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.

Try PlayGo.gg

I've recently been spending quite a bit of time on a new site for playing go and studying about go.  It is called PlayGo.gg  You can also get there by typing gothegame.com as well, which is how I found the site initially, and how I still get there. It hopes to be, for go, what chess.com is for Chess, and I believe that it may succeed. Currently you can do everything there for free. Eventually there will be fees involved which you can preview on the site.

I created a new activity under my Miscellaneous category for Go The Game, and ended up spending three hours there.  

Here is what I see when I log in.

It is a nice clean interface which is easy to understand and to navigate.

The only thing I have done so far there is to work through the lessons under Learn.  In spite of being 9k, I decided to start from the very beginning, and I am glad I did. I am currently working through 23 kyu problems. The site keeps track of how far I have gotten on my lessons, and it lets me pick up where I left off. When I click on Learn, I can redo problems or scroll down to where I can continue from where I left off.

I highly recommend these lessons for beginners.  The teacher goes to great lengths to explain in detail what is happening in the problems.  He shows every possible variation that can happen.  This is a level of detail I have found nowhere else for beginner problems. I expect, as the levels increase, that the level of detail will decrease as students are expected to be able to see the consequences of certain actions. However, at the very beginner levels this high level of detail is very refreshing.  Get your lessons in while you can watch as many as you want with no restrictions.

BenKyo Baduk has done a video about the site which you can watch here

And now for my weekly Go Activities Report:

My week was a little short on go activity with fewer than 20 hours.  As usual, my top activity was Live Play.  My newest activity, Go The Game, took second place. I also spent a good deal of time watching others play.  I can only assign an activity to one category, so a good portion of the time I spend on the category Twitch - Patrick is actually watching someone else play, and then part of it would be watching someone else review, but I let it just be covered by Twitch - Patrick.  Logging my time isn't so much about being 100% accurate as it is about counting up the time spent, and feeling that I have put in an adequate amount of effort.

It was not an especially good week in terms of my game performance.  I played six games, all with human beings, which is a plus.  However, I was unable to win a single one of them. They did turn out to be good material for a lesson with Clossius. He actually made me feel better about a couple of these games.  I am taking my lessons with Clossius on alternate weeks.

I'll have a new Go Activities Report next week, and hopefully something else interesting to write about.

I Missed a Goose Tesuji

Goose Tesuji is a term coined by Clossius (Shawn Ray), one of my teachers. It often results from filling dame, but it can actually be any weakness, especially near the end of the game.

In a recent NAOL game, with a long time Go Congress opponent, I totally missed a move that would have resulted in the capture of 11 stones minimally. It would have resulted in an even larger loss if my opponent had failed to step back, as necessary.

Take the time to see if you can find the first move for black in this board position. White had just passed, so it is black's turn.

You can check your answer by looking at the these two variations in the game record.

Click on the link below to find the above mentioned variations. Feel free to leave comments and variations of your own for both players while you are there.

NAOL Game

I consider myself lucky to have not needed this goose in order to win this game. However, it would have been nice to have at least seen it.  My intuition was drawing me to the area. I wanted to make something work, but I couldn't.  I saw the last remaining dame, which threatened a capture, but the threat was obvious and easily protected against.  My opponent made the proper response, and we moved on to scoring.

  

I failed to see that the proper move was from the inside rather than the outside. I hope to be able to see such problems in the future.  With that in mind, I headed over to Tsumego Dragon, and loaded up every Vital Wedge problem available to me.  There are 61 of them, and they range in difficulty from Level 0 to Level 3.

I did all 61 problems and only missed about four or five of them on the first try.

If you are interested in how the term Goose Tesuji came to be, you might enjoy this video:

The Story of the Goose Tesuji

Now for the report of my week of Go Activities:

Last week was a moderately active week for go activities. I put in over 17 hours. I did manage to get in a bit of time on my Internet Go School Spaced Repetition problems. I missed one day and am down to 12 vacation days. I have to be more vigilant.

My Return to Go Activity Tracking

For the past three weeks I have returned to tracking the time I spend on go using the IOS app "Now Then".  When I attended the U.S. Go Congress in 2024, in Portland, I had stopped tracking, as I do at every Congress.  I find it too annoying to track at a Congress. After returning home, I decided to take a break from tracking altogether for a while.  Unfortunately, I found that this pretty much put an end to blogging for me. After that I stopped tracking, I blogged seldom, and intermittently.

