My Week of Go Activities: I Like to Watch

 

Recently I have started to spend a great deal of time watching a couple of my friends play on Fox. I have a good friend who recently started to play on Fox and since he created his account on August 1st he has played 222 games. That is a lot of games in 30 days. I really admire how much he plays and he has ranked up a few times since he started and is now 10k. I can't remember where he started. I think it may have been 15k.

I, on the other hand, started at 18k where I met up with some sandbaggers. I have only gotten up to 13k in a longer period of time, but I have played many fewer games. I double ranked up once and have only single ranked up since 16k. I missed my chance to double rank up from 14k to 12k. It was so close.

I have some serious catching up to do with my friend.

Now for my usual weekly content.

I spent over 24 hours on Go Activity last week. Five and a half of those hours were spent watching others play. I don't even log all of the time I spend watching others play so that is probably an under estimation.

I took a bit of a break from my own play last week. I was able to do this because I had not had a lesson with Clossius for two weeks, and knew that I had a great many games for him to review during our two hour lesson.

I basically took a week off with the three games I played being played on the last day of my week which runs from Friday through Thursday because my lessons with Clossius are on Fridays.

The games in the "Reviewed" Column with blue cells were reviewed during my lesson on Friday. Clossius has gotten very efficient at reviewing games because of the 20 minute time restriction on reviews for NAOL. My lessons are two hours long and he managed to review six games during my most recent lesson. I find that impressive.

I have another lesson with Clossius on the 1st of September so I am going to have to make an effort to get in at least six games worthy of review. I've got three already, so this should not be a problem.

My Week of Go Activities: Back to AGA 9k

 

First of all I managed to win enough games to rank up from 14k to 13k with my sandbagging account on Fox. I only have to win three more games and I will be able to double rank up to 12k which would be great. I only double ranked up once and that was from 18k to 16k so this might be my last chance to double rank up before I reach the level of my legit Fox account which is 6k.

In other news, the U.S. Open games from the U.S. Go Congress have been rated and I managed to rank up to 9k again this year. I've been riding the rail between DDK and SDK for four congresses now. Previous to that I was very solid 9k and was even 8k for a while in 2012.

My goal for next year is to get to 8k based on my Congress results.

I also have a goal of getting my NAOL rank back in sync with the AGA rating. Currently my NAOL rank is 13k which is actually kind of laughable.

Now on to my usual Go Activities report.

I spent nearly 32 hours on Go Activities this week. Tsumego Dragon came in first with over six hours of activity.

I've been working hard to try to catch up to Clossius on the Leaderboard of Tsumego Dragon and I have earned four baby dragon for completing daily tsumego. It is still in alpha and the early alpha subscription price is still available. The little gold dragon next to my name designates me as a subscriber.

I spent a good deal of time this week watching others play. In particular I was watching a couple of friends of mine play with their Fox sandbagging accounts.

I played seven games this week and aside from one loss and a draw I won the majority of the games. All but one of them was played on Fox. I have started to use 20 minutes of basic time with 3 periods of 60 seconds.

That's it for this week.

My Week of Go Activities

 

 

I had over 29 hours of Go Activity this week, and played 12 games which took about six and a half hours to play making my average game time a little over 30 minutes which is still quite fast.

A great many of my games were BenKyo League Title Tournament even games.

I have no special plans for this week other than trying to rank up on Fox.

I spent a lot of time this week watching a friend of mine play on Fox. That was fun.

My Week of Go Activity: Alpha Testing Tsumego Dragon

 

One of my teachers, Shawn Ray, perhaps better known as Clossius, is developing a Tsumego App. It is called Tsumego Dragon. It is currently in the Alpha stage. He has nearly 100 people helping to test the app as he builds it. 

In the image above you can see that I am number six on the leaderboard for the month. The app works on both the desktop and also on mobile. It looks really nice on the iPhone.

You can currently use the app for free, but if you care to become a paid member and help to defray the costs of development, you can join for the price of $4.00 a month now during the Alpha stage. If you do you will be grandfathered at that low price even after prices increase during Beta and beyond.

Shawn may have plans to allow some free use of the app after it is fully developed. Perhaps a certain number of problems a day, or a free trial period, or some such restriction. 

Problems are largely geared to approximately the 9k level as many of Shawn's students are near that level. That is great for me because I am 9k OGS.

I have Tsumego Dragon front and center in my collection of Go Apps on my iPhone.

Now for my usual Go Activities information:

I spent nearly 21 hours on Go Activities last week.

Haha. I created a new Activity for Tsumego Dragon. But I named it Tsumego Dragoon. I have since changed it, but I am going to leave the mistake here for a laugh.

I only played five games last week. I did win all but one of them, and that one game was a 0.5 loss, so it was a good week for wins.

I've been asked to play more games and I have already played nine games this week and I have two more days left in my week. I think I will shoot for 15 games.

I was disappointed that my NAOL Game which was the 0.5 loss did not get reviewed for NAOL. The one from the first week wasn't a great one to review, the one from last week would have been so much better. I got Clossius to review it during my lesson on Friday. 

My goal for this week is to play a great many even Title Tournament games for the BenKyo League. Seven of the nine games I have already played fit that description. I was asked by Ben to play stronger players even. But in order to not be selfish I post an offer for an even game with any rank. That way weaker players who want to play stronger players even can take that offer if they want. 

Clossius told me in our last lesson that he can tell that I am feeling more confident, and I believe that I am.