I Might Have Found a Potential Over the Board Rival

I returned to the Princeton Go Club after a week off. I wasn't willing to brave the heat wave we were experiencing last week, so I did not attend.

This week I played two games with a member estimated to be near my rank. I had not yet had a chance to play Kyle who has been studying go for about five months, but does not know his rank.  That was surprising to me, and would suggest that he may not yet have an active presence on any go server.

We played two games.  In the first game we thought we had created a really large seki, but looking at AI later, it became clear that it was never really a seki.  He might have known that all along. I'm not sure. I think Andy, one of the strongest member of the club knew that it was not a seki. He had taken a look and held back from commenting on it. While my stones were doomed to die, I made a pretty bad blunder as the game was finishing up which dispelled any hope that there had ever been a seki, so I resigned. 

I was clicking through the game in AI Sensei later, and followed the progress of a blue move which resulted in a ko fight which white wins to resolve the lower right, while trading the lower left group. Black makes it into bent four in the corner.

In the second game with Kyle I asked for a two stone handicap.  Actually, I kind of demanded a two stone handicap. I was actually quite tired from the first game, and explained that we would be unlikely to finish the second game because BenKyo Baduk was scheduled to review my NAOL game that night. I wanted to be back home to watch the review live. When I needed to leave, we ended the game. It was looking fairly even, and later, when I uploaded the recording I found that it was pretty dead even. B+ 0.2 on AI Sensei.

I posted both of the games to the club Discord server.

In spite of being tired, I am glad that I played the second game because it gave me a good indication that Kyle and I are not too unevenly matched.  Kyle might be a potential rival.  I say potential rival because I'm not sure if a two stone difference is actually rival territory.  I could certainly try to catch up, and he could certainly work on maintaining his rank lead, but I doubt that would be hard for him. I've played for thirty years, and I've worked really hard in the past five years just to stay even at 9k AGA. I've been 9k AGA for 14 years. Kyle is technically adept after just five months of study, with no idea of how strong he actually is, so maybe it isn't really a rival situation except in my own head.  I've played two of the strongest players at the club with varying handicaps, but they are so much stronger than I am that they can't be counted as rivals.

I decided to have Clossius review the two games I played with Kyle in my most recent private lesson with him.  Clossius also reveiwed my most recent game with Andy, who is 2k. I shared a link to that lesson with the members of the Princeton Go Club on their Discord server.

I should mention that Clossius is having a special on packages of go lessons until the end of July. This is the best price he ever offers. It is his Go Congress Special. The package includes 12 one hour lessons for 300 dollars, which comes to just $25.00 per lesson. I stack my lessons with Clossius to create two hour lessons.

If you are interested in this great lesson deal from Clossius you can find it here.

And you can find Clossius's Tsumego Dragon app here.

Now for my usual Go Activities report:

I spent over 18 hours on go activity this week. My top activity was BenKyo Private Lesson REPLAY, which came in at six hours and 18 minutes. I watch my lessons not only to review them, but also to create problems from the games that Ben has gone over during the lesson.  This past week I created 56 AI Sensei problems from just one game with Parker. There is another game with Parker in the lesson that I will be creating problems for in AI Sensei. I just haven't had time to do that yet.

I played five games, two of which were across the board at the Princeton Go Club.

Notice that there is a notes column in my spreadsheet.  For the two games played with Kyle I added notes.  To see a note I simply hover over a cell with a black triangle in the upper right corner of the cell.

l should start adding notes to the games in my spreadsheet more often.

Nakade - I've Been Pronouncing It Wrong For Over 50 Years

Go Magic has a course on Life and Death that I spent a good deal of time with today. In the process of doing so I learned that I have been saying the word nakade wrong for a very long time. I have also been saying piranha wrong too. I trust Vadim on this because he is a linguist. To find out how these two words relate to life and death, you will just need to take the course.  If you are reading this blog, you probably know what the first word means.

Now for my usual Go Activities Report:

It was a very active week for go activities with over 27 hours spent. I spent a great deal of time reviewing a lesson with BenKyo Baduk and making problems from it using AI Sensei.

I did not make it to the Princeton Go Club last week. I played four games last week. One of them was a correspondence game that I finished with BenKyo Baduk as part of my benefits for my Tier 6 on his Patreon.

This week I will be attending the Princeton Go Club again.

