Enriching My Love of the Game: 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.