My Week of Go Activities

 

This week I spent nearly 36 hours on Go Activities. A big chunk of that time was spent watching Clossius Live Stream. I was there for nearly ten hours of his stream this week, and I didn't catch all of it. He was really active, and I am very happy about it.

For those who have missed seeing Clossius stream, you can start celebrating, because Clossius is back live streaming the go lessons of his students which they are willing to share, and it is looking as if that is nearly all of them. This is a bonanza of DDK and SDK go instruction which is tailored to the individual needs of his students, yet instructive for all. Tune in not only to watch the lessons, but also to participate in the on-topic, as well as off-topic, chat from the peanut gallery. My lessons are at 3:15 PM EST on Fridays most weeks. You are welcome to observe.

If you work a day job, and watching the Clossius stream in the middle of the day is inconvenient for you, no worries. If you subscribe to his twitch stream at the $5.00 level you can watch the VODs. 

I've been instructed to slow down my game play with some good results. I played eight games this week and spent over seven hours doing so. Games are averaging close to an hour each. This includes my opponent's time as well as my own.

I played five games on Fox this week, and won all but one of them. If I win four more games I will rank up to 6 kyu. If I lose nine more games I will rank down to 8 kyu. I'm liking my "odds". Of course, there are no odds. It is all skill. 

I've added a new go teacher to those that I currently support. In addition to Guo Juan, In-seong Hwang, and Shawn Ray, I am now supporting Ben Mantle (BenKyo) at the $5.00 level on his Patreon. I joined mid month with the intention of leveling up to either the $15.00 or $30.00 tier in December. I haven't decided yet which one I will choose. 

I did get my name "buzzsaw" into the credits of his latest video, so that is cool.

In my most recent lesson with Clossius it became very clear that I am not reading very well in spite of working to improve that skill. I will continue to do more capture race problems, and read those problems all the way through before answering them. I will work on applying that skill in my games. That is the priority for the week going forward.

One last thing... I have stopped recording an activity that I spend a great deal of time on. That is Watching Others Play. I am still doing it quite a bit, but I am not giving myself credit for it by recording the time I spend doing it. Watching Others Play usually shows up as the number one activity for the week, and you may have been wondering why it is gone. It is because I feel that I am fooling myself by including it. I do learn things by watching others play, and observing their reviews, but recording that as Go Activity now feels a bit like cheating. There are more active ways to study go. I took a look at my Go Activities for the year, and found this.

The lime green wedge is Live Play.

I Was Wrong: I'm Back to Weekly Activity Blogging

I discussed with Clossius my decision to stop posting my Weekly Go Activities. 

He said that he believes that people enjoy following my progress, and that I ought to continue, so I am back. He said that it is good to document my journey. I agree. 

Sometimes I feel like my journey is a few steps forward and a few steps backward over and over again, but be that as it may, I'm here to tell you about it.

I owe you two weeks, so I will just post them here without a lot of detail. I will pick things back up again next week.

For the week ending November 11th:

For the week ending November 18th:

Taking a Break from Weekly Activity Posts

This will be my last weekly blog post for a while.

When I realized that I had not posted my usual weekly blog post about my go activities I also realized that I was not highly motivated to put in an hour of my time on that task. I'd rather play a couple of games or watch a video.

Over the last couple months I have come to realize that I always put in between 25 and 45 hours on go activities, usually in the neighborhood of 35 hours. That has become quite consistent and is unlikely to change.

At this point I don't see a lot of value in continuing to post this information publicly. It takes a lot of time and effort.

I'm going to continue logging my time for my own interest, but I don't expect that gathering the information is going to change what I do in any way.

I'm playing a good number of Live Games now, and I am doing a lot of Go Problems. I'm continuing with weekly lessons with Clossius, and I hope to improve my performance slowly over time with his help.

I look forward to playing more on Fox and engaging in a variety of leagues, and I will probably find a reason to post from time to time. 

Thanks to all who bothered to read my posts.

2021 Canadian Open: The Second Weekend

I came into the second weekend of the Canadian Open with a record of 2:2. Last year 4:2 was enough for me to win first place in the 9k-8k division. This year the division is 9k-6k because there are not as many people playing near my rank. Things are sparse at my level this year, and I am near the bottom of my division at 8 kyu.

