My Week of Go Activities - More 101 Certificates

 

Last week I bragged about getting a 9k certificate from the 101 Weiqi web site. This week I went on to be granted 8k and 7k certificates. I do not expect this to continue. In fact, I foolishly did a rank challenge last night, the same day I got the 7k certificate, and ranked back down to 8k as a result. 

It's a process.

I am really enjoying doing the homework I created on 101 Weiqi.

I was greeted this morning with three homework assignments.

Nearly 26 hours were spent on Go Activities this week. Approximately a quarter of that time was spend doing problems on the 101 Weiqi web site.

I played twelve games this week, but spent a bit fewer than six hours doing so. I'm obviously still playing too fast.

This topic came up in my lesson with Clossius and he gave me an exercise to help with that. I'm supposed to start my day with a 9x9 game in which I strive to spend 18 seconds or more per move. I've managed to follow that advice so far. I'm working on building the habit, and I hope that it will transfer to my 19x19 games.

I lost most of my games this week, but that is because I created a 1k account on Tygem. I also created a 3d account on Fox. This was done at BenKyo Baduk's suggestion. 

Ben and I are working on improving my reading. We are devoting all of our Private Lesson Time and all of our Twitch Time to reading practice. Last night we spent about 20 minutes talking about this problem.

5k problem - White to kill

Ben and I went over two problems in depth. We actually started with this one.  After we exhausted the possibilities for those problems we spent some time with a couple of ladder problems that Ben constructed for me on a demo board. We will be continuing our work on reading tonight in a Twitch Time Session we have scheduled. I'm outside of my comfort zone with all of this reading practice, but that is apparently what I need.

Ladders are supposed to be easy to read because they are a one way street. This is true, but I find ladders difficult because there are so many stones to "visualize". I use the word visualize loosely here because I don't visualize stones at all. I simply try to remember that they are there, what color they are, and how many liberties they have.

I do like go problems, so even though I am outside of my comfort zone I am doing something that I enjoy in principle.

I must admit to being disappointed to have been kicked back down to 8k last night, but the struggle continues.

I had to laugh when I got this problem on the Internet Go School this morning. I got it right, but that didn't mean I could actually read it.

Baby steps.

My Week of Go Activities - 101 Achievement Certificate

 

I've been using the 101 Weiqi site for quite a while now. It is possible to use the site without creating an account, but I did create an account when I first started to use the site. You know you are on an Asian site when you manage to get your very common Western first name as a user name. 

I chose 10k as my starting rank, but never understood how to increase my rank on the site, so there I sat at 10k for a long time. Yesterday I attended the Massachusetts Go Association DDK Class. The topic was capturing races and a number of problems from the 101 Weiqi site were used to illustrate the principles of capturing. 

During class one of the other students explained that she does homework from the site at her level. She pointed me to a Discord server with a thread that explained how to create the homework. That was yesterday. This morning I got my first pat on the back from 101 Weiqi in the form of a certificate of achievement for 9k performance. I think I will increase the number of problems I have in that homework set and make it a part of my regular daily tsumego practice.

It was a fairly normal week of Go Activity with a bit over 30 hours of activity.

With the Western Server Challenge over many fewer games were played this week. There were only 13 games played. I won just shy of 50% of my games, yet it felt as if I had a terrible week. I had a streak of angry play on Tuesday when I played seven games. I didn't actually want to play, but I realized I was avoiding it, and that I needed games for my lesson with Clossius occurring one day early this week.

I started by throwing a won game. Then I threw another won game. Then I just went on to play very angrily. I'm not proud of it. I was playing fast and furious... literally FAST and furious.

I finished off the day with a win in the Massachusetts Go League which was assigned to Clossius for review the next day.

The next day, Wednesday, happened to be Clossi Class. It was a small class and Clossius asked if anyone was having any challenges. I mentioned my difficulty in slowing down my play. Clossius decided to play a game with me for class where he took his time and talked about what he was thinking to model the behavior of taking one's time and utilizing that time. The time settings were 5 minutes of basic time with 3 periods of 30 seconds of overtime. Below you can see that the game took over 49 minutes to play and that Clossius used twice as much time per move more than I did, but that was by design. I could have used more time, but I didn't want to waste class time twiddling my thumbs when we could be listening to Clossius explain his thinking. I suppose I could have explained my own. That might have actually been funny.

