My Week of Go Activities: Getting a Slow Start on WSC

 

There are three people who have already met the challenge of playing 100 live rated games in the Western Server Challenge. I am not among them. I wanted to start out strong and managed to get in six games in the first two days, which is not bad, but I didn't get in a single game yesterday, so I have ground to make up.

It is not too late to join the Western Server Challenge.

Here are my games this week. I played 17 games. Seven of them turned out to be practice for the WSC because I jumped the gun the day before play was to begin.

I am keeping track of my WSC games on my spreadsheet but am not logging all of the details related to each game. I am using a fairly fast time setting of 5+5x20 for my games. I am holding on to my 7k rating, but as it becomes necessary for me to increase the speed of my games in order to catch up it may not be possible to avoid dropping in rank. I knew that going into this. The challenge is not about getting stronger. It is about playing more and not getting hung up on protecting one's rating.

My domestic situation makes it difficult for me to play during the day and I am not sure I am going to be able to get the games I need at night, so it may be necessary for me to do bursts of games with 1+5x10 settings in order to crank out some games quickly in the middle of the day just to keep pace and have a fighting chance of completing the challenge.

Here is what my week looked like:

I put in nearly 29 hours in on Go Activity last week. Nearly 29 hours being spent seems to be the new normal. I've put in as many as 45 hours and I have dipped below 15 hours as well.

I spent nearly six hours on Tsumego.

My goal for this week is to play enough games in the WSC to bring the number of games I need to play per day down to about 2.5.

I have no illusions about keeping my 7k rank if I play that many rated games.