Guided Go with BenKyo

Ben and I had a great stream last night in which he guided me in playing three games against opponents who were fully aware of what was happening. They muted the stream so they could not hear what Ben and I were saying. They knew that they would get the benefit of that discussion by watching the VOD later. Games were not rated, and were resigned by me 40 minutes into the game so we could move on to the next game.

Everyone knew what was happening and no one got hurt.

This was a stacked two hour Twitch Redemption on my part. I put together two of my 60 minute slots. Ben generously added in some time at the end of the two hours to offer everyone some joseki knowledge about an attachment to the large knight's enclosure. He also generously did a review of the final game of Guided Go,  which was a game I played with Kdar.

I'm hoping that those who watched the stream found it entertaining. I'll probably be doing this again.

I'd like to credit Clossius with the inspiration for this special stream. He had played Guided Go with me in one of my lessons with Drewch who is a student of both Clossius and Ben, as am I. 

If you didn't get to see the stream last night check out the VOD.

Thanks to those who participated.

My Week of Go Activities - Plus Link to a BenKyo Baduk Review

I came dangerously close this week to going into "overtime" on my full time job of studying go. I put in just shy of 40 hours on Go Activities.

For the first time in quite a few weeks Live play came in at the number one activity. In order to achieve that I needed to play 18 games. I should actually say 16 games because two of them were teaching games played during lessons so they did not count toward the Live Play total time.

In fairness, the last two BuzzKill games were actually played on the first day of the next week, but I am counting them toward this week. I played them specifically to be reviewed during my lesson because Clossius had asked me to play four BuzzKill games. I had not managed to do it because I was very focused on playing BenKyo League and Canadian League games before the end of the month. Therefore I played two BuzzKill games right before my lesson.

During the Clossi Class on Wednesday I needed to look for a game I played as white. It was then that I realized I needed another column for my spreadsheet. Say, "Hello" to the C column. C for color.

Up to this point I have been doing all of my cell colors manually. Clossi suggested that I try coloring the Color Column conditionally based on the contents of the cell. I was able to figure that out.

I tried coloring the Rank and Result Columns based on the contents of the Result Column. I could color just the Result Column, but could not figure out how to extend that color into the Rank Column. I'll get it figured out.

My attempts to play BuzzKill style have been imperfect, and I need to keep working on it. I'm pleased to say that I can already see improvements in my games as buzzsaw. I guess I am making baby steps toward the desired goal.

Next week the Western Server Challenge begins. I do not expect to compete with anyone but myself. I just want to get in 100 games and earn a badge for that on OGS.

I had a review with Ben Mantle last night during his regularly scheduled Twitch Stream. In order to be able to attend at that time to get my review I rescheduled my American Yunguseng Dojang game. If you would like to see my game review you will find it at the very beginning of the VOD for the stream.

My review was supposed to be a 45 minute Patreon Twitch Time Redemption, but Ben was, once again, more generous with his time. The game was an AYD game. Though it had already been reviewed once, I like giving Ben a chance to go into greater detail on these AYD games. 

Ben's Tier 3 on Patreon comes with a 45 minute Twitch Time slot each month.

My Week of Go Activities - Mrs. Clossius is a Great Streamer

 

I put in over 38 hours this week on Go Activities. That is a lot of time. I actually had to do two screen captures in order to list all of my activities because they would not all fit on my iPhone screen. You can see a little gap between the two lists above.

My number one activity this week was watching Mrs. Clossius stream. 

Mrs. Clossius is a fairly recent go streamer. She and Clossius often stream at the same time from the same room and you can hear the other in the background as they stream. It isn't really annoying because it is the same subject matter.

I'm really enjoying watching Mrs. Clossius because she is just about the same go strength as I am. She and I have a similar style of play. She is a good streamer and engages her viewers well. Give her a look, and give her some love in the form of a follow, or even a sub. You can find her at Paige_dyer.

This was a light week for game play.

I played an accidental blitz game this week by accidentally clicking on the blitz button on OGS when I was trying to figure out how to change settings. It was pretty exciting, and I might do it some more on purpose.

In my lesson with Clossius on Friday we reviewed two games and then played a teaching game where we talked about me attacking and defending in sente. That was fun, and we definitely should do that again.

This week I am supposed to play four rated games with BuzzKill, and work on my attacking and defending in sente.

I started the week with a bang by playing four BenKyo League Games today.

My Week of Go Activities

 

Nearly 31 hours were spent on Go Activities this week. I spent a small amount of time on a great number of activities to the extent that in order to do a screen capture of all activities at once I had to cut the hours total from the top of the list and include it as part of my pie chart above.