It wan't that I had nothing to say, but I found that reporting on my go activities was the trigger that prompted me to post.  When I did post, I often had more to say, but my trigger was gone, so the posts ended.  Therefore, I am here again with my finger on that familiar trigger, posting my beach balls and my activity lists for the world to see.

It was a busy week for go activities.  My week runs from Friday to Thursday because my lessons with Clossius fall on Fridays.  I did not have a lesson with Clossius last week. He was meeting with friends for a fun filled go weekend, so my usual Friday afternoon slot was unavailable.

Last week I spent over 23 hours on Go Activities.  My top activity was attending BenKyo Baduk's Invasion Workshop. It was a great workshop with good attendance. I look forward to more workshops with Ben.

I created an entirely new Twitch category for my friend Patrick, who has been an inspiration to me. He streams most of his league games, and if I am not doing something else at the time he is streaming, I enjoy watching.

I was shocked this morning to discover that I did not have any time devoted to Guo Juan's Internet Go School on my beach ball, so I logged on to see that I had missed quite a few days, and had lost quite a few vacation days as a result.  It is easy to forget to do my minimal number of problems if I am busy with other go activities. I had made a resolution last year to build my IGS vacation days back up to 70, and I had achieved that goal.  However, forgetfulness had chipped away at those days to a dangerous extent, and I must do better.

I am down to 17 vacation days, and I do not want to risk my 2491 days in a row. I'll lose that number if I run out of vacation days.  I have multiple reminders on my calendar to do my problems, but the reminders are easy to overlook. At my best, I finish all due problems every day. This earns me bonus points.  My recent forgetfulness has brought me to 953 problems due. Bonus points are not important now.  Building up vacation days is what is important.

I have a two hour lesson with Clossius coming up, which is not going to be live streamed.  I've got nine games that he can review for me.

The games that have not been reviewed since January 14h are available for Clossius to review. I'm saving my Go Magic League game for BenKyo Baduk to review.  That is a Lesson which I will share with my opponent, as I am encouraging him to join BenKyo League.

Here is a better view of the games available for review.  If there is no name in the right column the game has yet to be reviewed.

I might return to streaming my lessons with Clossius, but I'm currently feeling a bit self conscious, and prefer to keep them private for now.

Next week I will be back with another Go Activity report, and perhaps more thoughts to share.

Progress on Yunguseng Dojang Game Review

In my last post I mentioned that I am listening to all 212 of my reviews from my five years in the American Yunguseng Dojang, starting from my earliest games. I wanted to report on my progress so far.

I've created a spreadsheet which will eventually house OGS links and AI Sensei links to all of my AYD games.  I've copied information over from my AYD profile page to create my spreadsheet.  

The profile page lists all of my games in this fashion:

I needed to copy the text from the profile page onto a spreadsheet of my own because I am adding columns for OGS links and the AI Sensei links. To make the sheet more easily navigable, I separated the cycles from each other with white space and copied the names of the columns for each segment. I added the names of seasons and cycles to each segment to more easily zero in on specific games.

My plan is to watch all of the reviews one time before making any problems in AI Sensei, but that plan might change.  Part of what I need to do as I fill in my spreadsheet is to download sgf files from the AYD site, upload them to my SGF Library on OGS, and then add those games to AI Sensei.  

I've actually watched the reviews from my first two seasons of AYD, but I have only uploaded the links for the first season so far. Starting in 2021 the OGS links should be available to copy from my games spreadsheet. I did not keep a games spreadsheet until when I started to take lessons with Clossius. I devised my games spreadsheet as a means for Clossius to launch games for review regardless of where those games had been played.

Below is part of my games spreadsheet.

It isn't the most impressive week, but it is what it is.

I've been enjoying watching the reviews again.  This activity has replaced some of the time I had been spending on Netflix, and it is surely better for me than watching Netflix. I think I must be stronger than I was at the time that I played these games because I am understanding the reviews better than I did when I first watched them. I really hope that creating problems will help to reinforce what I should be learning from each review.

