2700 Days in a Row

Most of my post this week is dedicated to my weekly visit at the Princeton Go Club. 

 

Sunday, October 4th

I logged into the Awesome Baduk discord and noticed a video for Bent Four in the Corner for the 10k to 15k level, and I watched it.

Monday, October 5th

I hit a new benchmark at The Internet Go School, I have completed 2,700 days in a row.  Well, not literally in a row. You earn vacation days, and if you miss a day, and have a vacation day to use, you keep your streak. On the day I hit 2700 days in a row I had nine vacation days left.

 

 

 

I spent a good deal of time reviewing games today.

Tuesday, October 6th,

I listened to the new Star Point podcast and the new All Things Go podcast. I should probably save one or the other of these podcasts for later in the week to spread out the go podcast goodness a little bit.  I'll have to think about this.

I attended the BKL tsumego group.

More Level 2 problems in Tsumego Dragon

• 33 Loop/Ko

I spent a good deal of time working on go problems created from a recent lesson with Ben.

 

 

Wednesday, October 7th

I attended the Princeton Go Club tonight which made me really happy because I was unable to go last week. I played two games, and had a great time.  Winning both of the games was a plus, but I think I would have been equally happy if the games had gone in the opposite direction by the same margin. Both of the games had very small margins. These are the types of games I like. The games where I die big, or simply lose by huge margins from bleeding point, are both demoralizing, but I think I am taking them well. When I lose by fewer than ten points I feel as if I played well, but a little less efficiently than I should have.

The first game of the evening was with Hochul.  We played a game with 78.5 points of reverse komi. We based the level of komi on the results of three games we played one night in quick succession. That was well over a month ago, so it was definitely time for us to play again.  All three of those games were five stone handicap games. The first two games ended in early resignations by me after something died. Ben told me, when he reviewed those games, that both of those resignations were premature. Hochul and I got the last game to go to scoring in an attempt to get a handle on what a proper handicap ought to be. It ended up being a fairly decisive victory for Hochul. We decided that, as a result, a seven stone negative komi equivalent would make sense.  I won our game tonight by 5.5, which makes us believe that we have found a good handicap.

Here is our game on Better Baduk.

 

Terri vs. Hochul 

 

 

The second game was with Andy.  We had played three times previously, and have not yet zeroed in on a proper handicap.  Our most recent game was three stones, but had been quite a while ago, so we decided to try three stones again.  I asked Andy to choose between reverse komi and stones.  He chose stones. We had a very close game, but I squeaked out a victory.  So it appears as if three stones is a good handicap.  I've won twice at three stones, and I think that we probably ought to observe a three-game kadoban with rank changing after three consecutive wins for one player or the other.  I was disappointed in my recording skills in this game because I messed something up on the game record and had to abandon recording very near the end of the game

I found out later that I had accidentally given white 7.5 points of komi when I set up the game.  I later fixed the metadata to reflect the correct komi.  Better Baduk gave me this message when I did that.

 

 

 

Here is our game on Better Baduk. This link reflects what the AI estimates the score to be when I stopped recording with the corrected komi.

 

Terri vs. Andy 

 

 

Hochul was kind enough to fill in the extra stones on the board to replicate the final board position.  I took a screen capture of that, and here it is. (However, this result still reflects the 7.5 komi error.) So it is probably actually B+ 10.5 

 

 

Andy brings out the best in me according to Better Baduk's estimate of my rank in the game with him compared to my rank in the game with Hochul.

Against Andy, I am 5 dan.

 

 

 

 

Compare that to the Better Baduk estimate of my rank based on the Hochul game, where I am 8 kyu.

 

 

 

Thursday, October 8th

I started my day with spaced repetition problems on The Internet Go School.  I lost another vacation day earlier this week, but it is what it is.  I just have to be better about remembering to do my problems.  Today I came upon an easy problem and had to laugh because I will surely be dead when it will come around again.  I will be well over 100 years old in 34 years.  

 

 

 

 

BTW, this is not a one move problem, but it was super easy.

I had a lesson with Ben today. We reviewed the two games I played last night at The Princeton Go Club where I will share the reviews.

 

Friday, October 9th

I again spent a good deal of time working on creating go problems.

I lead my usual tsumego group tonight.  We used Tsumego Hero.

