My Week of Go Activities

I followed the advice given to me last week from members of the Facebook Go group to spend more time reviewing my games. I spent approximately a quarter, about 5 hours, of my time with Live Play. I spent half as much time reviewing those games.

Games took an average of 36 minutes to complete. Auto Match games were considerably shorter than games played with friends from the American Yunguseng Dojang, which were closer to an hour in length. There were two such games. The remaining six games were Auto Match. All games were played on KGS this week.

I am particularly proud of the fact that I did not procrastinate playing, as I did last week. I played one game per day with two games played on Saturday to finish out the required eight games for the week. My last game of the week was an Auto Match with a friend from AYD. It was a surprise to get matched with a friend in Auto Match, especially since my rank restriction is +/- one rank, and I play so few games. All Auto Match games were rated. AYD Friend Matches were NR.

I uploaded my games to ai-Sensei.

In addition, I uploaded my games to OGS so I could use the AI over there.

One of the suggestions from last week was to determine why I either won or lost each game. I have not gotten to that point yet. Some games are obvious. The results that are not obvious are because there is no death on either side. These results probably came about because of one player being able to push the other around in the opening or early middle game. Finding the moves that achieve that result would be helpful.

Something different I tried this week was to take one of my games and play out AI variations from OGS on a physical board. Even without playing every single variation it took me 30 minutes to get to move 33 in this game. I’m not sure how valuable that activity was. I stopped at move 33. I decided to try it because, although I prefer the move by move analysis of OGS to the Big Mistake approach of AI-Sensei, I dislike the shadowy appearance of every stone in the variations. I like seeing where the variation is heading, but it messes with my brain as I try to visualize the development of the variation. 

An alternative to using a physical board would be to use cgoban next to OGS to add in the variations so I can see them develop one move at a time, but not need to place and remove stones. That is what is taking so much time even with inverted Yunzi stones, which does help. The shadowy stones do assist in sweeping variations from the board. I’ll admit that.

My goal for next week is to continue with eight games per week and to try my best to find the reasons for my losses.