The Clossius Live Stream once again came in at the number one spot, followed by Live Play, followed by my BenKyo Private Lesson time. 

I had a 90 minute lesson with Ben, which actually ran a bit over time. However, the bulk of the time indicated above was spent reviewing my very first BenKyo Private Lesson from nearly a month ago. Thursday I had my second Private Lesson with BenKyo, and I am scheduled for lessons for the next two weeks. So in February I will have three lessons with Ben Mantle. 

I am only entitled to two lessons a month from Ben on the Tier 7 of his Patreon. However, I developed a slight backlog of lesson time which I am redeeming as quickly as possible, thus the three lessons for February.

Once my backlog time is redeemed a month of instructional time with Ben will look like this template:

I get so much instructional time from Ben at Tier 7 that I felt the need to create a spreadsheet to keep track of redeeming it. The spreadsheet actually has other cells to the right for recording links to lesson videos and VODs from Twitch. I also have cells for notes.

I get 165 minutes of time on Ben's Twitch Stream which can be stacked, which means it can be combined in any way I want. That is not to mention the time that will be devoted to the game review I get which comes with Tier 5.

I can schedule time in advance or ask for it spontaneously when Ben is streaming. I also get three hours of lesson time (two 90 minute lessons). All Tiers include benefits from previous Tiers. The spreadsheet above shows the Tier at which a benefit kicks in.

Here is what my games looked like for this week:

I played 12 games. Seven of them were rated. BuzzKill played four games, all of them after 10:00 PM. I'm tired when I play as BuzzKill so I am amazed that I am at 6k on KGS with this account.

The purpose of the BuzzKill account is to play more aggressively. I'm working on it, but it is definitely baby steps.

In my Friday lesson Clossius reviewed the two most recent BuzzKill games. After that we played a brief game in which I was not allowed to defend in gote. Nor was I allowed to make a big move if there was something to attack. I found the exercise useful.

My Week of Go Activities: I Won The January BenKyo League By Brute Force

I'll make short work of my usual activity charts because I want to devote the bulk of this post to writing about the BenKyo League, and promoting it a bit.

It was a busy week with almost 35 hours of Go Activity. Nearly 50% of that time was spent watching Live Streams. Clossius came in at position #1. He's gotten serious about doing more streaming in the new year, and he lived up to his promise in a big way this week.

Also this week is a benchmark lesson with Clossius. It is lesson #50.

 

Now for the big news this week:

I managed to win the January BenKyo League by brute force alone. For the first time this month we were allowed to play every other league player twice which clearly worked to my advantage. It would also have worked to the advantage of anyone else willing to put in the time and the effort to schedule and play a large number of games.  

Below is a portion of the League Spreadsheet that shows the points earned by each participant at the end of the month. My row is highlighted in green. The player in the lead is always highlighted in green on the table and, as far as I know, Ben did not need to highlight a different row throughout the month.

When I say that I won by brute force I mean that even though I lost half of my games, I played so many that I earned enough points to pull well ahead of my closest competitor. I played a total of 16 games while he played 8. He had an impressive win ratio, losing only one game. However, the league awards three points for a win and two points for a loss to encourage participation. Therefore, playing many games can result in a win if other players fail to fill out their row. 

I have no doubt that my main competitor would have won easily if he had been able to fill his row, so I kept a careful eye on the situation, going so far as to play two additional games on the final day of the month to be extra careful.

Clicking on the full table below provides context. 

Aside from the one player who said he intended to be inactive this month, I managed to fill all but two spaces on my row.

Given the fact that my AGAID# is 8, my results feel somehow fated in retrospect. 8 wins, 8 losses.

The BenKyo League is a Tier 4 benefit of BenKyo Baduk on Patreon.

Now is the perfect time to join in the league since the month is just beginning. 

All games are handicapped so everyone has a chance to win the league. Victory comes with a prize of a 90 minute Private Lesson with Ben. Join Tier 4 and ask Ben to add you to the table. 

Let's play!

My Week of Go Activities: I Jumped to Tier 7 of BenKyo Patronage

 

It was an active week with nearly 30 hours of Go Activity. The BenKyo Live Stream once again dominated my time.

I played eight games this week, and they took a little over a half an hour on average. They were a bit fast because they were mostly BenKyo League Games with 20 minutes of basic time.

Six out of eight of my games were BenKyo League games this week. The league is handicapped so these games necessitated the addition of a new column on my spreadsheet. I now record the number of handicap stones for each game.

