Heading Off To Congress

There are no images in this post because I am having trouble with Blogger.  Hopefully I can fix my issue soon, but I am going with just text this time.

I am looking forward to Go Congress in Boston this year.  I didn't attend last year in Austin, and definitely didn't want to miss another year.  I've only missed two years in a row once since my first Congress in 1997.  I didn't attend in 2010 or 2011.

While at Congress I don't track my activity because it is just a pain to do so.  I will give a report upon my return though. I may keep a journal while I am at Congress and post that when I return.

My main goal this year at Congress is to come out of it still being 9 kyu.  It is a struggle each year since 2012 to remain 9 kyu, or to pull myself back up from 10 kyu.  It's not easy riding that rail between DDK and SDK.  Some day I will get back to 8 kyu, which I was in 2012 for a brief moment in time.  

I also want to get through the Congress without consuming a vacation day from my Internet Go School account.  I intend to do my spaced repetition problems every day, preferably before I leave the room for breakfast.

I am up to 13 vacation days from a low of 3 days in the Internet Go School.  It has been quite a while since I consumed a vacation day by accident, and I have gotten my number of problems due per day down to about 30 on average with judicious use of the EASY button.

I didn't blog last week, so I am going to mention two weeks of go activity before I head out. In the absence of images, I'll just mention how many games I played. The last two weeks were light on activity with just four games played.

I should do better than that next week at the Go Congress. I will play at least the six rated games in the U.S. Open.  I won't be playing in the Die Hard on Wednesday since I will be participating in a tour of Harvard and MIT with a friend from BenKyo League and her husband.

Something special about the Congress this year is that my birthday will be happening during the event.  What better way to spend your birthday?

I Might Have Found a Potential Over the Board Rival

I returned to the Princeton Go Club after a week off. I wasn't willing to brave the heat wave we were experiencing last week, so I did not attend.

This week I played two games with a member estimated to be near my rank. I had not yet had a chance to play Kyle who has been studying go for about five months, but does not know his rank.  That was surprising to me, and would suggest that he may not yet have an active presence on any go server.

We played two games.  In the first game we thought we had created a really large seki, but looking at AI later, it became clear that it was never really a seki.  He might have known that all along. I'm not sure. I think Andy, one of the strongest member of the club knew that it was not a seki. He had taken a look and held back from commenting on it. While my stones were doomed to die, I made a pretty bad blunder as the game was finishing up which dispelled any hope that there had ever been a seki, so I resigned. 

I was clicking through the game in AI Sensei later, and followed the progress of a blue move which resulted in a ko fight which white wins to resolve the lower right, while trading the lower left group. Black makes it into bent four in the corner.

In the second game with Kyle I asked for a two stone handicap.  Actually, I kind of demanded a two stone handicap. I was actually quite tired from the first game, and explained that we would be unlikely to finish the second game because BenKyo Baduk was scheduled to review my NAOL game that night. I wanted to be back home to watch the review live. When I needed to leave, we ended the game. It was looking fairly even, and later, when I uploaded the recording I found that it was pretty dead even. B+ 0.2 on AI Sensei.

I posted both of the games to the club Discord server.

In spite of being tired, I am glad that I played the second game because it gave me a good indication that Kyle and I are not too unevenly matched.  Kyle might be a potential rival.  I say potential rival because I'm not sure if a two stone difference is actually rival territory.  I could certainly try to catch up, and he could certainly work on maintaining his rank lead, but I doubt that would be hard for him. I've played for thirty years, and I've worked really hard in the past five years just to stay even at 9k AGA. I've been 9k AGA for 14 years. Kyle is technically adept after just five months of study, with no idea of how strong he actually is, so maybe it isn't really a rival situation except in my own head.  I've played two of the strongest players at the club with varying handicaps, but they are so much stronger than I am that they can't be counted as rivals.

I decided to have Clossius review the two games I played with Kyle in my most recent private lesson with him.  Clossius also reveiwed my most recent game with Andy, who is 2k. I shared a link to that lesson with the members of the Princeton Go Club on their Discord server.

I should mention that Clossius is having a special on packages of go lessons until the end of July. This is the best price he ever offers. It is his Go Congress Special. The package includes 12 one hour lessons for 300 dollars, which comes to just $25.00 per lesson. I stack my lessons with Clossius to create two hour lessons.

If you are interested in this great lesson deal from Clossius you can find it here.

And you can find Clossius's Tsumego Dragon app here.

Now for my usual Go Activities report:

I spent over 18 hours on go activity this week. My top activity was BenKyo Private Lesson REPLAY, which came in at six hours and 18 minutes. I watch my lessons not only to review them, but also to create problems from the games that Ben has gone over during the lesson.  This past week I created 56 AI Sensei problems from just one game with Parker. There is another game with Parker in the lesson that I will be creating problems for in AI Sensei. I just haven't had time to do that yet.

I played five games, two of which were across the board at the Princeton Go Club.

Notice that there is a notes column in my spreadsheet.  For the two games played with Kyle I added notes.  To see a note I simply hover over a cell with a black triangle in the upper right corner of the cell.

l should start adding notes to the games in my spreadsheet more often.

Nakade - I've Been Pronouncing It Wrong For Over 50 Years

Go Magic has a course on Life and Death that I spent a good deal of time with today. In the process of doing so I learned that I have been saying the word nakade wrong for a very long time. I have also been saying piranha wrong too. I trust Vadim on this because he is a linguist. To find out how these two words relate to life and death, you will just need to take the course.  If you are reading this blog, you probably know what the first word means.

Now for my usual Go Activities Report:

It was a very active week for go activities with over 27 hours spent. I spent a great deal of time reviewing a lesson with BenKyo Baduk and making problems from it using AI Sensei.

I did not make it to the Princeton Go Club last week. I played four games last week. One of them was a correspondence game that I finished with BenKyo Baduk as part of my benefits for my Tier 6 on his Patreon.

This week I will be attending the Princeton Go Club again.