I still had hopes of winning my last two games of the Open and getting 2nd or 3rd place as a result. My dream came true, but it was not easy.

Saturday:

My first opponent of the day on Saturday was a 10 kyu who had gone undefeated the previous weekend. He was 4:0, which was daunting. I came to discover after our game was over that he had played the first round with my Pair Go partner and beaten him rather decisively. I went on to defeat him and give him his only loss in the tournament. He went on to achieve a record of 5:1 and came in first place in his own division which was one division below mine.

Here is that game:

Round 5

My 5th Round opponent turned out to be the only opponent I had who was not a Canadian League player. I won this game by managing to live after my opponent tried to contain a shoulder hit. It was really scary, but I survived and went on to take over a huge lower right corner by killing seven black stones in the p3 area.

My 6th Round opponent turned out to be a Canadian League player in the league above my own. It was unlikely that I would be able to win that game, but I did so handily by a 25.5 margin.

Here is that game:

Round 6

I am guilty of making a few overly cautious moves at the end of this game. I did count and knew I was winning big time. I know that s4 was unnecessary. I even read it properly and trusted it. I played it anyway. My bad? Maybe so. I think I won this game by destroying the center.

I had a good day on Saturday and went to bed with visions of prizes dancing in my head.

Sunday:

The final day of the Canadian Open was devoted to Pair Go and Blitz. I signed up for Pair Go with another Clossius go student. He is one stone weaker than I in the Canadian system, so we made an excellent Pair Go team because neither one of us had to worry about whether our partner would understand our moves based on strength alone. We also have a similar knowledge base because we are both familiar with the Clossi Approach taught by our teacher Shawn Ray. To learn more about our teacher search for Clossius or Shawn Ray on Patreon or on YouTube. He has many instructional videos and operates a Discord server called The Online Go Club with active discussions.

There were actually very few Pair Go teams, probably because of the lack of available female players. There were a number of male players who signed up alone who were unable to be paired. The combined strengths of the teams were quite wide, so handicaps were common in the games.

My partner and I managed to play two out of three of the scheduled games. Our opponents never showed up for the 2nd game, so even though my partner had a misunderstanding about timing and had arrived late, we could not have played anyway. We ended up taking large handicaps in both of our games and we won them both. When we were confronted with something we did not understand we simply tried to Clossi it. I believe we were successful in that.

Here are our Pair Go games with active links:

Pair Go Round 1

We won Round 1 by resignation. The last move in the game was a net I played to protect the black stones to the right which were cut from the other black stones.

We did not play Round 2. If we had, we would have had to give four stones, and would likely have lost.

Pair Go Round 3

We had to play Round 3 all the way to the end. Our opponents confused us with their opening where they repeatedly did tenuki. We did not understand it, but we Clossi Approached it. At least I hope we did. In any case we won by 21.5.

Late in the evening on Sunday we got email announcing the winners of the Divisions. I came in at 3rd place as I expected.

I managed to win a two month Basic Membership to Awesome Baduk. I proactively signed up for a free month wile waiting for my code. I also signed up for their Discord server. I have already watched one of their videos which is about Cross Cuts.

Thanks to everyone who worked so hard to bring us this terrific online event this year. I had a great time. If it is held in real life in Canada next year I will be unable to attend. I do hope that they decide to hold some online events in the future. I am signed up for the next Canadian League.

Although there were a few technical glitches early in the event that required some players to issue challenges, things ran very smoothly later in the tournament. It was a real pleasure to have games begin automatically for the tournament on OGS and to have results automatically recorded by Baduk Club.

My Week of Go Activities

 

It was a relatively light week for Go Activity with only about 34 hours. A good deal of that times was spent on Live Play.

I had to work extra hard to achieve my new goal of a minimum of five rated games because I played three league games and four tournament games this week. None of those games were rated on the go servers, though the Canadian Open counted toward my Canadian rating which is 8 kyu.

I played two rated games on OGS on Monday, and ranked back up to 7 kyu with the first game.

Since Fox decided to work for me again, for no apparent reason I might add, I logged in on the last day of my week, Thursday, to play three rated games. I met my goal of five rated games.

During my lesson last week I got Clossius to say something he has never said to a student before. He told me to do fewer go problems. Granted, I had done over 2,000 go problems the previous week, and I had played precious few rated games. It wasn't so much that he objected to the go problems. He just felt that my time would be better spent playing more games.

