, and when you join and say that I recruited you, I will let Ben know that I am passing my reward directly to you. My name on Discord is buzzsaw. I am willing to do this for players from 25k to 20k because I have an interest in increasing our roster of DDK players. They are the future of BKL.

BenKyo league comes with three interactive group classes per month. You get two leagues, and homework. You also get a community, the value of which is impossible to measure. The fact that people do not play their games at the same time means that you will likely get observers dropping comments and variations into your live games, which you can study later. Many of the stronger players in BKL are happy to play Title Tournament games with you. I am one of them.

Learn the details about BenKyo League here.

Are you ready for BenKyo League? You are if you are playing 19x19 games.

You can join the Discord for free and get a taste of the community in the free channels.

Now for an expanded Go Activities report. I have not posted for a few weeks. Rather than catch up with each missed week, I will post details of the entire previous month. My activities app allows me to do that.

It wasn't a terribly active month.  I spent a little over 13 hours on go activity per week, but I had fun. Now that I am caught up I will try to post weekly again with something new to say if possible.

The top activity was watching my BKL buddy Patrick play his games on Twitch. He streams his NAOL games and also his BenKyo League games, and he is only one rank away from me in BKL, so I find his streams interesting.

Twelve games were played during the month.

I was brave enough to open my Calendly for Main League games, but not brave enough to schedule them myself.  I jokingly told BenKyo Baduk during our most recent lesson, where we discussed my rank anxiety, that if my group members schedule with me, that I will play, but that I'm not brave enough to seek out games on my own yet. I guess that is the next thing I need to work on.  I will take one step at a time in overcoming this BKL rank anxiety.

Get a Great Deal on Lessons

You can get a great deal on Go Lessons and help send Clossius to the Go Congress at the same time. Clossius is offering a terrific price on packages of lessons to finance his trip to the Congress this year.  You'll get twelve one hour lessons for the price of $300.00, which comes to just $25.00 per lesson.

If you would like to see a sample lesson you can watch a recent two hour lesson I had with Clossius where he reviewed seven of my games.  We've been together for five years, and you can see that we have fun together during our lessons. In the last ten or so minutes I show him some problems that I had developed from the material in a previous lesson using AI Sensei. If you just want to see the AI Sensei Problems go to 1:48:00 on the video.

You can purchase a lesson package here.

Now for my weekly Go Activities Report.

It was an average week for go activity with over 20 hours devoted to play and study. 

AI-Sensei Problems came is as the top activity again.  I'm enjoying doing problems often and finishing them all for the day, sometimes more than once. I spent over two and a half hours doing that last week.

I made more problems again this week which is why BenKyo Private Lesson REPLAY as well as Clossius My Lesson REPLAY got significant slices of the pie.

I didn't play many games, but it was a good week for winning.

AI Sensei Problems for Game Review

My newest go study obsession is to create problems in AI Sensei to reinforce my lessons with Clossius and BenKyo Baduk.  My lessons consist mostly of game reviews, so it was a no brainer to start creating problems for those games in AI Sensei based on my lesson content. My problems are based on the input that I get from my teachers. They are not just based on blue and green AI moves. Some of the problems I make are are simply reinforcement of good moves, so they are not problems in the usual sense.  They are memories.

I have found that the primary benefit of creating problems from lesson material has been that it forces me to rewatch my lessons.  This is something that I should be doing anyway, but I have not done it consistently enough in the past. It didn't really feel productive until I decided to try making problems.

The way I create my problems is to open the video of my lesson along with the AI Sensei review of the game under discussion. I create a note in Evernote to take notes about the lesson incase there are things I want to remember that don't lend themselves easily to problem creation. I also open a review of the game in OGS incase I want to save variations. AI Sensei is best for one move problems, so I find it beneficial to sometimes replay a variation from a lesson and drop it into OGS to look at it later.

The time I spend reviewing my lessons, and creating problems is credited to Lesson REPLAY. The time I spend solving AI Sensei problems is credited to the Go Activities subtask of Tsumego called AI-Sensei Problems. I spent a great deal of time on that subtask last week.

An hour of that time was spent sharing problems from one of my games with a few BenKyo League members.  I shared my screen with them, and we talked through the problems. Currently that is the only way to share problems from AI Sensei. There were 34 problems for that game alone, and we spent an hour going over them. That included going back through the problems that were missed the first time.

The amount of time spent creating custom problems is not trivial.  It requires me to watch the entire lesson, and it requires me to write unique prompt text, and answer text, for each problem.  Recently I spent two hours watching commentary about one game, and creating 20 problems from that lesson.  I estimate the time spent on each problem is actually between 3 and 6 minutes not counting the time of watching the lesson itself.  If you figure that I spent two hours watching one hour of video to create 20 problems the math comes down to 60 minutes divided by 20 problems. This equals 3 minutes per problem, which isn't bad, but it is an investment of time.

The value of that investment became clear to me during a lesson I had with Ben the day following that two hour investment of time.  The next day we had another lesson, and Ben referenced a situation from the game I had created the problems for. I knew exactly what he was talking about because I had spent two hours the night before reviewing the lesson about that game. We talked about it in abstract terms until he opened the game record and found what we were discussing. It turned out to be a hypothetical that we were both able to recall. It wasn't even part of the game. It was kind of a mind blowing experience for me to realize how valuable it had been to spend the time reviewing the lesson and making the problems.  I had even made a problem for the hypothetical that we were discussing.