I Bought a Standing Desk for Go Activities

I spend so much time on go related activities on the computer. I'll be sitting down, or even reclining in bed for hours. This can't be good for me. I've been eyeing this desk for quite a while and finally decided to get one. I don't intend to use it all the time, but even a couple hours a day of standing has to be better for my health than sitting, or reclining, for six to eight hours a day.

The desk I bought is made by a company called Work From Home Desks. The pieces just slip together and are held in place by other smaller pieces. I should probably get a stool to go with it so I can easily transition from standing to sitting.

I have it set up in my living room next to our TV which is on a base that allows me to swivel it so I can see the screen while standing at the desk. I can imagine watching my lessons on the big screen and replaying the variations on an actual board on the desk.

I used the desk to play my most recent Go Magic game on an actual board while playing on my laptop. I play rather quickly, and this slowed me down a little bit, which is a good thing. There is a very nice laptop support that I bought separately from the same company that I use mostly on the kitchen counter when I am cooking. You can see it in the above image.

After an hour we had gotten this far in the game. It was my first time playing on a real board standing up. I had not built up the stamina for it yet, so I took the laptop and sat down for the remainder of the game, which did not go well, but it was already not going well. I don't blame it on standing though. I just played poorly.

Here is the final board position after about another 30 minutes of play. White managed to get a huge bottom.

We had an observer who kindly left a good number of comments after the game was completed. You can find them here.  This observer is a former member of BenKyo League who is thinking of returning.

Followup On Internet Go School Study Habits Progress:

Wow! Marking some of the problems as easy has really brought down the number of due problems. Today there were only 24 due problems.

I can start watching more lessons and adding more problems now.

Keeping the number of due problems at a reasonable level is a delicate balancing act between marking problem I am able to solve on the first try as good or easy, and marking missed problems as either hard or forgot.  Sometimes I mark missed problems as hard a few times before marking them as forgot.

I got to go club again this week, and about 50% of my games are now being played over the board at club. 

What I wore to club this week:

 

Now for my usual Go Activities Report:

I played five games this week. I lost all but one of them.  I'm not doing very well.

Cleaning Up My Study Habits at The Internet Go School

 

I hit a nice round number of days in a row for the Internet Go School last week, and I am building up my Vacation Days as well, yet I need to do more work on my study habits in regard to this web site.

Recently I have been trying to make sure that I do the minimal number of problems to avoid losing vacation days, but I have ended up accruing large numbers of due problems, which I periodically clear by clicking "hard" on all problem to gain a clean slate. It has become obvious to me that this is a waste of my subscription, so I am working on trying to do more problems each day, and set up some better study habits.

I started by doing more than the minimal ten problems.  You'll see that I was averaging about 45 problems a day from 5th through the 12th of the month, but that wasn't enough to avoid the accumulation of a backlog of problems that was continuing to get larger.  I finally bit the bullet on the 13th, and actually completed my entire backlog rather than clicking the problems away.

The last three days on the chart above represent completing all due problems each day, which results in a 50 point bonus. The dark segment on the 9th shows that I spent some time watching a new video. The image below shows the details.

I ended up adding 8 problems to the training system from that lesson.  The yellow segment that day represents the use of the Quick Look feature of the site. That allows one to solve all of the problems from a lesson outside of the Training System.  This is a great way to preview problems before watching a lesson, but it is also a good way to revisit problems from a lesson as a unit, after they have become separated from each other within the Training System.

Not long ago I came upon a problem which, if I had marked easy, I would not see it again for 29 years. I don't expect to live that long, so I marked it as hard, so I will see it again in 14 years if I am lucky enough to still be alive. I'd like to see this bulky five again some day.  Maybe I will revisit it through Quick Look.

I had to laugh about the problem I encountered a while back that wouldn't be seen again for another 81 years.

On the 16th I decided to do some Quick Look review of problems from the Easy Life and Death category of lessons, which can be found under the Basic Course main category.

I started to review some of the earlier problems using Quick Look.  I then discovered that additional shapes had been added since I first worked through this category.  I am going to have to watch those lessons. I worked my way through shapes 1, 2, and 3, and started with shape 4 on the 16th. I see that I had not yet watched the C-1 lecture.

I'm definitely going to have to start marking more of the problems as easy to push them farther ahead in time. This will make room for new problems, and keep the number of due problems at a reasonable level. I would consider that between 40 and 60 problems daily.