 

 

Saturday, October 10th

I attended Ben's Study Group Class today.  The subject of the class was reviewing your own games. It was a great class.  One of the things Ben recommended is to review the game without AI first and, assuming you are using OGS, drop a variation for every move you feel is questionable, or that you want to follow up on.  I tend to be guilty of not reviewing my games myself. I depend on my teachers to review them. I have a lot of lesson time to spend, and relatively few games to review, so it is easy to get them all reviewed by my teachers.  Ben's class today convinced me, however, that I will get more from my lessons if I review my games on my own ahead of time.  I've already noticed that when I have bothered to click through recent games before a lesson, I get more from the lesson. When asked for alternative moves I am more likely to come up with good ones, and the game feels more fresh.

 

 

 

You Should Be Playing In NAOL

 

I have been so late in getting out last week's journal entries, that I am combining them with this week's journal entries, so here you will find two weeks of my ramblings about go.

Week one

 

Sunday, September 20th

I reviewed my the 60 minute lesson I had with Ben yesterday.  It was the lesson in which Ben reviewed the game I played with Kyle at the Princeton Go Club last Wednesday.  I created 22 problems for that game in AI Sensei. I use AI Sensei problems to review the things that Ben went over in our lessons, so the problems are sometimes remembrances rather than problems in the usual sense of the word.  I wish there was a way to share the problems, but that is currently impossible to do. I am thinking that I need an alternate means of summarizing my lessons for future review. I want a way to cut to the meat of the lessons without having to listen to every minute over again. I thought that AI Sensei problems would provide me with that means, but the lack of control I have over viewing them has been disappointing.

 

 

Continuing with the Level 1 problems in Tsumego Dragon:

• I did Snapback and Throw In Tactic for a total of 48 problems.
• I did Vital Wedge, Squeeze Tactic, Shape, Connect & Die, and Eye vs. No Eye for 29 problems
• I did Double Threat / Atari, Capture Race, Endgame (Yose), and Opening Basics for 84 problems
• I did Mutual Life, Liberty Shortage, and Bamboo Snapback for 14 problems
• I did Loop/ko and Double Loop/ko for 5 problems.

I think I have done almost all of the problems from Level 1 now.  I may be missing a few based on the math of the groups from today and yesterday, but it is not going to be worth my time to try to track down the few problems that I missed.  I'll try to be more systematic with Level 2 when I start doing that level.  My main goal is to go through all of the problems up through Level 3.  I'll probably repeat that periodically.

 

 

Monday, September 21st

Here I go with Level 2 of Tsumego Dragon. 

• 46 Capture problems.
• 58 Connecting problems.

There were new episodes for both Star Point and All Things Go.  I listened to both episodes. It is great to have fresh episodes every week.

 

 

Tuesday, September 22nd

I had a really bad night sleeping last night. I woke up at about 4:30 am, and unable to go back to sleep.  Since I have an important NAOL game tonight I took a nap in the afternoon so I can try to be fresh for my game.

I lost my NAOL game tonight.  I did finish Season 23 at 4:1 

 

 

Wednesday, September 23rd

Here I go again continuing with Level 2. To avoid missing any problems I have decided to do the categories in the order in which they appear in the app, rather than grouping them based on similarity.

• 17 Disconnect
• 29 Double Threat / Atari

I attended the Princeton Go Club.  Parker and I played two reverse komi games.  He keeps winning, so he had to take on increasing amounts of reverse komi starting with 78.5 for the first game, which I lost, and then 91.5 for the second game. I've arranged lesson time with Ben to review both of these games.  I've scheduled two 60 minute lessons. We will cover each game in separate lessons.

 

 

I had to leave the club at 9:00 pm to get back in time for an NAOL review with Ben.  My game was the last of three he was scheduled to review between 9:00 pm and 10:00 pm.  I got back home by 9:30, to find Ben still holding forth on the first game, which did not surprise me.  Ben gives great reviews for NAOL and spends more time than the twenty minutes per review he is contracted for.  This particular session lasted for two and a half hours, and he ended up spending over an hour on my game alone.  It turns out that I didn't play that poorly, which made me feel better. I made a mistake with a reduction that ended up getting contained, and then I handled the fight that resulted poorly. I should have run farther with those stones before making them live. 