Watching all 212 reviews and turning them into problems is going to be a very long process. I'm not sure that it is the most efficient use of my time, but I am having fun with it so far, and I find myself oddly obsessed with completing this task. Regardless of how long it takes I am going to complete this task. Failure is not an option.

Thinking of Returning to the Yunguseng Dojang

 First of all let me say I'm back to blogging!

It's been about a year since I have consistently blogged. I stopped blogging when I stopped keeping track of the amount of time I spent on various go activities. I took a break from that at the 2024 U.S. Go Congress, as I always do. For some reason I didn't get back to keeping track of my go activities after the Congress. That disrupted the flow of my blogging, and brought it to a screeching halt. 

Recently I have begun to think about the way I structure my go study, specifically how I learn from my go lessons and reviews. As a result, I have decided to begin blogging again and to share my my go journey.

I spent five years studying with In-seong Hwang in his American Yunguseng Dojang, which I will call AYD moving forward. A year ago I decided to take a break, but I am considering coming back. One of the things I want to do before returning is to rewatch the game review videos that were done over the course of those five years.

It looks like I have 212 games to review based on my game graph below from my profile on the AYD web site.

I decided to start my listening from the oldest to the newest reviews.

When I was in AYD there were three seasons per year with three cycles each, yielding 15 games per season and 45 games per year. That changed at the time that I left. There are now two seasons per year with four cycles each, yielding 40 games per year.

I actually think I would prefer the new format since it eliminates the weekend game from each cycle. Those games were often difficult to schedule.

Below you can see my first cycle of games. 

The little black square ballon shows that I have recorded notes for the video.

Hovering over the little black square balloon at the end of each list shows the notes that I have included about the contents of the video. Those notes are visible only to me, and I generally use the comments to indicate the time stamp for the beginning of each review, and also the length of my own review. Sometimes I write a few notes below the time stamp, but I am actually considering creating Evernote files for my reviews. I am also planning to create problems in AI Sensei to reinforce In-seong's comments about my games.

This morning I listened to all five of my reviews from Season 25 Cycle 1.

It was certainly a walk down memory lane. During that cycle I was in the same group as Ragnarr, who has become a good go friend of mine. He is now AGA 2d compared to my AGA 9k. During the first cycle I played him and lost by only 9.5 points in an even game. He is now giving me nine stones. How things have changed.

One of the nice things about being a member of AYD is that even after you leave the league, you still have access to your own game reviews, and also to the reviews of the members of your group who happen to be reviewed at the same time as you. All of the games reviewed at the same time are in one video.

Below you can see what it looks like when I click on the 5th round of Cycle 1. The video itself is at the top, and the individual games are listed below that. You then see a box where you can type comments about the video which are visible only to yourself. Every time you add comments you click the update button to preserve your comments. They will be there the next time you open the review.

My plan is to first simply watch my 212 reviews and put in the time stamps for them. That way I can easily find them again. I ought to have 225 reviews, but I apparently had a number of wins by forfeit during the course of the five years. After I have watched my reviews I am planning to watch them again while creating problems within AI Sensei. The use of AI Sensei problems for lesson review is something that I am very interested in, and that is a future blog post of its own.

My estimated time of arrival back to AYD is probably September of 2026. That will have given me two years off and nearly a year to study the five years I spent learning from In-seong.

I do highly recommend AYD. In-seong allows students to begin at 12k. My suggestion, however, is probably 9k as the best minimal level to begin while getting the best value from the reviews. I feel that 5k might be the best minimal level to get the most value from the lectures. I always felt that the lectures were over my head, but I was okay with that. I was there for the reviews, and it will be for the reviews that I will eventually return.

By the way, In-seong had me pegged from the first game. He really knows his students. The best advice he gave me was to not only look to my stones and my weaknesses, but to also look to my opponent's stones and their weaknesses. I've been trying all along to do that, but I never quite managed to improve as I should have. Perhaps going over the material again will help. Reinforcing it with problems in AI Sensei surely ought to help. I'd really like to return to AYD, especially with the new improved schedule that puts review times earlier in the day, but I am hoping not to be a disappointment to In-seong when I do return. I believe that looking back on the five years is important before I return.