Enriching My Love of the Game: My Week of Go Activity: NAOL 13k

The good news is that Season 4 of NAOL has begun. The bad news is that I ended up as 13k after the dust settled from the first three seasons. They finally decided to adjust our entry ranks, and after three seasons of play I dropped from 10k to 13k.

After my disaster of a Go Congress, especially with my Covid Brain Fog, I was not looking forward to playing my NAOL Game on Tuesday. Lucky for me I managed to pull off a win. I gambled by playing end game before looking to protect the lower left area. My opponent had followed me earlier in the game, so I worked on the assumption that he would follow me as I played end game. I was right about that so it worked out okay. I should have played a protective move at d3 instead of f3 however when I finally did bother to protect my mayo from invasion.

My opponent went in at the 3-3. When he did I decided to try killing from the 2nd line. I was told later that I took a risk with that and that I could have allowed it to live and still been ahead.

If you want to see Clossius review this game you can tune in to the 1:04:15 mark in my recent Two Hour Lesson with Clossius. After he opened the game record he asked, "What is this?"

He was particularly proud of the fact that I handled the J-Group so well in the lower left corner. The corner turned into a classic life and death problem.

The Game Record can be found here.

And the AI Sensai Review of the game can be found here.

I was nervous about the game but was very pleased to see that my friends from the BenKyo League were present to cheer me on. I dropped the link to my game in the "Let's Play" channel of the BenKyo Discord Server knowing that I was likely to get observers. I think I had as many as seven.

Here are some of the gems they left me in the chat to discover after the game was over.

If you are interested in joining a community offering this kind of support take a look at the promotional site for the BenKyo League. If you decide to join BenKyo League please tell Ben that buzzsaw sent you. We have a referral program.

After the game was over I naturally promoted BKL to my opponent.

This game was selected for review and was reviewed by Milan the day after it was played. It is really nice that we get at least one game reviewed for the season.

Now for the usual Go Activities info:

I spent over 22 hours on Go Activities this week.

Over seven of those hours was spent making up for days I missed on the Tsumego Club when I was at the Go Congress.

I played ten games not including the Teaching Game with Clossius.

Aside from a BenKyo B Group game and an NAOL game all of my games were with the new AI Sensei rated play system. I am enjoying it, but I am playing much too quickly. Those ten games took me about three and a half hours to play. They should have taken longer.

Playing against AI tends to make me speed up because my opponent plays instantly, but given that I have limitless time I should be playing more slowly.