My Go Teacher: BenKyo Baduk

This is the fifth entry in my series of posts about my go teachers.

Today's post is about Ben Mantle better known as BenKyo Baduk.

About a year into my lessons with Clossius I became aware of BenKyo Baduk. A good friend of mine from AYD was taking lessons with Ben and spoke very highly of him.  I wanted to learn about Ben's style of teaching and considered starting lessons with him, However, by the time I tried to do so I found out that the only way to get lessons with Ben was to sign up to one of his Patreon Tiers with lessons, and so I carefully looked at all of his tiers.

I cautiously started with a membership to the BenKyo League. The league largely functions on Ben's Discord Server with games played on OGS, the Online Go Server.  I also started to watch Ben's Twitch Stream. 

I was dipping my toes very carefully into the water with Ben before committing to a higher level Patreon Tier. I was cautious only because I tend to keep my teachers once I employ them. I don't like to fire anyone, and I was already paying Clossius for four one hour lessons per month, subscribed to The Internet Go School, and making regular payments for membership in The American Yunguseng Dojang. It wasn't a small thing to consider another regularly occurring go expense for Private Lessons I would get at the higher tiers of Ben's Patreon.

In spite of my caution, it didn't take me long to fall in love with Ben's community and with Ben himself. I mention the community first because I've never seen a go community as active and supportive as the one that Ben offers through the BenKyo League. It is hard to explain how good it is because words just don't do it justice.

I upgraded to a Patreon Tier with one private 90 minute lesson per month very shortly after joining BenKyo League. Within a month after that I upgraded to the next level Tier with two 90 minute private lessons per month, and there I remain. My tier also includes three 30 minute Semi-Private Lessons per month, bi-yearly reports, the benefits of the Study Group which comes with three interactive Group Classes per month and an extensive library of class videos. Of course, it includes the league I initially signed up for. I consider Ben's Discord Server to be my go home.

Ben and I finally met at the 2023 U.S. Go Congress at Kent State in Ohio.  Here we are cropped out of the photo I recently posted of AYD students in my post about In-seong Hwang. Ben is right above me and I am the elderly woman with the gray hair near the bottom left of the picture. The AGA, President Gurujeet Khalsa, is pictured on the far right.

Ben and I were planning to play Pair Go together two days after this picture was taken, but I was holed up in my dorm room suffering from Covid at that time. We never did get the chance to play, but we had a great time hanging out for the first few days of the Congress.

I enjoy Ben's style of teaching. I always feel comfortable telling him anything and asking him anything. He never makes me feel stupid, and he's never made me cry. I can't say for all of my go teachers. He is always patient and takes the time to rephrase things if I am not understanding something. I consider my Private Lessons with Ben as much Go Therapy as Go Learning, and have heard other students say that they feel the same way. Ben is my Go Psychologist. He respects my recent decision to focus on fun and community rather than seeking improvement. He and I are currently working on a trick joseki which I am playing primarily for fun. It might lead to improvement in the process, but that isn't the goal.

Back to the value of the BKL community... Because games are not played on a regular schedule members are often able to watch the games of other and add comments and variations as the games take place. It is not unusual to find a number of players kibitzing active games and providing variations. It is an ideal environment for the weakest players because they can get a lot of attention from the stronger players in the league who are very generous with their time.

You owe it to yourself to at least join Ben's Discord where you can access many free channels. You also owe it to yourself to take a look at the promotional page for the BenKyo League which is a great value for $25.00 a month. We have players from 4d to 15k in the league. You can join at any time. There is no need to wait for the end of a month or a season to join. In fact, the ideal time to join is probably about ten days before the end of a month so you can be properly placed into the BKL Rating System in time for the beginning of the next month. You will be ready to play in the Main League and the Title Tournament at your newly achieved BKL rank for the whole month.

If you decide to join BenKyo League please Tell Ben that buzzsaw sent you. We have a generous referral program which provides me with a free 30 minute Semi-Private Lesson with Ben if I bring in a new member at the league level or above.

BenKyoLeague Patreon Discord Twitch YouTube

Now for my usual Go Activities content:

It was a moderately active week with nearly 17 hours devoted to Go Activity. Live Play came in as the top activity which is something I always like to see.

I played six games and spent about four and a half hours on Live Play.

I will admit to being a bit depressed about my results this week.  The only game I won was an even game against a 15k player.  

I felt a bit better about my week after my lesson with Clossius.  He managed to review all but the AYD games which were previously reviewed by In-seong Hwang.  Clossius reviewed some games from pervious weeks as well for a total of five games during our two hour lesson.

Here is an update on my Go Resolution:

I've increased my Vacation Days at the Internet Go School by one for a total of 19, and I have not used a single vacation day since I started my resolution to remember to do my go problems every day.