Having had my attention drawn to the proper way to think, and to slow down, I decided to play a slow game on Thursday morning. I wanted to have something worth talking about with Clossius during my lesson that day. In the lesson we covered that slow game. Then I asked Clossius to review the game we played in Clossi Class the day before telling me what I should have been thinking while I was playing, so the lesson ended up being an extension of the class from the day before. It was a good lesson.

Thursday was a big day for lessons. Later in the day I had a private 90 minute lesson with BenKyo Baduk. Ben and I have decided that our focus is now going to be on developing my ability to read. Ben glanced at a few of my games from April. He chose an AYD game with a Life and Death problem to solve. We spent a lot of time talking through that problem. I found it useful and encouraging.

I kicked off my new week with a Canadian League game on KGS which I won by 24.5 points. BenKyo Baduk was in attendance throughout the game, which was an honor. Afterwards he told me that it was the best game I had ever played. Three of my BenKyo Baduk friends were in attendance for the game. Here is some of the chat.

They believe in me.  Now I just need to believe in myself.

My Weekly Go Activities - Not Having Fun

 

I spent nearly 29 hours on Go Activities this past week. Only five and a half hours were spent on Live Play. Now that the Western Server Challenge is over I am playing fewer games but spending more time per game on average. 

I played eight games which lasted on average 41 minutes each. That doesn't mean that I spent half of that time myself, however. I am having a hard time spending more time on my games.

Every game played this week was a League Game. Because I did not want to play any more than necessary on KGS during the month of the WSC, I had put off my Canadian League Games. I managed to fit in three of those games this week and I have two more scheduled for next week. That will leave me with two more to play before the end of the month.

Tsumego had suffered greatly during the month of the Western Server Challenge. I started to make up for that this week with 1,000 problems on the 101 Weiqi site.

I barely spent any time at all on the Internet Go School website in the past month. As a result I had accumulated more than 1,300 due problems. I've handled that by disabling a number of problem sets. I will be slowly adding them back in again as I get to the point where all due problems can be completed each day.

The bright spot in my week was the appearance of my achievement on the OGS Go Server for completing the Western Server Challenge.

I'm not sure if I will be participating next year because the minimum time settings are going to be adjusted to eliminate blitz games. I doubt that I will be wanting to play 100 slow games in a month next year. Perhaps I will, but I doubt it.

Although I won as many games as I lost this week I am not feeling good about my playing. I'm actually not having much fun playing right now, and I am feeling reluctant to play at all. It doesn't have anything to do with rank anxiety. I'm pretty much over that. I'm just not having fun, and even though I know I am supposed to be slowing down and thinking more, I really don't want to slow down and think more.  I am having a very hard time making myself do it.

My Week of Go Activities - Guided Go With BenKyo

 

I spent nearly 28 hours on Go Activities this month which is fairly typical. Because the Western Server Challenge was still ongoing Live Play came in as the #1 Activity.

I logged 31 games and could not even get them into one screen capture. Because the last three of those games were logged under a different category than Live Play, I won't include them in the average time per game stat. The games took a bit over 21 minutes to play on average, and almost all of them were blitz.

The new columns "Move" and "Match" give times in seconds for the average move time and time in minutes for the total match time.

Guided Go With BenKyo has now become a monthly event. I get a good deal of Twitch Stream time with BenKyo as part of my Tier 7 Patreon Rewards. I stack two of my 60 minute time slots for a two hour session where I play go against a number of opponents with Ben guiding my thinking. 

This month I invited any BenKyo League players who had not yet played Guided Go with me to participate. I got three volunteers quite quickly.  We spent about 35 minutes per game. After that I resigned to move on to the next game. At the end of the stream Ben spent about 25 minutes total doing brief reviews of each game. 

Next month I am planning on doing only two games for the Guided Go Session in order to get farther into the middle game and to give Ben more time to review each game. Currently I am offering the Guided Go Experience only to BenKyo League members, but everyone is invited to be a part of the Twitch audience and to contribute to chat which I enjoy reading after the fact.

BenKyo Patreon Tiers include Twitch Stream Time beginning at Tier 3. Check out Ben's Tiers on Patreon.

You can view the VOD of last night's stream. It should be available for a few weeks. If it is replaced by a permanent highlight clip I will link it here.