You can see below that I cut down on go problems. I stopped after topping 1,000.

Below is the start of my effort to rank up from my new 6k status on Fox. I have two losses and one win. The win was a resignation. I was ahead by about 9 points anyway, but I managed to cut off a group of stones and kill them. Resignation followed quickly.

2021 Canadian Open: The First Weekend

Last year I played in the Canadian Open and took first place in the 9k/8k band. This year I am playing again. The band is 9k/6k, so I doubt I would have a chance even if I played well, since I am in the lower part of the band.

I started out strong this year winning both of my game on Saturday. I did less well on Sunday losing both of my games. So at the end of the first weekend I am 2:2 with little chance to win a prize unless I do very well next Saturday.

Last year I entered with my AGA rating of 9 kyu. I earned a Canadian rating of 8kyu last year. and have kept it active through Canadian League play.

What I found very interesting is that all four of my games so far have been with Canadian League players. The first day the two players I defeated were in my own Canadian League. However, they had both beaten me in league play, so I felt really good about being able to win against them in the tournament. 

On the second day I lost against players two ranks higher than myself. One was in the league immediately above me. The other was two leagues above me so I was really pleased with my small loss.

Here are the games records:

Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

Round 4

I'm looking forward to rounds 5 and 6 next Saturday. 

There will be three rounds of Pair Go on Sunday.

My Week of Go Activities

 

I put in nearly 40 hours on Go Activities this week. I only managed to play eight games, but spent nearly six hours playing them.

I only had two rated games this week. One of my free games should have been rated but I forgot to check the rating check box. That is too bad because I won that one. If I had checked that box I would still be 7k on OGS.

I ranked down to 8k on OGS this week, and need to work my way back up.

I still can't play on Fox because of some issue I can't resolve. I suspect it may have something to do with the way Parallels is configured.

I was told that I may be doing too many go problems. I've been told to do fewer tsumego problems and to play more games, especially rated games. I need at least five rated games a week.

I played the first round of the Canadian Open today and won that game. Yea me!

Trouble Upgrading Fox Go Server Under Parallels Desktop

I am publishing this blog post specifically to ask for help. I have provided a link to this on the Go Facebook Group.

I installed Parallels Desktop so I could use the Fox Go Server on my MacBook Pro. I have been playing on the Fox Go Server for a couple of months now with mixed results.

The first problem I experienced was the inability to download my games. At first I was able to download games. Then, even if I could get my games list to open, I was unable to get a game to load so I could download it. I had to resort to asking friends to download my sgf files for me. This was a major annoyance because it meant that I was unable to review my losses in a timely fashion. I also felt as if I was inconveniencing my friends.

The next problem is that when it became necessary to upgrade the Fox server program I discovered that under Parallels the outdated Fox program could not download the updated version of the program.

There was a solution to this. I found that it was necessary to drag the old program to the trash and download the updated program from the internet and install it fresh. I was able to do this at least five times without a problem.

A friend pinned a link to the Fox Server download on a Discord server that we both use. So I was always able to find the download link when I needed it. That was really helpful.

Just recently, however, I ran into a new problem with updating.

I downloaded the new exe file and installed it. 

I chose "yes".

After downloading an updated Fox server exe file, and installing it, the program wanted to update. 

This made no sense because previously the new installed Fox Server programs did not need to update because they were recognized as the latest files. The fact that it was attempting to download was a big problem.

Clicking on "yes" starts an unending attempt at downloading.

I tried dragging the program to the trash and downloading multiple times, but each time I ended up in an endless download attempt after installing the new exe file.

I am hoping that the file on the web is still outdated, and that the new file will be uploaded there soon. That would explain the problem. However, if every new exe insists on downloading after installation I will never be able to play on Fox again under Parallels.

Does anyone know what is going on?

I am thinking I might need to buy a Windows machine exclusively to run Fox and Katrain.

Parallels is worthless to me if I can't run Fox under it.

My Weekly Go Activities

 

I spent nearly 40 hours on Go Activities this week. I only played seven games this week, but I spent nearly six hours playing them. That is nearly an hour per game. All but two of them were unrated league games played on either KGS or OGS. The only two rated games I played were on Fox. 