If you have an AGA membership, and you are not playing in NAOL, you are seriously missing out. Season 23 just ended, and it probably won't be long before they open up registration for Season 24.

To peak your interest in playing in the NAOL, I will provide you with a link to Ben's most recent set of reviews. Mine is the last game.

The link provided will start at the beginning of my game review. 

 

 

BenKyo's NAOL Review S23 R5

 

 

Thursday, September 24th

In my lesson today with Ben we played a teaching game with a lot of discussion during the game. I felt like I needed more immediate feedback, so I wanted to give that a try.

 

Friday, September 25th

I lead my usual tsumego group in the evening at 8:00 PM.

 

Saturday, September 26th

Back to Level 2 problems in Tsumego Dragon.

• 100 Capture Race

Week Two

 

Sunday, September 27th

I played a game on PlayGo. gg, and felt as if I might not have played a bot this time. I have a lesson with Clossius this Friday. I should play a few more games to make sure I have enough material for him.

 

Monday, September 28th

I missed a day of spaced repetition problems on the Internet Go School, and am now down to 10 vacation days. This happens when I have a bad night of sleep, am too tired to do problems first thing in the morning, and then forget about them for the rest of the day. I was too tired to engage in any go activities on Tuesday, but I could have at least clicked through the problems to avoid losing a vacation day. I should just do that on a day I am too tired to do the problems first thing. It is way to easy to forget to get back to them.

 

 

 

Tuesday, September 29th

I discovered the problem with spaced repetition this morning when I went to do my problems and found two days worth of problems waiting for me and another gap in my progress graph.

I worked on Level 2 problems in Tsumego Dragon:

• 38 problems of Discovered Cut, Endgame (Yose), and Opening Basics
• 48 problems of Net
• 50 problems of Ladder

A cool thing about the net problems is the ability to see the opportunity to break the bamboo.  When you do a whole series of net problems the unfinished bamboo shape starts to jump out at you.

I attended the BenKyo Study Group tsumego session today.  We had nine people in attendance.

NAOL is now on break between seasons, so there was no NAOL game to play tonight. As a result I was able to schedule a lesson with Ben for 8:00 pm, when I ordinarily would have been playing an NAOL game.  It was a 60 minute Semi-Private Lesson.  We reviewed the first game I played against Parker at the Princeton Go Club last Wednesday. The second game will be reviewed on Saturday afternoon.

 

 

Wednesday, September 30th

I spent some time reviewing a few recent games with AI, listened to the most recent All Things Go podcast, and stayed up until midnight because it is the last day of the September season of BenKyo League.  We have a three day transition period during which time we prepare for the new season, and I like to get a head start on some of the administrative tasks associated with the transition.

Thursday, October 1st

I had a meeting with Ben today and we worked on some cool stuff I can't talk about yet.

I can't believe that I missed another day of problems on the Internet Go School.  That is two vacation days lost this week. I am down to 9 vacation days. This has to stop.

I watched a couple BenKyo League members play a game in the evening.

 

 

Friday, October 2nd

I had a two hour lesson with Clossius.  He reviewed five games for me and we finished up the lesson with a few problems in Tsumego Dragon because I ran out of games and had about ten minutes leftover, not enough time for a game even if I had it.  We did spend time looking at my 53.5 point loss against Katago, and we reviewed that game in Better Baduk where it was played.

Clossius likes the UI of Better Baduk.  I do too.  It is very attractive.

Saturday, October 3rd

I lead a tsumego group this morning for the BKL Study Group. I shared my screen and we used Tsumego Dragon.

Oh god no! 

 

 

 

I missed another day of problems on The Internet Go School, and I lost another vacation day.  Three vacation days lost in one week!  This insanity had got to stop! I am not only burning up vacation days I am wasting my money, especially since my reaction to missing a day is to click through the problems rather than to solve them.

The 3rd of the month is the night when Ben announces the beginning of the new season of BenKyo League.

Go Magic's Life and Death Volume Two is out!

I started it tonight.

 

Tackling Easy Problems in Tsumego Dragon

 

Sunday, September 13th

I mostly just did my Internet Go School problems and took a break from other go study for the day.

Monday, September 14th

The new season of Star Point has begun.  Of course I have devoured the new episode.