One last thing... I finished the Western Server Challenge. I actually accumulated two additional games above what is shown in the screen shot above. I managed to finish the challenge by playing nine games simultaneously, many of which counted toward the challenge. A few of those games did not count because they were either over handicapped or under handicapped.

Due to never having played games simultaneously before the end of my Western Server Challenge experience was unpleasant, but that was because I was unprepared to deal with the tabs that kept opening in my browser. My settings were correct, so I suspect this may have been browser related. In any case I survived it and I hope to experiment with simultaneous play to make it work for me next time.

My Week of Go Activities

 

30 hours a week for Go Activity appears to be my new normal. The fact that I am no longer counting time spent watching others play has a lot to do with that.

Live Play came in at second place for the week at nearly eight hours. I played 24 games. All but one of those games qualified for the Western Server Challenge. Games took about 20 minutes on average. All but one of them was blitz, so that isn't too bad.

I had a fairly impressive losing streak. When Clossius asked me how I felt about it I said, "I really don't give a crap." He applauded that attitude, and I believe we both feel that the Western Server Challenge has been been good for me. It has eliminated my fear of losing and my fear of ranking down. 

At the end of my losing streak I was 10k for 15 minutes. I took it in stride, and the game that I played as 10k which got me back to 9k started me on a fairly impressive winning streak. It brought me back to 8k where I now sit precariously.

There was only one loss during that winning streak, but it was only a 1.5 point loss.

My progress on the WSC continues to be steady. I have 90 games played with 10 more games to go in four days. I only need to play 2.5 games per day now. I'd like to finish the challenge at least one day ahead of the deadline if possible. 23 players have already met the challenge. I hope to join them soon.

I think the WSC is great to do once a year. Some might claim that it builds bad habits by encouraging people to play too fast, but I think habits are built in more than a month. I've actually done better with blitz than I expected and I have found that I enjoy it. I expect that I will continue to play it as a change of pace.

I admit that I am looking forward to playing games with longer time limits and actually getting into overtime in those games now that I am no longer so afraid of being in overtime.

My Week of Go Activities

 

It was an average week for Go Activity with nearly 32 hours of activity.

Almost 30% of that time was spent on live play. I played 24 games and spent about 25 minutes per game. The AYD Game and the two BenKyo League games took considerably more time than any of the blitz games which clocked in at as low as 14 minutes in some cases.

I am still participating in the Western Server Challenge run by Clossius. Today I was one game ahead of him, but I am sure he will get to 100 games before I do.

I have 41 more games to go in the challenge. I am enjoying playing blitz this week. The lesson I had with Clossius where he and I played blitz helped me get more comfortable with it.

My Week of Go Activities

 

It was a light week for Go Activity by my usual standards. I only put in about 27 hours.

Live Play came in at the number one spot at nearly eight hours.

There were 23 games played, so the average time per game came to about 20 minutes. That includes time spent by both players.

I am so focused on playing my games that I have spent very little time on review and study. 

With the number of games I need to play, and the number of days I have left in the month, I am going to need to play 3.3 games per day to reach my goal of 100 games, so I am still on target to reach my goal by the end of the month. 

This can be done.

My Week of Go Activities - Plus First Week of the Western Server Challenge

 

My spreadsheet got the seal of approval from Clossius during my lesson because it contained 20 games. It would have had even more if the Western Server Challenge had begun on Friday when my week starts. Clossius was all smiles over my spreadsheet.

It isn't too late to join The Western Server Challenge. There is a button to sign up.

My plan is to keep an eye on how many games I must play to get to 100 and to try to stay ahead of it a little.

I added two new columns for the month of March to track games that count toward the challenge.

I spent nearly nine hours on live play for 17 games. The last three games were counted toward BenKyo Personal Stream Time as they were a part of the Guided Go with BenKyo stream. Some of the games were as short as 12 minutes. Games come to a little over 30 minutes per game on average with league games taking the longest.

I'm playing a lot of games at blitz speed, but it is feeling good to get in a lot of games. There should be more than 20 games next week. Let's see how many.

Clossius is a great teacher and I must give his lessons a shout out. We've had 54 lessons together so far. You can watch him teach most of his lessons during his live streams on Twitch because most of his students have generously agreed to share their lessons with the public. 

You can watch my most recent lesson with Clossius to see if lessons with Clossius may be right for you. If you view this lesson you will see that he and I have a very good time together. 

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.