My Week of Go Activities: I Jumped to Tier 7 of BenKyo Patronage

 

It was an active week with nearly 30 hours of Go Activity. The BenKyo Live Stream once again dominated my time.

I played eight games this week, and they took a little over a half an hour on average. They were a bit fast because they were mostly BenKyo League Games with 20 minutes of basic time.

Six out of eight of my games were BenKyo League games this week. The league is handicapped so these games necessitated the addition of a new column on my spreadsheet. I now record the number of handicap stones for each game.

You will see that I gave 9 stones in two games this week and 7 stones in another two games. The pink highlighted cell in the Rank column indicates that I fell from 7k to 8k as a result of three losses in a row this week. I am not concerned.

Look at all of those BenKyo League games!

All but one of my games this week was colored "Feel Good Green" in spite of the fact that I lost five out of eight of my games. The one big loss I had was an AYD Game where I had essentially killed an invasion but failed to pull back one line as I finished blocking it off. Big mistake. Live and learn.

You can see my shame here: SashaOtter-buzzsaw

The sad truth is that I nearly played the correct move in the game. I beat myself up about it for a while, but not for long. I am getting a lot better about moving forward emotionally after a bad loss.

My Go Problems suffered this week as a result of putting my attention on the January BenKyo League. I was intent on trying to schedule as many games as possible. I'd like to win the league at least once for the glory.

My Week of Go Activities

 

I spent over 26 hours on Go Activities, with BenKyo Live Stream coming in at the number one spot.

Aside from watching the regular live stream, I redeemed a Patreon Tier benefit for a 60 minute personal live stream segment, and I logged my time for that separately. 

Ben spent over an hour and a half reviewing one of my games on live stream. I'm hoping that this segment will get clipped into a separate video so I can find it any time I want to watch it again. I'm having difficulty figuring out how to find the VOD which includes my review. I'll have to ask about that. I'm not very good with YouTube.

I managed to get in my required ten games this week. I still need to make up for the two games I fell short on last week, so I will be shooting for 12 games next week to make up for that.

I played five games with my KGS BuzzKill account this week. That account was created specifically to play more experimentally.

I didn't play any BenKyo League Games this week, and I need to get going with them again if I want to maintain my lead in the league this month. It is my goal to win the league by brute force. I already have nine games played with six wins as I write this on January 23rd.

BenKyo Stream Time has been cutting into my Go Problem time. I missed finishing all of my due problems on the Internet Go School a few days this week, but I managed to avoid using any vacation days. 101 Weiqi is not getting the love it deserves.

My Week of Go Activities - Happy Anniversary Clossius

 

This was a monumental week for two reasons.

Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of my first lesson with Shawn Ray (Clossius). In the past year we have had 47 lessons. Through his tutelage I have come to embrace the 101 Weiqi web site and appreciate doing Go Problems. At his suggestion I developed a kick ass games spreadsheet of which I am very proud. I look forward to another great year with Shawn, and hope to hit the 100 lesson milestone at some time in early 2023.

The second reason that this was a monumental week is that, purely by coincidence, I had my very first lesson with Ben Mantle (BenKyo Baduk) on the one year anniversary of my first lesson with Shawn. I won't be taking weekly lessons with Ben, however. Presently I am in a Patreon Tier that includes one monthly lesson and a significant amount of teaching time on his Twitch Live Stream. I am enjoying his Discord community, particularly the League.

This week was clearly dominated by a color I now refer to as BenKyo Blue.

My lesson was supposed to be 90 minutes, but you can see that Ben was generous with his time on this first lesson. He brought it in at over three hours. We played a teaching game and then reviewed it. We covered a number of topics aside from the game review and had a discussion about stone visualization. Ben referred me to a Patreon article he has written a few months ago for more detail. It was a great lesson.

Ben is currently only accepting new students for lessons through his Patreon Tiers which is one of the reasons I got involved at the lower Tier levels a little over a month ago.

