My Week of Go Activities

 

It has been over four months since I posted about using the IOS app Now Then to log my go activities. I have been using this app ever since and have decided to post my progress weekly. 

The categories I am using have changed a bit over time. Some categories were added, some were eliminated, and some were broken down into two actives. I won’t go into the the reasons for the changes. Below are the current categories. If you want to see the original categories, and their descriptions, you can find them here.

The total amount of time I spend on go activities has remained about the same at 20 hours a week give or take a few hours. I have recently made an effort to increase the amount of time I spend playing go rather than studying go. I was successful this week largely due to an online tournament in which I played yesterday. There will be a post about that coming soon.

I’ve played in three online tournaments now in about a month and a half, and I just signed up to play in another in February. That will be a two day tournament with a total of six games.

My increase in playing time this week was also fueled by the suggestion to play eight games a week. This suggestion came from a friend in a Discord study group to which I belong. I played three games Friday night to insure that I would meet my eight game goal.

While the amount of time I spent on Live Play this week is the most time spent on any one category, it is still only slightly more than a third of the time I spent on go activities.  I think I am happy with that proportion. However, it will not be easy to maintain with only eight games per week.  My tournament games were a bit longer than my usual KGS games created via auto match with 25 minutes of basic time, so I might need to play more than eight games to maintain a 33% proportion.

I am a big fan of Guo Juan’s Internet Go School, and I continue to spend a good deal of time on the Spaced Repetition Problems. However, it has been a goal of mine in recent weeks to spend more time on playing than I do on these problems. I got caught up in the competition to get to one of the top ten positions on the Leader Board at the Internet Go School site every day. Some of those people do 800 problems a day! I can get to #10 though easily every day if I really work on it. However, I got to the point where I thought it was not productive for me. I was doing about 150 problems a day and adding lectures and problems to stay on the Leader Board. The Leader Board became more important than the knowledge.  So now I am currently doing all of my due problems only. That number is going down each day as I mark more problems as Good or Easy. When I drop to 60 a day I will add new lectures and problems to maintain that level.

I’ll report back next week and we shall see how the activity mix changes.