My Week of Go Activities

 

I spent over 28 hours on Go Activities for the week. Many of them on Tsumego Hero and on Live Play.

I played six games all of which were League Games.

I'm a week behind on reporting and a new report will be coming in a couple days.

My Week of Go Activities: Doing well in NAOL and also in the Go Magic League

 

It was a heavy week of Go Activity with nearly 29 hours spent. The top activity this week was a BenKyo Baduk Hangout with Ben and other Patreon supporters. Ben spent 12 hours on stream and I was there for a good portion of it.

I only played four games this week. All of them were league games. Two Go Magic League games, one NAOL game, and one Clossi League Game.

My Week of Go Activities: Taking a Break From Rated Games

 

This week was really short on Go Activity with fewer than 16 hours.

The Western Server Challenge is over and I am a bit burned out. As a result I am taking a break not only from rated games, but from playing in general. It was easy to do that because I didn't have a lesson with Clossius on Friday so I didn't really need to make sure I had enough go material for game reviews. I also felt like I deserved a break after playing 100 rated games last month. Occasional breaks are good.

I'm actually planning to do more studying than playing in the weeks leading up to the U.S. Go Congress. I am already registered for the Congress and have purchased my airline tickets. 

I have a lot of material to study in my recent lessons with Ben Mantle, and it is my plan to rewatch my lessons. I want to take a few notes so I can find certain material again to revisit it. There is so much to study and I feel as if I have not taken advantage of it and can't even find the things I want to study without rewatching at least six of my most recent lessons.

I am currently playing nothing but league games that I am required to play.

I am continuing with the NAOL League, the Go Magic League, the American Yunguseng Dojang, the Clossi League, and the BenKyo League, so I have plenty of league games I am obligated to play. I estimate that I will probably get in at least six games per week moving forward simply by meeting my obligations.

My Week of Go Activities: 100 WSC Games Played

 

My week runs from Friday through Thursday. I played 18 games last week. Most of them counted for the Western Server Challenge. The two that did not count were American Yunguseng Dojang games played on KGS.

In spite of a great many games being played, Tsumego Hero still came in as the top activity for the week at exactly 8 hours. 

I really need to keep working on Tsumego.

In my list of games above I am showing the first six games of the current week because I needed to play six games on Friday because it was the last day of the Western Server Challenge. I started the day five games short of completing the challenge, and I knew I only had until 8:00 PM EDT to get those games in because the challenge would end based on UTC time.

I decided to play two games before my 2:00 PM lesson with Clossius. That left me with three more games to play. Shawn and I started off the lesson with a chat and then we moved forward into me playing WSC games. He commented the games as I played them. He muted himself in Discord so I could not hear anything he was saying. He left my mic live on Discord so I could comment as I played.

I was playing at a speed of 1m 5x15s so there was not really much time for me to comment. The games were so fast that there wasn't much time for Clossius to comment either, but it was good fun, and a bit hilarious. I finished the three games with time to spare. We reviewed the third game and then used the last 25 minutes of my lesson to play a game.  

I enjoyed watching the lesson later to hear what he said to the observers. There was a particularly funny moment when I played a move in a joseki that Shawn figured I wouldn't know. In fairness Ben had gone over it with me in the past, and I had not really remembered it.

Here is the moment I played the move and Shawn's reaction.

He asked, "Do you KNOW this?" 

I could not hear him because he was muted but I expected a rise out of him when I played it, so I responded, "I know this is a thing, but I probably don't know how it continues." 

I think the reason he cracked up was mostly because I actually answered his question even though I had not heard him ask the question. That was funny as all heck.

I don't usually share links to my lessons but I'm going to in this case for entertainment purposes. Bear in mind that this is not a typical lesson. We tried something different with the commentary which probably would have worked very well if I wasn't playing at blitz speed. I really wasn't even using the 15 seconds of time for the overtime periods.  One thing I did to to lower stress was to make it so the lady did not start to count until 5. By the way, when you do that the lady actually says 10 on the way to getting to five and the lady was not saying ten very often so I was playing quite quickly.

I do two hour lessons with Clossius these days, and I am probably the only person who is doing so at the moment, though a few other people have expressed interest in combining lessons into two hour units.

If you enjoy viewing my recent lesson with Clossius please know that you can watch lessons during his streams, and if you become a member of his site at the $10.00 level, you will have access to all of the lessons he has uploaded to his site.

March is over and the WSC is done for this year. I'll be participating next year again. My strategy is going to be to actually play blitz games since I am playing at that speed anyway. I would have an actual shot at placing as number one for my rank level group for blitz if that is all I played. I say that based on these results from this year.

I have two awards for WSC so far. I wish I had played the first year.

I'm a little burned out right now and I am taking a break since I don't have a lesson this Friday. I will be staying away from rated games for at least a week and playing only League games that have been scheduled with me.