When I had my lesson with Ben on Thursday we went over my NAOL game which was played against another OGS 7k who is listed as an NAOL 11k.  We spent the entire hour reviewing that game, and Ben suggested that I take a look at the games I lost last week to see if I can find some of the things that I did in those games that were good.  I am going to try to make time to do that this week.

My Go Teacher: Clossius

This is the fourth post in my series about my go teachers. Today I feature Shawn Ray, better known as Clossius. He appears above doing a DDK lecture at the 2022 U.S. Go Congress.

I came upon the Clossius Twitch channel in the Fall of 2020 through links on OGS. I spent a good deal of time watching Clossius do game reviews and lessons on his stream. I liked what I saw and decided that I wanted some of that for myself. Rather than try to get in on the free game reviews, I decided to go all in with lessons.  I subscribed at the level of four lessons per month.  The lessons were one hour each. I remember thinking to myself, "Let's give the AGA 4 dan a try." That was the beginning of a long teaching relationship. I am still with Shawn after three years.

My first lesson with Clossius was on January 13, 2021. Since then I have completed 145 one hour lessons with him. At first I would take a lesson every week. More recently I am taking two hour lessons on alternate weeks. I do this by combining two of my one hour lessons. I have found that I like the longer lessons. It has been over a year since I took a one hour lesson.

My lessons with Clossius are taught publicly on Twitch. I have a regular time for my lessons which is Friday afternoon at 2:00 PM EST. If you don't see me on the Clossius stream at that time it means that it is one of my weeks off from lessons.

A year and a half after I started to study with Clossius we finally met at the U.S. Go Congress in Estes Park, Colorado.

It was for Clossius that I came up with my spreadsheet for recording my games. I used to put links to my games in my blog for him. At first we used my blog as a springboard to start our game reviews, but creating a spreadsheet allowed me to customize the information I provided for each game.

Since I play on multiple servers it made sense to use a spreadsheet. I didn't want to limit our reviews to only the games I played on OGS, and I wanted to be able to give Clossius the big picture of how I was doing for the week. He likes to see details on all of the games I have played when selecting which games to review.

I also record links to my lessons on my spreadsheet and keep track of how many lessons I have backlogged as well as my ranks for different servers and leagues.

This is what a recent week looked like on my spreadsheet:

Clossius teaches DDK and SDK players up through about 4 kyu. He is best known for his Clossi Approach Method  for which he created a series of videos called  The Clossi Approach Series in which he plays games with players from 25 kyu through 5 kyu. The series starts with 9x9 progresses to 13x13 and at about 15 kyu it moves on to 19x19. There are about 50 hours of video content in the series and access to it is free.

More recently Clossius has developed a go problem web app called Tsumego Dragon. His app has 31 different categories of problem types. The problem types include Capture, Connection, Net, Ladder, J Group, Throw-in, Crane's Nest and many more. The app can be used on your phone or your desktop. I prefer to use it on the phone. It has recently come out of beta and has a subscription fee of $10.00 a month, but the app can be used for free to solve 20 problems per hour. If you have the patience to come back with frequency throughout the day you can solve quite a few problems as evidenced by a non-subscriber who manages to maintain a position in the top ten of the Monthly Leaderboard despite the problem limit. I subscribed during the alpha stage of development and use Tsumego Dragon daily.  I recommend subscribing for those who want to support the development of this app. 

Using Tsumego Dragon religiously has brought me to 5th place for All Time on the Leaderboard just two places behind Clossius himself.

My favorite feature of the app is the ability to limit the level of problems I am doing.  I am currently completing every level 0-1 problem in the app. It is taking me more than one day to do so. As much as I enjoy the Daily Challenge I especially like solving problems by category.

Take a look at the Tsumego Dragon app. Also tune in to the Clossius Twitch Stream to watch Shawn teaching lessons and doing Open Game Reviews.

At the current time I believe that I have more lessons under my belt with Clossius than anyone else. If you are interested in lessons you can find out about them on his web site. Clossius offers a sample lesson you can view,

Now for my usual go content:

Last week was a moderately active week for Go Activity with over 16 hours with the largest chunk devoted to Live Play.

I played five games which took three and a half hours.

My new thing is playing even games with any level player. I have been enjoying it as an opportunity to experiment with playing a low pincer to the high approach to the 3-4.

I had a disastrous start to the new season of the NAOL. I ended up playing a 7 kyu who is listed as an 11 kyu for the NAOL league which didn't seem right to me. He totally outplayed me, though I did get a good result in the lower left corner from the joseki I am working on. Ben told me that I could have pushed one more time at b8 though.

I am white.

