My Week of Go Activities: Double Ranked Up on Fox

 

The big news this week is that I double ranked up on Fox. My 18k "speed run" account is now 16k. 

Live play came in decisively at first place with nearly five hours of activity.

Most of my games this week were played on Fox and they were all reviewed by Clossius during my two hour lesson on Friday.

Clossius was pleased with how many games I played this week, but then I had to tell him that I played the Fox games rather quickly. I'll try to slow down a bit next week.

My Week of Go Activities: Using AI Sensei in Lessons for Review

 

I spent 29 hours on Go Activity this week with Live Play coming in as the clear leading activity.

I played seven games this week. One of them was a Pair Go game with Ben Mantle. We played that game against a lone 2k player which was the highest challenge we could face as a pair go team. Our opponent did not need to wonder what his partner was thinking because his partner was himself. We amazingly won that game by 0.5 in spite of my many sub optimal moves.

In my two hour lesson on Friday Clossius managed to look at every game I played last week plus a game I played that morning. So that was eight games in two hours. He only actually glanced at the Pair Go game I played with BenKyo Baduk against a 2k out of curiosity, but it is still an amazing number of games covered in that period of time.

Clossius did something new this week. Because I have links for all of my game to AI Sensei in my spreadsheet he decided to open the games in AI Sensei rather than on OGS. He disabled AI for the reviews as in the screen shot below.

I randomly selected a board position. It is not particularly interesting. If it had been interesting and Shawn wanted to take a look at AI he could just click a setting to turn on AI temporarily and he would see alternate moves as in the screen capture below.

For contrast below is what the position looks like in the AI that available with OGS. This is fine up until the point at which you click on an alternate move.

At that point you are presented with a full variation whether you want to see it or not. I have lowered the opacity of the stones to make it less annoying to me, but I still find it annoying. Let me decide one move at a time if I am interested in continuing with the variation. I don't want to see where it goes ahead of time. I'm sure this is just a personal preference, but it is a strong personal preference. I'd like it if there were an option to see only one move at a time when clicking a suggested move.

At the end of my lesson I joked with Clossius that his efficiency in reviewing my games is actually a conspiracy to make me play more games so I won't run out of material during our lessons.

I guess I had better play more games this week.

My Week of Go Activities

 

I put in a little over 26 hours of time in on Go Activities this week. I'm going to see if I can increase that next week. 

I played six games this week. All but one of them was a league game. And the one that twas not a league game was a game that one of my NAOL opponents scheduled with me outside of the league.

I need to get back to playing some Fox game.

My Week of Go Activities: Doing Text Reviews of My Games

 

I've added a new category in my list of Go Activities recently which is Reviewing My Games with Comments. It is a sub category of the Game Review category.

I don't review my games enough and when I do I don't always review them on my own before looking at AI. 

One of my teachers, Ben Mantle. encouraged me to spend more time reviewing my game on my own. He typed questions in one of my game records and asked me to review the game to answer the questions. In order to be accountable and show him my answers I needed to add my answers into the game record along with his questions.  This was tedious, but not as difficult as I thought it would be. His questions ended about mid way through the game and he asked me to continue with the game looking for more things to comment on which I did.

I spent a great deal of time on the exercise, but it felt worthwhile. I'm hoping to continue with it in the future.

I was actually pretty resistant to the idea of doing it before I actually did it. I only committed to spending ten minutes with each game in the future and spending more time if I was enjoying it. I'm actually not even at the point where I am being consistent with this. But I am going to keep working on it.

Now for my report on my activities of the week:

I spent nearly 23 hours on Go Activity this week with Live Play coming in as the top activity. The more granular I get with my activity categorization the easier it is for Live Play to come in as the top activity, so that is actually not such a high achievement.

I had so many separate activities this week that I had to do two screen captures on my phone to document them above.

I played only three games this week with two of them being league games and one of them being a game I played on Fox with my 18k account which I actually mentioned in my most recent blog post.

I'll try to play more games in the coming week which shouldn't be difficult.

I have a friendly game lined up with a previous NAOL opponent.