I currently have a number of categories established for time tracking of my BenKyo time. I am entitled to unlimited Correspondence Games with Ben with Malkovich comments, so that is one of the categories. I have yet to start a Correspondence Game, however, and that is on my to do list. A number of Ben's Patreon Tiers promise additional lesson time on his Live Twitch Stream, so I will be tracking that separately from the general Live Stream time.

I have a number of categories for the tracking of my Clossi time as well.

Since coining the term "BenKyo blue" I have been searching for a color name for pink that starts with the letter "c".

I want a cool color name for my Clossi Pink.

Clossi Creamy looks like the right color, but my better judgment tells me to choose Clossi Carnation even though it is not quite the right color.

My first thought was to switch out the pink for the red I am using for Tsumego so I could have Clossi Crimson. It sounds so much cooler, but it would be a lot of work. I'll leave the color as pink for now and consider the switch for later. If I make Clossi time red that would put him at the top of the color list, but I am the only one that sees the full color list.

I was a little light on Go Problems this week with just over 1,000. I need more 101 Weiqi.

I played eight games this week, so I fell two short of my goal. I will make up for it next week. If I play two games a day I can get in 12 games and still have one vacation day.

My Week of Go Activities

I spent nearly 22 hours on Go Activities this week. A third of that time was spent on Live Play.

I did fewer Go Problems this week than usual, coming in at under 1,000 problems for the first time in a long time. I really have to spend more time on 101 Weiqi next week. 

I had an exceptionally good week. I played ten games. More than half of them were rated. I had seven wins and three losses. My largest loss was 2.5 in a game where I had to give handicap. The other two losses were 0.5 games. Look at all that "feel good" green! I think this might be the first week ever that I had an entirely green column for my games links.  It might be the last since I am going to be playing ten or more games a week moving forward.

I played five games in the BenKyo League this week. I am currently leading in the league, and hope to play as many games as possible before the end of the month. The league is handicapped which is interesting because I hardly ever take or give handicap by choice. Ben is encouraging rated games so I am playing rated with those who are willing. This seems to be helping with my fear of playing, and it is definitely helping with meeting my goal of playing at least half of my games rated.

I am riding the line between 8k and 7k on OGS which effects handicap in my league games. We are allowed to play the same person twice in the league, and something funny happened. I played someone when he was 2k and I was 7k and I got five stones. I dropped to 8k and thought I would get six, but when we played he had dropped to 3k, so it was still a five stone game. Funny.

I'm having my first lesson with Ben next Thursday and hope to rack up a few more league games between now and then.

My Week of Go Activities

 

It was a light week for go activity with just shy of 26 hours. Live play came in at the number one spot with more than six hours. A good portion of that time (nearly three hours) was spent playing a simul game in live stream with BenKyo. He was playing a good many other players with generous time limits, so I spent most of that time thinking on his time, not that it helped me much. I ended up resigning that game because I was behind by over 25 points. It was an even game with an OGS 6 dan, so it was to be expected that I would lose badly.

However, checking with AI Sensei the next day I was pleased to see that I had actually played well for my level. I am 7k on OGS, but I have my slider set to show 6k mistakes.

Check it out!

There were no 6k mistakes. That lead me to see just how far I would need to adjust the slider to detect a mistake for black in this game.

It turns out that I have two 2k mistakes.

The fist one really cost me.

I am going to start posting my stats for go problems on a weekly basis. I generally do nearly 1,000 Spaced Repetition Problems on the Internet Go School web site. They are listed in the GJ column. GJ stands for Guo Juan. When Clossius suggested I do fewer go problems I found myself cutting down on the 101 Weiqi problems which I did not really want to do. I am going to be trying to get in between 1,500 and 2,000 problems per week moving forward. I think it is important in developing my reading skills to focus on the 101 Weiqi problems. Ideally I would like to do 700 problems from 101 each week.

The year has come to an end, so it is time to look at how many games I have played for the year.

I played 471 games this year which is an average of 9 games per week. I want to raise that to a minimum of 520 games in 2022 for an average of 10 games per week. Maybe I can do even better than that. I am going to try to increase the number of rated games I play. At least half of my games should be rated.