Back to my concern about playing a 7k in an NAOL division composed mostly of 11k players. I happen to be a 9 kyu who is listed as an 11k kyu in the NAOL league based on the results of six seasons in the league. Perhaps I appear to be under ranked as well. I am allowing my rating to adjust naturally in NAOL, and perhaps my opponent became a lot stronger in the recent season that he spent away from NAOL, so there is that to consider. The way I figure it is that if everyone whose OGS rating is not in sync with their NAOL rating asks for it to be adjusted, then we are really just using OGS ranks rather than creating a new NAOL rank system.  I think the ratings are still adjusting and I suppose I should be patient with that. I'm going to trust that things will work themselves out over time. I'd like to see a chart showing the AGA and NAOL ranks for all players who actually have an AGA rank and whose OGS rank is current. I'm not letting my 11k rank bother me and I actually go out of my way to add it to my Zoom name because I find that rank amusing. I started as 10k then dropped to 13k and fought my way back to 12k and finally to 11k. I'm inclined to want to play rated again on OGS again just to see if I can get to 8k again there for an even wider gap with my NAOL rank. It isn't important though. It is just a mystery. 

Let me be clear that I think the NAOL is great, and that the people who are running it are doing a fantastic job. Each season gets better with more reviewers participating. Any ratings issues will eventually be solved. I've been playing in the NAOL since it was in beta and I am very glad we all have an opportunity to play in it if we are association members in our respective countries.

That is all I've got for this week.

Those of you who come to my blog from the Go (Baduk, Weiqi) Players on Facebook group may find my mid week post about my recent Go Resolution interesting.

Resolution: To Get 50 Vacations Days on IGS

This morning I went to the Internet Go School to do my Spaced Repetition Problems and hoped that I had done them the day before because I was worried about my dwindling number of Vacation Days.  My hopes were dashed. I had not done problems on January the 15th.

I proceeded to do my problems for the day to earn a bar on my graph as well as an 50 extra points for completing all of my due problems. 

However, I looked with dismay upon my chart above showing four missed days in the past two weeks. That was totally unacceptable.

My 1840 day streak is undoubtedly awesome, but my measly stash of 17 Vacation Days was decidedly not awesome. For someone who had previously had in excess of 70 Vacation Days I had obviously slipped badly, and was in danger of losing my streak altogether if I didn't get my act together.

I have had two reminders on my calendar to do my go problems for quite a while. One is scheduled for 9:30 AM and a back up reminder is scheduled for 11:00 PM, but they are apparently not enough. I have scheduled an additional reminder for 4:30 PM.

The four alerts for the reminder will come as pop ups on my computer. If I am busy I can choose to be reminded at an interval of my choosing later. If I can be diligent about responding to this second reminder I won't even need the 11:00 PM reminder, though I will leave it in place as a safeguard.

I'm going to set a reasonable goal of achieving 30 Vacation Days by the end of 2024 which will allow me to exceed expectations even allowing for the occasional use of a Vacation Day.

I'm going to set a long term goal of 100 Vacation Days which will is achievable by the end of 2025 since Vacation Days are earned at a rate of one per seven days of problem solving.

I will report periodically on my progress for this goal.

My Go Teacher: In-seong Hwang

 

I have been a student of In-seong Hwang now since September of 2019. I do not take private lessons with him, but I play in his league called the Yunguseng Dojang. It was at the Go Congress in Madison that I decided to join the American Yunguseng Dojang which I will refer to as AYD going forward. 

I had attended a number of In-seong's lectures at the Congress of 2019, and I decided that it was time for me to start studying go again, or at least playing serious games with regularity. I was about five years into a break from my lessons with Yilun Yang and I wasn't ready to commit to lessons again. However, the idea of a league appealed to me.

I was playing almost no go games between my yearly appearances at the U.S. Go Congress. I used to play a few games a month with Yilun Yang when I was taking lessons, but those lessons had stopped. My primary reason for joining AYD was to guarantee 45 serious games before the next Go Congress. That was all I expected to begin with.

Before I go into details about my experience with AYD I'd like to share some group photos of AYD participants at the two most recent Go Congresses.

Here we are at Kent State in 2023.

Here we are at Estes Park in 2022.

Some of the people you see in these photos are actually in the European Yunguseng Dojang, EYD. It is not unheard of for some North American players who are retired, are students, or who have flexible work schedules to join EYD rather than AYD.  Some people like to play in the afternoon rather than the evening. 

I've played in 13 Seasons of AYD. Here is my ratings graph:

I am making some progress.

What is AYD like? It consists of lectures, games, and reviews. There is an extensive library of previous lectures which you can watch as well. You play 15 games during a three month season, and get a review for each of them. There are links to videos of the reviews, and they can be watched again later.

For more details about AYD please take a look at a blog post I did about my experience with the Yunguseng Dojang. I made that post back in 2020, but it still serves as a good introduction to AYD. 