To give you an idea of what AI Sensei problems look like I will offer three examples of problems.  I will show screen captures of the prompt text and the answer text for each problem. This is actually a series of problems for a kill that never happened.

Problem 1

Problem 2

Problem 3

Currently AI Sensei problems are presented to me using a Spaced Repetition Model.  There is value in that, but it also means that I have no control over which problems are presented to me, and when I will see them again.

1. I would like to have control over when I see problems again.  Part of this might involve having the ability to initiate a session involving all of the problems from a game from within the AI Sensei game review.
   
   
2. I'd like to be able to create problem sets based on a variation that would keep those problems together in sequence.
   
   
3. I'd like for the addition of problems to the Training List not be dependent upon the date at which the game was first loaded into AI Sensei.  I found out about this issue when I created problems for games In-Seong had reviewed perhaps five or more years ago, and those problems did not show up immediately in the Training List. I was so disappointed by this that it stopped me from creating problems for a while.

Last week I spent a great deal of time doing problems to see if I could force the In-seong reviews to the surface.  It worked.  There were three reviews of AYD games that eventually appeared.

Next I decided to try to solve all of my problems. I got myself to the point where I only had seven games left, and I hit "Start Training" to do them all.

Success.

It isn't that hard to stay current with my problems.  This morning I was presented with 25 problems. It took me nine minutes to do them. That amounts to about 1/3 of a minute per problem. Most of the time was spent reading the prompt text, and answer text, for each problem. New problems are presented to you in a short period of time.

Now for my usual Go Activities Report:

It was a very busy week for go activity largely due to my new obsession with solving AI Sensei problems.

Not a great deal of time was spent playing games.  There are only three of them, but I have more games from the previous week for my lesson with Clossius.  In addition to that I have a new rank to report.

I have a rating on the PlayGo server which translates to 8 kyu based on the levels of the go problems.

PlayGo.gg Problems

 

I continue to enjoy the the lessons on PlayGo.gg, and spent over four and a half hours there last week working on Lessons. For a while I had been moving forward from one level to the next without bothering to play out the addition problems provided for each level.  After finishing the 900 Elo lessons I decided to check out the rest of the problems for all levels up to that strength before moving forward with the 1000 Elo lessons.

I discovered that there are a great many problems available, and that the site keeps track of which ones I have completed.  This makes it easy to return to doing problems, and to pick up where I left off.  I finished all problems up through the 900 Elo level. After that I returned to doing lessons, and am currently working on the 1000 Elo level.

I've actually changed the name of my activity category from Go the Game to PlayGo.gg because I don't think most people think of Go the Game as the name of the site.

Now for my usual Go Activities Report.

It was a very active week with over 24 hours of go activity. PlayGo.gg came in as the top activity.

I played six games and won four of them.  There were two Kango9 Group games among them because my week begins on Friday and it just worked out that way.

There are three auto match games on PlayGo.gg  The time I spend on games played there gets categorized as Live Play.

I Need to Play More Games

I've noticed that I have a tendency to play fewer games the week after I have a lesson with Clossius. Last week I had a lesson with him during which he reviewed seven of the games I had played in the previous two weeks. He reviewed all but the two games that BenKyo Baduk had reviewed for me.

Five or four games per week isn't terrible, but I know I can do better. But when I know that my lesson with Clossius is two weeks away I start to spend more time on activities other than actually playing.

My go activites for the week reflect this.

Though I spent nearly 21 hours on go activities, I spent only slightly more than two and half hours playing go. I managed to get in two games last week.

I need to play a lot more games for my next lesson with Clossius since BenKyo Baduk has already reviewed the two games above. I am planning to play some games on PlayGo.gg. I have already played three games there, and I have won each of them, which has earned me the Elo listed below.

Once the system sees me lose a few games that ought to change.

I Joined the Kango9 Community

Kango9 is a go teacher with a Discord server that he started in order to encourage people to play one serious game a week.  He is pairing people for weekly games and he asks that people who join the server either play a game each week, or at least contribute to discussion on the server.

Since joining a few weeks ago, I have played three games, and have another one scheduled for Friday night.

The image above is lifted from my games spreadsheet and shows a Kango9 Group game every week.

You can join the Kango9 Server here:

Now for my usual weekly Go Activities Report

It was a busy go week with 23.5 hours of go activity.

I didn't play a lot of games, only four, though I did win all of them.

I Missed Another Goose Tesuji

This was the last NAOL game of the season. I was black. White had passed. I shouldn't have.

Find the goose tesuji before scrolling down.

Wait for it,

Wait for it,

Wait for it,

Wait for it.

Ready, set, scroll.

Here is the goose.

I had looked long and hard at the cut at e3 earlier in the game. At the time white had not yet played the dame at e8, which changed everything.

This goose would have reversed the game, and I would have won by a small margin.

I was thinking that maybe white could do better by giving up the four white stones at e2, so I looked at that, but it would actually be worse.

It would have lost even more for white.

Anyone who is interested in seeing how the game unfolded can find it here.

Now for my weekly Go Activities Report.

It was a heavy week for Go Activities with nearly 27 hours spent. Live Play did not make it into the number one position. The category of Twitch - Patrick takes that honor, with Go The Game coming in third.

I played five games, most of them league games. I managed to win my Kango Group Game which I played against a fellow BenKyo League member. I used the new opening that BenKyo Baduk created for me, but played it as white. If anyone has an interest in seeing that game you can find it here.

I'm hoping not to have a missed goose next week. We'll see.