You will see that I gave 9 stones in two games this week and 7 stones in another two games. The pink highlighted cell in the Rank column indicates that I fell from 7k to 8k as a result of three losses in a row this week. I am not concerned.

Look at all of those BenKyo League games!

All but one of my games this week was colored "Feel Good Green" in spite of the fact that I lost five out of eight of my games. The one big loss I had was an AYD Game where I had essentially killed an invasion but failed to pull back one line as I finished blocking it off. Big mistake. Live and learn.

You can see my shame here: SashaOtter-buzzsaw

The sad truth is that I nearly played the correct move in the game. I beat myself up about it for a while, but not for long. I am getting a lot better about moving forward emotionally after a bad loss.

My Go Problems suffered this week as a result of putting my attention on the January BenKyo League. I was intent on trying to schedule as many games as possible. I'd like to win the league at least once for the glory.

My Week of Go Activities

 

I spent over 26 hours on Go Activities, with BenKyo Live Stream coming in at the number one spot.

Aside from watching the regular live stream, I redeemed a Patreon Tier benefit for a 60 minute personal live stream segment, and I logged my time for that separately. 

Ben spent over an hour and a half reviewing one of my games on live stream. I'm hoping that this segment will get clipped into a separate video so I can find it any time I want to watch it again. I'm having difficulty figuring out how to find the VOD which includes my review. I'll have to ask about that. I'm not very good with YouTube.

I managed to get in my required ten games this week. I still need to make up for the two games I fell short on last week, so I will be shooting for 12 games next week to make up for that.

I played five games with my KGS BuzzKill account this week. That account was created specifically to play more experimentally.

I didn't play any BenKyo League Games this week, and I need to get going with them again if I want to maintain my lead in the league this month. It is my goal to win the league by brute force. I already have nine games played with six wins as I write this on January 23rd.

BenKyo Stream Time has been cutting into my Go Problem time. I missed finishing all of my due problems on the Internet Go School a few days this week, but I managed to avoid using any vacation days. 101 Weiqi is not getting the love it deserves.

My Week of Go Activities - Happy Anniversary Clossius

 

This was a monumental week for two reasons.

Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of my first lesson with Shawn Ray (Clossius). In the past year we have had 47 lessons. Through his tutelage I have come to embrace the 101 Weiqi web site and appreciate doing Go Problems. At his suggestion I developed a kick ass games spreadsheet of which I am very proud. I look forward to another great year with Shawn, and hope to hit the 100 lesson milestone at some time in early 2023.

The second reason that this was a monumental week is that, purely by coincidence, I had my very first lesson with Ben Mantle (BenKyo Baduk) on the one year anniversary of my first lesson with Shawn. I won't be taking weekly lessons with Ben, however. Presently I am in a Patreon Tier that includes one monthly lesson and a significant amount of teaching time on his Twitch Live Stream. I am enjoying his Discord community, particularly the League.

This week was clearly dominated by a color I now refer to as BenKyo Blue.

My lesson was supposed to be 90 minutes, but you can see that Ben was generous with his time on this first lesson. He brought it in at over three hours. We played a teaching game and then reviewed it. We covered a number of topics aside from the game review and had a discussion about stone visualization. Ben referred me to a Patreon article he has written a few months ago for more detail. It was a great lesson.

Ben is currently only accepting new students for lessons through his Patreon Tiers which is one of the reasons I got involved at the lower Tier levels a little over a month ago.

I currently have a number of categories established for time tracking of my BenKyo time. I am entitled to unlimited Correspondence Games with Ben with Malkovich comments, so that is one of the categories. I have yet to start a Correspondence Game, however, and that is on my to do list. A number of Ben's Patreon Tiers promise additional lesson time on his Live Twitch Stream, so I will be tracking that separately from the general Live Stream time.

I have a number of categories for the tracking of my Clossi time as well.

Since coining the term "BenKyo blue" I have been searching for a color name for pink that starts with the letter "c".

I want a cool color name for my Clossi Pink.

Clossi Creamy looks like the right color, but my better judgment tells me to choose Clossi Carnation even though it is not quite the right color.

My first thought was to switch out the pink for the red I am using for Tsumego so I could have Clossi Crimson. It sounds so much cooler, but it would be a lot of work. I'll leave the color as pink for now and consider the switch for later. If I make Clossi time red that would put him at the top of the color list, but I am the only one that sees the full color list.

I was a little light on Go Problems this week with just over 1,000. I need more 101 Weiqi.

I played eight games this week, so I fell two short of my goal. I will make up for it next week. If I play two games a day I can get in 12 games and still have one vacation day.