My Go Teacher: Yilun Yang

I think I have a reputation for collecting go teachers, so I thought I would do a series of posts highlighting each of my many go teachers in the order in which I added them to my Educational Team.

My first go teacher was Yilun Yang, 7p.

I met Mr. Yang at a workshop he conducted in 1997 in Highland Park, New Jersey. It was a very special event since there were only seven of us in attendance. It was a much smaller group than I have seen at any of the other Yang Workshops I attended. 

Some people thought that I was too weak to attend a workshop with a professional player, but I was really glad I decided to go. I got an early introduction to Mr. Yang's principles, which he would later publish in his book The Fundamental Principles of Go. For years the only way to learn his principles was to take lessons with Yang or to attend one of his workshops. I was lucky enough to do both.

I saw Mr. Yang again a few months later at the 13th U.S. Go Congress which was not only my first Congress but also my first tournament.  By January of 1998 I had decided that I was ready to begin lessons with Mr. Yang. I started with two hour lessons on alternate Saturday mornings.

My lessons with Mr. Yang have always been text only. We started on IGS, the Internet Go Server. At the time IGS did not have the teaching facilities that KGS was later to develop, so I was not getting the full benefit of our first 13 lessons. If I had been a stronger player I might have been able to go back after the lesson to add comments and variations, but I was not able to do that as a 19 kyu. At the 1998 Go Congress I suggested to Mr. Yang that we spend the first hour of our lessons playing. I asked him to later spend an hour offline reviewing the game for me so I would have comments and variations to review. We continued in that fashion until I introduced Mr. Yang to KGS. We resumed two hour live lessons of play and review on KGS. This allowed for interaction during review and provided me with a game record to study later which included all of the comments and variations.

I've studied off and on with Mr. Yang since 1998 with two gaps. One was a four year gap and the other was an eight year gap. So I have 13 years of lessons with Mr. Yang so far.

In 2022 I came back to lessons with Mr. Yang and I have completed 40 lessons in my third series of lessons. Some of my lessons are still teaching games, but often I bring games to review.

For lessons 37 and 38 I brought Mr. Yang games to review. I am currently taking 90 minute lessons, and when I bring him games I bring only two so he can spend about 45 minutes on each game. I often bring games from leagues I play in. The two games I brought him for lesson 38 were both from the American Yunguseng Dojang. Those games do get reviewed by In-seong Hwang or one of his co teachers, but those reviews are about 15 minutes in length and address both players. I sometimes find it beneficial to get a 45 minute review from my side only for those important games.

Notice that I have two numbers assigned to each lesson. The first number is the number in the current set of lessons that I started in 2022. The second number is the number of the lesson since I started taking lessons with Mr. Yang. I have currently taken 376 lessons with Mr. Yang as the table shows. I plan to continue because one of the things that defines me is that I am a student of Yilun Yang.

For my lessons with Mr. Yang I have two sub tasks in my Go Activities app:

After my lesson I like to go back and edit comments. Sometimes comments get scattered a bit in the file because of moving from one area of the game to another. I like to fix that. I also like to move questions about next moves to right before the variations so it is easier to follow the review later especially for someone I share the file with.

While I have 336 lessons from previous sets of lessons with Yang, I am putting my emphasis upon reviewing my current 40 lessons and getting the most from them. I may even create problems in AI Sensei for each of the lessons.

Now for my usual Go Activities content:

I spent 18 hours on Go Activities last week which is an increase in activity over the past couple of weeks.

I played nine games last week with one of them being a Teaching Game with Mr. Yang.

I played three games on the Fox go server and am currently two games short of a double rank up from 11k to 9k.

I am excited, yet nervous, about the prospect of another double rank up on the heels of my recent double rank up from 13k to 11k.  My current record is undefeated which is fun to see. It is a sandbagging account though designed to allow me to focus my attention on my opponent's weaknesses which is something I often miss.