Tuesday, September 15th

I watched Patrick stream his NAOL game and stuck around for the review. I had no game of my own to play today because I played two NAOL games last week. Therefore I must wait until next week to see if I can finish Season 23 with a 5:0 record for probably the first time.

 

 

Wednesday, September 16th

I decided to try playing against AI using the Better Baduk web app. My second game against Katago ended up going to end game with me losing by a mere 53.5 which totally amazed me. That has to be a fluke.

 

buzzsaw vs. Katago

 

I listened to the latest episode of the podcast All Things Go.

While I was listening to the podcast I decided to do some easy go problems.  I opened up a set of all categories of problems at Level 1 on Tsumego Dragon.  I found it really easy to concentrate on the podcast and solve problems at the same time.  I usually do sets of a specific category of problem, so it was interesting to have all of the categories coming at me, and to think about the goal of the problem before I solved it. One of the things I noticed was that I was actually reading the problems all the way through before solving them, which is not always the case with Level 3 problems. I am at Level 3 with the Tsumego Dragon Assessment system.  There are 569 problems in the set I am working on.  Perhaps I will try to do them all in one day.

Oh crap.  I was chipping away at the Level 1 problems and I inadvertently exited by clicking on the wrong "back" button when I wanted to revisit a problem after clicking ahead to a new one.  It took me out of my problem set with no way to return to my random order of problems. I had finished half of them already. I'm not starting over again today, but I will make it a point to try getting through all of the Level 1 problems at some point soon.

I attended the Princeton Go Club tonight as usual.  I ended up playing Kyle again.  He played two games at once. When we have an odd number of people someone often ends up playing a simul game so everyone can play.  Kyle took black against Parker and and white against me. Here he is considering a move he is about to play in his game with me. Notice that I am using Better Baduk to record my game.

 

 

 

 

 

I lost, as usual. I have only won one game against Kyle, and that was due to a snapback fluke, so I don't put much stock in the win. I'm asking for 26.5 points of reverse komi next time, moving from a two stone handicap equivalent to a three stone handicap equivalent.

Thursday, September 17th

I had my usual lesson with Ben.  We spent the entire 90 minutes on the game I played with Kyle, not last night, but the week before.  I've already schedule an additional 60 minute lesson to cover the game from last night.  That will happen on Saturday.  I've already dropped today's lesson link into the Princeton Go Club Discord channel.  Ben spent time in that lesson giving me some 3-5 joseki to commit to memory. I am going to practice those joseki on an actual board.

 

 

Friday, September 18th

I was upset to notice this morning that I had failed to do my Internet Go School spaced repetition problems yesterday.  I'd had a terrible night of sleep Wednesday night, and didn't do my problems first thing in the morning.  I had a nice streak of doing my problems every day for a while which I ruined on Thursday. I need to do better with following through on my problems even when I don't get a good night of sleep. I will admit that I disposed of the larger number of problems by marking them all hard. After all, tomorrow is another day. (Channelling my Scarlett O'Hara.)

I am feeling unfocused concerning my go studies.  I'm not sure what to focus on next. There is so much to do. I decided to take the time to watch my lesson with Ben from yesterday, and at least do some screen captures of the 3-5 joseki suggestions.

Tonight I lead my usual one hour tsumego group.

 

 

Saturday, September 19th

Today Ben's Group Class was BenKyo's Opening Principles Revisited.

I decided to do all of the Beginner Level problems on Tsumego Dragon this morning. There are 307 of them. I finished them all in one sitting. I am definitely going to do all of the problems through Level 3, and it is nice to have the easiest ones out of the way.

Level 1 consists of 569 problems.  At some point I will try to solve all of those problems without losing track of things like I did the first time I attempted it. I think the best way to manage this is probably to select a few categories at a time to break up the sessions so they are no more than 100 problems per session.  I probably ought to take note of which categories I am doing in each session so I can be sure that I am not duplicating categories in later sessions.

Ben and I had a one hour lesson in the afternoon to review the game that Kyle and I played on Wednesday at the Princeton Go Club. That lesson is also being posted on the Princeton Go Club Discord.

 

I completed 375 of the Level One problems tonight.

