My Week of Go Activities: Half Way Done With the Western Server Challenge

 

At the time of the writing of this post I have completed 50 games in the Western Server Challenge with a win rate of 48%. I've managed to get halfway done with the challenge before the month was half over. This means that I will be able to increase my time settings toward the end of the month and still complete the challenge.

You can see the results of the ongoing Western Server Challenge here.

My week looked like this:

I spent nearly 27 hours on Go Activities with Live Play coming in at the top activity again this week.

I have continued with Bugkitten's Tsumego Club and spent over three hours doing problems on the Tsumego Hero web site.

This week I played 30 games.  All but one of them were WSC games played at a 5min 5x20sec time setting. I got pretty comfortable with the time setting. On two occasions I hit 9k for one game. I bounced right back though each time. I've been comfortably maintaining an 8k rating now which is just a bit below my usual 7k rating. Given the fast time settings I am using it makes sense that I would lose a stone temporarily during the challenge.

I decided to show a lot less information on my spreadsheet this week than usual. I was playing so many fast games and didn't want to spend a lot of time documenting them.  I ended up writing up notes for some of the games so Clossius and I could select games to review for my Lesson on Friday. I had my 100th and 101st lessons with Clossius last Friday. We had a great lesson and we managed to review a good number of games, not necessarily all the way through. 

Clossius was impressed that playing at blitz speed made me play more aggressively. The time setting is not actually blitz, but I was playing at blitz speed since my average number of seconds per move for these games was in the neighborhood of five to seven seconds, which is definitely blitz speed. My opponents were usually using a good deal more time than I on these games.

My week runs from Friday through Thursday. By the end of my week I had 35 WSC games under my belt. It is now four days later and I have added another 15 games since then to get to 50 games.

I am enjoying the Western Server Challenge this year. I don't intend to play this many games this quickly more than once a year though.

It is worth noting that the one game I played that was not a WSC game was an AYD game. I won that game by a large margin because my opponent failed to protect against a peep and something died. Before that I was ahead by about three points, so it was a really close game.