Unfortunately the timing of my post today isn't ideal. In-seong just started a new season of AYD which will last for three months.  If you decide you are interested you can sign up on a waiting list. Sometimes a position becomes available because someone leaves mid season. On those occasions In-seong will look for someone near the level of the person who left and you might get lucky enough to join mid season.

This season I made the cut for the 2nd weakest group in AYD even though a few people weaker than myself had left AYD. I am in C2 and was afraid I was going to be placed in C3 this season instead.

We meet for games on Thursday evenings at 8:00 PM EST. Following that we meet again at 10:00 PM EST for reviews. If you can't make the scheduled times you can play ahead of time by agreement with your opponent and you can watch the reviews on video later.

In-seong is an excellent teacher and he really cares about his students. He gets to know your style of play very quickly and offers individual suggestions based on your strengths and weaknesses. He cares very much about his students and it shows.  In-seong accepts students as low as 12k and students of that level can certainly benefit from the league game reviews, but to get the full benefit from lectures I think one ought to be 5k or above. I am only 9k and a lot of the lecture material is difficult for me. Yet I find plenty of value in the league reviews and I try my best to get as much value from the lectures as possible. There are very few members below 5k and we compose the bottom two groups of AYD. 

If you decide to come to the U.S. Go Congress this year make sure that you attend at least one of In-seong's lectures.

Now for my usual Go Activities content:

My Go Activity was up last week with a bit over 19 hours spent. 

I played only four games but spent about four hours on those games.

The final game of the week was my first AYD game of the new season. I played against a player new to the league and managed to win by a very narrow margin of 4.5 points. I was well behind in the game but managed to find what In-seong Hwang refers to as a Trouble Master. In review he pointed out to us that aside from the Trouble Master I found that there were a few other Troubles left on the board. My opponent and I may find portions of our game in a future Trouble Master book or in a Trouble Master lecture for YD.

In the review of my AYD game In-seong advised me once again to pay less attention to my own weaknesses and to look at my opponent's weaknesses. All of my teachers agree on this. So far no one has managed to figure out how to get me to see my opponent's weaknesses. In-seong tells me to look at my opponent's stones which is good advice. He has pointed out to me that if their weaknesses were my own I would see them, so I am capable of seeing them. I'm just not doing it. It isn't the type of thing I can change just by knowing it, but I am trying my best to do it for him and for my other teachers as well.

The number of games I play per week should be going up considerably soon. I am hoping to get competitive in the BenKyo League Title Tournament by playing on the fly in the evenings. AYD just started and NAOL will begin this week followed shortly by the Go Magic league. I see lots of serious games in my near future.

My Go Teacher: Guo Juan

I remembered seeing the above picture previously and really liked it. I was able to find it by googling "Guo Juan in a parka". "Guo Juan dressed up for Winter" failed.

Although I have never taken lessons with Guo Juan I must include her among my go teachers because I have been a happy subscriber to the Internet Go School for many years. 

I have 1827 days in a row of problems solved using her Spaced Repetition method for problem reinforcement. I am rated 34 for all time on her leaderboard system, and I am getting fairly close to two million problems solved. 

The Internet Go School provides lectures paired with problems related to those lectures. The problems are delivered to you daily based on how many you want to solve each day. You rate the difficulty of the problems as you solve them. This determines how soon you will see particular problems again. When you have trouble solving them you mark them "Forgot" and they will appear again quickly. There are some problems on the site that I won't be seeing for another ten years because I have marked them as being easy so many times.

When you log into the Internet Go School web site you will see my written recommendation among others.

In addition to using the Internet Go School I have attended workshops with Guo Juan. I also participated in her league classes which she conducted a number of years ago. I also enjoy seeing her at the U.S. Go Congress when she attends. Guo Juan has also requested game records from me for review for the eJournal on occasion.

For a detailed review of the Internet Go School please see this previous blog post.  The post is from January of 2023. It was written for the benefit of the DDK players of the BenKyo League of which I am a member. 

Now for my usual Go Activities content:

I put in a nearly ten hours on Go Activities last week. That isn't very much for me. Things ought to pick up next week when the American Yunguseng Dojang starts a new season. The week after that the NAOL will start a new season as well. 

My only game this week was a Title Tournament game for the BenKyo League. Title Tournament games do not count for our Elo ratings system in BKL so they don't need to be properly handicapped. The game I played was an even game against a 15k because they wanted to play even. 

I've been inspired to play all even games this month in BKL assuming my opponents agree to those settings.

Tsumego Dragon came in at first place in my Go Activities again this week.

In spite of the two and a half hours I spent I have dropped to 11th place on the leaderboard.  I need to work my way back up into the top ten.