• I started with Connecting and Disconnect which yielded 70 problems at Level 1
• I moved on to Capture which yielded 170 problems at Level 1
• I then did Three Point Eye, Four Point Eye, and Five Point Eye yielding 42 problems at Level 1. (there were no problems at Level 1 for Six Point Eye, and Nine Space Eye)
• I then did Making Eyes, Taking Eyes, False Eye, and Corner Life and Death for an additional 51 problems at level 1
• I ended my problems for the evening with Net and Ladder for an additional 42 problems at Level 1

That is enough for one day. I'll work on doing the rest next week.

I Am Now 4:0 in Season 23 of NAOL

 

Monday, September 6th

I played an NAOL game today in the afternoon.  My opponent is a fellow member of BenKyo league. I won that game, and am now 3:0 for the 23rd season of NAOL.

 

 

Tuesday, September 7th

I attended my usual Tuesday afternoon tsumego session. We are currently working with a combination of the categories Making Eyes and Taking Eyes at Level 2 and Level 3.  I spent time later in the day chipping away at some Level 2 problems in those categories.

I played another NAOL game in the evening.  I fully expected to lose this game since I have not done well recently against this opponent, who happens to be another member of BenKyo League.  BKL members make up 50% of my division this season in NAOL.  I didn't prepare for this game except to decide that since I would be white, and unable to use my opening, I would play two 3-5 moves as white. This was an attempt to take my opponent outside of his comfort zone.  It is something I have before, and an attempt to play my usual opening as white. It was a departure for me since I usually play two 4-4 points as white.

I was doing better than usual in the middle game, and got really lucky to cut off a chunk of 13 stones with a wedge. Based on the graph I had a chance to win without the wedge, but it would have been a much closer game, and there is no guarantee that my end game would have been good enough to pull off the win without that capture.

Here is a link to the game on Better Baduk which ought to take you to the wedge: 

 

Patrick vs. Terri 

 

And heck, let's just memorialize it with a screen capture. 

 

 

My move, as large as it was, is indicated as an inaccuracy because there is something that neither I nor my opponent had seen in the game.  I should be playing at b5 apparently.

When the game was finally over I noticed that we had drawn a crowd to observer the game.  It turns out that our game had been under discussion on the MGA Zoom. I hopped onto the Zoom to join them, and they shared the highlights of the discussion with me.

For someone who has convinced herself that she doesn't care about winning, I am on a bit of a high from this game.  It feels good to win a game you didn't expect to win.  I really don't care about my 12k rank in NAOL.  I find it almost laughable.  The competition in NAOL is fierce, but I think that anyone with an active AGA membership ought to play in the NAOL.  It does feel good to think that I might nudge that laughable rank a little closer to my AGA rank of 9k in the next season.

 

 

Wednesday, September 9th

I played Kyle again at the Princeton Go Club. I lost this game by 22.5

 

Terri vs. Kyle

 

Thursday, September 10th

I didn't have my usual lesson with Ben today.  I worked on some tsumego.

 

 

Friday, September 11th

It is funny how reading miscellaneous go Discords will send me to watching videos.  Today I opened up a video by Nick Sibicky about Bent Four in the Corner.  It is specifically his #255 lecture Bent Four Situations.  He mentions at the beginning of the lecture that he had done a similar one four years earlier, and I think I watched that at some point, or perhaps had watched this one before.  After getting twelve minutes into the lecture I am convinced that it was the earlier lecture I had watched.

 

Bent Four Situations

 

I watched the entire video, and now I think I should probably be watching them all to watch the evolution of his go lecture series. Maybe I can make it a point to watch one lecture a week.  If I do that it would take me more than ten years to catch up to his most recent lecture.  He actually stopped doing videos a few years ago, and I think he has recently resumed doing the occasional video.

 

So I opened this one.  Nick Sibicky Go Lecture #1

 

This lecture reviews a game played by 5 kyu players  on KGS in 2012, so it is 14 years old.

An important quote from the above video is, "If you make moves like this in go you are a chicken, or you are blind and you just can't find your opponent's weaknesses." How about both?

I lead my usual tsumego group in the evening.

I spent time after the tsumego group to play a couple of games with a new player who I have been talking about go with over the phone for the past year and a half.  I am going to work on getting him to come to the Princeton Go Club. 