Based on my recent performance on Fox I knew that I was likely to rank down. I only needed two more losses to accomplish that. So relatively late in the night on Wednesday I bit the bullet and played those game. 

I now have a fresh start on Fox as a 6 kyu. 

I have continued my concentration on Go Problems this week. I met my goal of over one thousand problems on the 101 Weiqi web site.

I believe that working on go problems helped me win my most recent Canadian League Game. There was a life and death problem in the upper right of the board. I took the time to read it. I trusted my reading. After my opponent gave up and played elsewhere I continued to trust my reading, and I did tenuki as well. I was proud of myself. I got a good lead in that game which my opponent whittled away at in the end game. I managed to win it by 9.5.

Here is the life and death situation. 

AI would have preferred that I play at m19 rather than p19. A friend of mine, Drewch, who clicked through the game later, suggested m19 as well. 

During the game I considered m19, but was not sure of the continuation. It gave me comfort to make two rooms with the p19 move. 

I did manage to read that playing p19 allowed me to answer m19 with n19. That is one eye. I read that I could answer q18 with r19. That was easy. There was a more challenging move for black.  I read if black played s19 I could not r19 which made me a little crazy. But then I miraculously read that I could q18 because black could not r19. That would leave a three stones capture. That would give me an eye because a throw in would not spoil the eye of a three stone capture as it would with a two stone capture.

I was proud of my reading.

To be clear I had at least twenty minutes on my clock when I ran into the life and death situation. I have little doubt that if I was in overtime that I would have had trouble with it. I am just now beginning to actually read in my games. It is kind of a miracle that I have gotten as far as I have on instinct and principles. Be that as it may, it is now time to learn how to read.

Most of my life and death skills to this point have been based on the Life and Death Principles of Yilun Yang. You can read about his method of approaching Life and Death on Sensei's Library.

My goal for next week is to review more of my losses on a real board, and to play more rated games on Fox. I also need to learn how to avoid making stupid mistakes late in the game. I need to learn how to bring a won game home. I lost two games this week that clearly should have been won. One of them I lost because I trusted my reading, but I was wrong. I don't feel too bad about that. I just need to get better at reading.

My Weekly Go Activities

 

I spent over 40 hours last week on Go Activities. A good chunk of my time was spent watching others play, specifically my good go buddy Drewch on the Fox go server.

I decided to try to rank up to 4k this week on Fox. I only needed two wins in order to do it. However, things did not go as planned. I had five losses in a row on Fox over the course of two days, and now I only need two more losses to rank down to 6k. This rank down now seems as inevitable as the rank up had seemed previously.

I am in a disturbing downward spiral.

I played ten games this week. Half of them were league games played on either OGS or KGS. The remainder were rated games on Fox.

I did manage to kick some Canadian butt last night. It is the last game for the week.

I have been asked to replay my losses on a real board. I'm not a fan of the process yet, but I did spend over an hour this morning replaying three of my losses from last week on a real board in preparation for my lesson this afternoon.

I was a bit of a slacker this week with my go problems. I only got in 520 problems from the 101 Weiqi web site. 

I did manage to do a timed test of the cutting problems. I came in at only 88% accuracy so I will need to be working on that set again soon to raise my accuracy to at least 90%.

My Weekly Go Activities

 

I put in over 35 hours on Go Activities this week. At the top of the list was Clossius Lesson (Others), which is watching the go lessons of my fellow Clossius students. I had a Clossius Lesson Festival, spending nearly seven hours watching go lessons.

I tried to get ten games played this week, but came in short at eight games with four wins and four losses for a 50% win rate.

Last night it came down to a choice between getting in those last two games or getting 700 go problems for the week from the 101 Weiqi site. I chose go problems over playing because I really need to improve my reading.

My last game of the week had a Trouble Master that I missed. If my reading had been up to snuff I surely would have seen it. Even without seeing it all the way through, I should have invested two stone that would cost me nothing because they needed to be answered. Once they had been answered I would have easily seen the continuation. 

This was actually a pretty good game even though I lost it by 3.5. A friend of mine who observed the game commented that I had played a lot of active moves and had attacked things. There was a life and death situation with the e2 group that I failed to see. I don't think it was obvious though. When I finally attacked it I chose the wrong point to go in.

The Game

My goal for next week is to try for ten games. 

I will continue to do 700 problems on 101 Weiqi.