Reflections on attending the Princeton Go Club:

I've attended The Princeton Go Club for two weeks in a row now.  It is the first time in many years I have attended a club.  I am really enjoying it.  I have been very socially isolated in recent years. My social life is pretty much entirely online, and my husband and I very seldom have visitors in the house.  We rarely leave the house except for appointments with doctors.  We don't go places anymore. I think going to club is going to be good for my go, but more than that, I think it will be good for my brain, and for my mental health.  They say that social isolation is very bad for your brain.  My general practitioner was very happy when I told her about going to the club.  I play go not only because I love it, but also because I am hoping that it will help prevent dementia, but I never thought about the fact that the social interaction that comes with go might be just as important as the game itself.  During and after club it feels like parts of my brain are lighting up that don't light up from playing online. It is hard to describe, but it feels real.

I wore this shirt to go club this week.

Now for my weekly Go Activities Report:

It was a moderately active week for go activities. I played five important games this week. 

My Return to the Princeton Go Club

 

I returned to the Princeton Go Club on June 10th, playing there for the first time in I don't know how many years.

Probably my greatest regret concerning the game of go is that I did not go down to to play at the Princeton Go Club when I first moved to Somerville, New Jersey in 1980 to start my career as an art teacher. I had already spent ten years trying to teach friends and relatives how to play go with little to no success. I loved the game, but I had no one to play with. I knew that there was a club at Princeton because it was listed in the back of one of my go books, but I was afraid to go there because I wasn't sure if they would welcome an inexperienced player. I should have known better. Because I didn't go to the Princeton Go Club in 1980, I wasted another sixteen years of my life that I could have been playing go.

In 1996 I discovered go on the internet, met a few people from the AGA, started to play at the Highland Park Go Club, and eventually found my way down to the Princeton Go Club.  I would go down periodically, I even played some games with Feng Yun's daughter during a narrow window when she was my strength, and I enjoyed playing in the New Jersey Open for a good many years.

I'd been wanting to attend at the Princeton club again, but the difficulty of parking in Princeton made it difficult for me to go to the Sunday afternoon meetings.  Recently the club started to meet on Wednesday evenings at the Panera Bread outside of Princeton in the same shopping center where the Wegmans is.

So this past Wednesday I headed out with my go bag filled with a slotted go board and a set of antique wafer thin slate and shell stones that I purchased from Baduk Club.

Here is the bag resting on a table board on my bookcase.  If you look down you can see quite a few go books including my all time favorite, Fundamental Principles of Go by Yilun Yang. You will also see two boxes of Ing stones in cheap plastic food containers. Down, and to the left, are the first bowls and stones I ever owned.  A friend secured them for me in China town in Philadelphia.  I paid twenty dollars for a set of wooden bowls, some very nice glass stones, and a folding wooden board.  The year was 1970.

Here are the stones I brought to club. I could not resist them when I saw them online. They are shaped like Necco candies.

I am told that the meeting was a smaller gathering than usual.  When I arrived Parker was already there.  He and I played a five stone game.  He is 2k and I am 9k.  Seven stones seemed like a lot though, so we decided to try five. We used Parker's board and double convex stones for the game. We didn't get a good photo of the finished game, but here is the ending position from the upload of the game record to AI Sensei. About 30 moves or so into the game we realized that it would make sense to record it, I pulled out my iPad, and we replayed it on the screen. I'm glad we did because I am happy to have the record.  I created a folder in SmartGo One for the Princeton Go Club.

I lost that game by 3.5 according to our count, and I was quite pleased with the result.  I would have been pleased with anything short of a 20 point loss. We might have unintentionally shifted a few stones while counting though. When I uploaded the game record to my OGS library I was quite surprised to see that it turned out to be B+ 0.5.  The difference certainly isn't important.  The five stones seemed like a good handicap, and we will probably use it again. If we had played even, my butt would have been well whooped, so it is important to keep that in mind with handicap games. If you win a handicap game it just means that maybe the handicap should be lowered. It isn't a competition. It is more of a dance made more interesting for both by the presence of the handicap stones. As end game approached, I pointed to the lonely handicap stone at the center of the board and said, "You've effectively made this a four stone handicap game."

While Parker and I were playing Brian and Andy had a game.  Before leaving Brian took a selfie with the rest of us. 

From left to right: Brian, Terri, Parker and Andy. 

Photo by Brian.

You may notice that I am wearing a shirt from the 2024 Portland Go Congress.  I have resolved to show up in a different Congress shirt each time I come to the club until I have to start repeating them, or wearing other go shirts such as my Yilun Yang 9x9 board shirt, which turned out to be a big hit at a Yang Workshop.