 

 

Saturday, September 12th

Ben did a great class today which went a bit over two hours.  It was BenKyo Class #150 - Inventing Opening Patterns.

After class I tuned in to watch Patrick stream a BenKyo League game, and then Patrick decided to stream his lesson with Ben, and I was treated to a review of the game that Patrick just played, followed by a teaching game with Ben.

Later in the evening I watched Patrick play another BenKyo League game.  Not streamed this time.

I Got a Nice Snapback in a Game at Club

 

Sunday, August 30th

I spent a significant amount of time on Tsumego Dragon working on a fairly new feature called Assessment.  You need to do three sets of problems (called assessments) and then you are given a set of training problems based on your results during the assessments.   Although unlimited usage of the Assessment feature requires a subscription, you can do one assessment per day as a free user. The training system is designed to zero in on the categories you are having trouble with, and to keep your solving percentage near 50%.

In the evening I watched a BenKyo League friend stream one of his Main league games in BenKyo League. It was an exciting game with a reversal.  There was a 1 dan player observing who left some variations.

 

 

Monday, August 31st

I spent a good deal of time with Tsumego Dragon again today.

Not go related, but I spent my evening watching episodes of the show Fallout which I am watching on recommendation from a Facebook Group devoted to the show Silo. I am looking forward to the final episode of season three of Silo this week.  It is going to be another year until we get season four, and I am planning to listen to the books while I wait.

 

Tuesday, September 1st

I attended a one hour tsumego group meeting in the afternoon.

I played my NAOL game tonight and won it by 22.5 points, which is quite a large margin.  I am now 2:0 for the current season of NAOL.

 

 

Wednesday, September 2nd

I played Kyle again at the Princeton Go Club.  We used reverse komi of -13.5 for white in place of the two stones we would ordinarily use.  Kyle told me that he had looked up 3-5 joseki in anticipation of us perhaps playing. I managed to get in a nice snapback which gave me more than the slight lead I had before the snapback.  Here is a link to the game at the time of the snapback.

Terri vs. Kyle

 

Here is a screen capture of the time of the snapback:

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday, September 3rd

In today's lesson with Ben, we reviewed the game I played last week with Parker in which we used reverse komi of -65.5 which is the equivalent of six handicap stones.  Parker won that game easily by a little over 20 points.  It was a private lesson, but I told Ben I would be sharing it with Parker and the entire Princeton Go Club.  We spent the entire 90 minutes on that one game. Ben gave me permission to also share with the club a Study Group Class, the title of which is Endgame: Move Value Concepts & Counting. The class is two hours long.

I started watching the class after I dropped it into the Princeton Go Club Discord for all to watch. I was in attendance when the class was recorded three and a half years ago. It is class number 16, but Ben now has a library of 149 classes for Study Group members to watch. 

 

 

Friday, September 4th

In my two hour lesson with Clossius we started by spending nearly an hour reviewing my Princeton Go Club game with Kyle from Wednesday. I've shared that lesson with Kyle and the rest of the Princeton Go Club.

The tsumego group i lead on Fridays met tonight for an hour. We had a good sized group as usual lately.

Saturday, September 5th

Because it is the first Saturday of the month there was no Study Group Class today with BenKyo Baduk.

I spent time this evening doing training on my go problems on AI Sensei.

 

 

 

I think I Solved My Image Problem

 

The image above is provided to prove that I can now post images to my blog again. It is a picture of the BenKyo League gathering at the Go Congress.

This renewed capability might be limited to Firefox. If so, I will start composing my blog entries on Firefox.

Just before I left for the Congress I started to have difficulty posting images.  What I usually do is create drafts of my blog in Evernote.  I copy those images and drop them into Blogger.  All of a sudden that was no longer working.  Now, exclusively through Firefox, I can do it again.  I hope this continues.

 

 

I Tried Negative Komi rather than Six Stones in a Game at the Princeton Go Club

Sunday, August 23rd

I continued working on reviewing a lesson with Clossius.

Monday, August 24th

I finished reviewing the lesson with Clossius.  I am not recording the time I spend on things anymore so I can't really say how much time I spent, but I made AI Sensei problems for all five of the games he reviewed.  I would estimate that I spent at least three hours reviewing that lesson, maybe even four given that I have to rewind pretty often when I find material for problems.  It was a two hour lesson to begin with.

