My Week of Go Activities - Yilun Yang Returns

 

I spent 32 hours on Go Activities this week. 

Tsumego at 101 Weiqi came in at the number one spot.

The big news this week is that I am starting lessons again with Yilun Yang. I first started lessons with Yang in 1998.  I had taken a workshop with him in 1997 after which I attended my first U.S. Go Congress. It was a half a year after that when I began lessons with Yang.

My first round of lessons with Yang lasted for 5.5 years. The reason I stopped in 2003 was that I was still teaching and I felt as if I was not devoting enough time to go to justify continuing with lessons.

This is from our final lesson in 2003.

In 2007 I retired from education and started up lessons with Yang again and began blogging. My second round of lessons with Yang lasted for 8.5 years. I got to the point where the only games I played were with Yang and at the yearly Go Congress. I should have gotten more active with go and continued with lessons, but I stopped once again believing that I would never start lessons again.

Things changed though in 2019 when I joined the American Yunguseng Dojang. I made many friends online, and got a lot more active with playing and studying. I took on two teachers for private lessons, Shawn Ray and Ben Mantle. 

As the Go Congress got closer I started thinking that I should start up with Yang again to complete my excellent team of teachers. I had my first lesson back yesterday afternoon. I numbered it 337a using the same numbering system I had used in my previous lessons. Those lessons were two hours each and almost always resulted in two files so I would append the number of the lesson with a letter. Sometimes I would have Yang review games and end up with four files for a lesson. My new lessons with Yang are an hour and a half so if we do a teaching game it will only be one game rather than the two games we used to play, but there will still be occasions when I have him review games rather than play a teaching game, so I'll continue to use the letters.

So I just had my 337th lesson with Yilun Yang. I hope there will be many more.

I'm a little late with posting this week. I am already four days into the next week and it is looking decidedly unbalanced so far.

Ben streamed for 12 hours straight three days in a row and I managed to be in attendance for about two thirds of the time. He was doing a speed run up the ranks from 8k to 8d. He didn't get all the way because the weaker players especially don't seem to know how to resign.

My Week of Go Activities

 

I am really late posting about Go Activities, so I am going to post two weeks and not comment on it very much. Then I will move on from there. Hopefully next week I will have more to say. Above you see the chart and stats from the most recent week.

Below you will see the chart and stats from two weeks ago.

That's it for this week's post.

My Week of Go Activities - 5k Certificate on 101 Weiqi

 

When will it end?

I earned another certificate on the 101 Weiqi web site. This time for 5k. 

I do think I have reached a level that I will maintain now for a couple of months. I don't think I will be seeing a 4k certificate any time in the new future. 

I'm now doing five problem sets of 10 problems each every day at my own level. Those 5k problems are challenging.

It was a very active week with over 42 hours of Go Activity. Tsumego came in at the number one activity again this week. That is likely to continue.

I'll make this a short post since I am posting late in the week.

My Week of Go Activities - 6k Now on 101 Weiqi

 

I was getting a little discouraged about my progress on 101 Weiqi, but I managed to get another certificate this morning. I then checked when I got my 7kk certificate and realized that it was only eight days before, so I am actually making good progress. It is going to slow down now for sure.

Today I decided to edit my homework assignments so that I am getting five sets of 20 problems every day.

I believe that my intuition is improving on these go problems because I could see where this problem was going within seconds. That feels good.

Here are the stats for this week on Go Activities:

It was a very active week for Go Activities with over 37 hours spent. Most of that time was spent studying.

Tsumego 101 Weiqi came in at the number one spot again consuming at close to 10 hours and 25% of time spent.

A new category was created to time the 9x9 games that I have been playing to practice playing slowly.

I played a small number of games this week aside from the 9x9 games which are not being placed on my spreadsheet, so you do not see them here. I tried isolating under handicapped games at the bottom of the sheet, but will not be doing it again since that turned out to be a pain in the butt.

Clossius seemed pleased with my ability to slow down in the 9x9 games. I admitted that this skill has not transferred yet to my 19x19 games but I think I am doing a bit better. We decided to find a way to slow me down in my regular games. Before I can make a move in a game I need to find a cut and read it whether it is meaningful or not just to have something to do to slow myself down. 

I will be doing slow 9x9 games again every day this week before moving on to slow 13x13 games next week.

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.