After my game with Parker I played a game with Andy.  We also used a five stone handicap. This time we used Parker's board with my stones, which were actually being used by me for the very first time. I managed to find a throw in that did more damage than it should have, which ended the game.

Here is the board position at the end of the game from my point of view. It was B+R

Having played two games myself, I encouraged Parker and Andy to play using my stones. They did, and it was a pleasure to watch.  An observer stopped by and asked about the game. I explained what it was about, gesturing at the board and showing the final position of the game with Parker on my iPad.  This showed how the board would fill.  That brought up the question of scoring, which I said we would see in the ongoing game after the board filled up. I explained that after there are no more profitable moves to be made, both player would pass. That was not to be the case with this game, however.

The game finished with a resignation just as I was telling our potential new go player about how the stones would be moved around creating easy to count chunks of territory, making scoring easier.

Parker and Andy then set about filling in the gaps on the borders for the benefit of our observer. They made a dead group alive in order to replicate a typical game that goes to counting. They then moved the stones around to get easy to count rectangular blocks of territory.

I gave our observer the url for OGS.  Let's hope he enjoys what he sees there and comes back to the club.

I had a great time at club tonight, and will definitely be back. Playing across the board made my go world feel larger again, much as it did in the first decade of this century. That was the heyday of Wings Across Calm Water Go Club. It was also a time when I attended multiple tournaments and workshops each year, not just the Go Congress.

If you are within driving distance of Princeton please come to the club some Wednesday night. I expect to try to attend most Wednesdays between now and the Go Congress.  I need practice playing across the board, and I also need practice recording games.

Now for my usual Go Activities Report

It was a moderately active week for go activity with over twenty hours spent on go.

I played four games this week.  All of them were important.  There was a Go Magic league game, a NAOL League game, and two Princeton Go Club games. The time spent playing at the go club is not included under Live Play.

I am planning to return to the Princeton Go Club next week again.

My Free Week on PlayGo.gg

The paywall went up on PlayGo.gg at the beginning of May, and I have been getting the most I can out the site without subscribing since that time. However, last week they made everything free for just one week, which accounts for the 8.63 hours you see on my Go Activities Beach Ball above. Most of that time was spent binging on lessons. Without a subscription you can usually only watch one lesson per day. If you click to watch a second lesson, you will get a notification telling you about two options for membership.

One day last week I didn't get the notification to subscribe when I clicked on a second lesson. At first I thought there was a glitch on the website. Thinking that the glitch might get fixed soon, I decided to watch as many lessons as time would allow. Eventually, I learned that the week was being offered for free, and there was no glitch after all. This knowledge came to me near the end of the week, so it was too late to put up a blog post inviting you all to the party.

If I had been paying attention I would have seen the notice in the upper right corner of the site each time I logged in. Actually, it wasn't that obvious.

Last night was my last chance to binge on lessons. My week was going to end at 8:00 pm ET. At 7:45 pm ET it became clear to me that there was no way I was going to finish the 12 kyu lessons before my free week ended.  There were five more lessons to complete and I was pretty tired after devoting the better portion of the day to working through lessons.

I managed to complete the lessons for a full ten ranks in one week, 23 kyu through 13 kyu.  That is not too shabby. Without the free week, that would have taken me the better part of a year because each rank level has multiple lessons. If I get a heads up about it the next time they offer you a free week, I will let you all know. If you have not tried PlayGo.gg, though, it is worth it to create an account to take advantage of what is available to you without a subscription. Keep your eye on the upper right of the site and you'll know if another free week is offered.

Playing games and watching games is always free. Plus you can do 20 Practice Puzzles, two Puzzle Runs, one Lesson, one AI Game Review, and one game with a 10d Bot. If you log on every day you can get a lot of value from the site even with the restrictions in place. If I were to subscribe it would probably be to get the unlimited Practice Puzzles that come with the Pro membership.

Now for my usual weekly go activities report:

It was a fairly active week with over twenty hours of go activity, most of which was spent on PlayGo.gg doing lessons.

I played five games, all of which were played on Thursday night. I won my NAOL game and went on to play four games in a row afterwards on PlayGo.gg.

Given that I played four games in a row Thursday night with only two people, I tend to think I might have been playing with bots. I'll have Clossius review these games from PlayGo.gg in our next lesson using the review tools on the site.

I didn't do a blog post last week so I have one more week of activities on which to report:

The previous week also had over 20 hours of go activity. My top activity was Live Play, which is always a good thing to report.

I delighted Clossius with nine games in one week, five of which were played on PlayGo.gg