For one of the games in the lesson I made 44 problems.  I now have 1,530 problems in AI Sensei.

Tuesday, August 25th

I was taking a look at the number of posts per year on my blog today.  If you take a look at the list on the right side you will notice a gap of five years when I did not blog at all. That was from 2015 through 2019.  It turns out that there were two things that probably caused that gap.  I started an eight year break from lessons with Yilun Yang in 2015.  The other thing that probably brought about the end of my blogging about go is that I was heavily involved with quilting, and I was blogging about that multiple times a week. I didn't really have a go community to center me like I do now with BenKyo League, and I had no teachers at all after stopping lessons with Yilun Yang.  I was also attending the Go Congress alternate years for a while during that time period.  I just wasn't that into go anymore.  If it hadn't been for going to congress alternate years I might have given up the game. It wasn't until I decided to join the American Yunguseng Dojang in 2019 after the Go Congress in Madison, that I started to play go with any seriousness. That soon lead to blogging again in 2020.  If you want to know more about that you can look at the first few posts from 2020.

I lead a one hour tsumego group for the BenKyo Study Group today.

The NAOL season started today. I won my first game by 4.5 points.  It was against an opponent I played seven times, and this was only my second win against him.  It was a fairly close game throughout with neither player being more than about 10 points in the lead at any time.

My game was finished in about an hour.  I joined the stream of a friend of mine who is in my NAOL division, and also a BenKyo League member.  I watched him defeat my next opponent.  His game went on for at least 40 minutes after I arrived in his stream.  It is always fun to watch him stream his games and then review them on AI Sensei. 

Wednesday, August 26th,

I woke up at 4:00 AM and didn't get back to sleep.  I decided to do some go problems so I opened up AI Sensei. My training shows 9 games with a total of 200 problems due.  I'll chip away at them and then maybe give sleep another shot. 

I never did get back to sleep even though I tried.  I eventually made coffee and started my day.  I didn't want to challenge myself too much so I decided to entertain myself by watching a Semi-Private Lesson of another BenKyo League member.  One of the nice perks of being in BKL is that Ben posts the Semi-Private lessons in a dedicated channel, so all BKL members can watch them.  I noticed that our newest member had a 60 minute lesson posted yesterday so I decided to watch it while I was waking up with coffee.

I played Parker at the Princeton Go Club.  We decided to use the negative komi chart that BenKyo Baduk developed for use in BenKyo League.  Parker seemed skeptical of the -65.5 komi required to equal a six stone handicap.  I suggested that the negative komi could be regarded as something requiring adjustment, just like handicap stones. He decided he was willing to give it a try. He had no trouble winning, and I lost by a little over 20 points.  I at least got to play the opening that Ben developed for me. It starts with a 3-5 stone. We ended up with a meaningless ko at the end of the game. It wasn't going to change the results, but we played it, and it turned out to be the longest ko I had ever played.  It was hard enough to record on my iPad. I am glad I wasn't recording on a paper kifu. Based on results, Parker and I are going to have to try seven stones next time. I did better than I did last week, but the results still indicate that handicap is insufficient.  

Here is the game with Parker.

After finishing my game with Parker I was quite tired, but I played a few small board games with Kyle.

Thursday, August 27th

I have a lesson with Clossius on Friday, and I really don't have much material for our lesson. I decided to play some games on the PlayGo server late in the evening.  I played four games in a row.  I lost them all.  I am convinced that every opponent I played was a bot.  They all played to keep the time left on our clocks nearly even.  I might play some more games tomorrow before our lesson.  Clossius can usually do six reviews in a two hour lesson.

Friday, August 28th

I woke up early, downloaded my games from PlayGo, uploaded them to my SGF Library on OGS, and put them into my games spreadsheet. I didn't play any more games.

I discovered that PlayGo now has a Coaching feature for review.  I used it to review the final game I played last night. That is how I spent my morning.

I had a nice lesson with Clossius in the afternoon. It turned out that I had plenty of material for him without using any of the bot games from PlayGo. We reviewed four games.

Saturday, August 29th

I didn't do much today other than watch a few BenKyo League games being played.  I am pleased to see that we are going to be able to maintain our five groups for September.  BenKyo league has members from 6 dan to 20 kyu.