Journal Log #1

Sorry it took so long everyone, but I will now start adding my own anecdotes on my journey. As you all may have seen, I’ve been busy writing various reviews and reading as fast as I possibly can while still maintaining my life.

The time has come… all the beginning quests have been completed… and it is time to leave the home village where I have spent my beginnings. Let us overview my stats.

I’m currently ranked at 20 kyu (according to KGS), which to me is not very strong at all. In a few days, it will have been a month. So I’m curious as to a more accurate measurement of my skills, but alas that will do me little good. In the past, I’ve made it a point to try and play on equal grounds with the Bots available on KGS. Yeah…. I think that was a bad decision.

Plenty of people think that playing a computer develops bad habits in a player. I couldn’t agree more. I will say however, that the quality of play does improve one you get pass the 20-30 kyu computers. The computers tend to make semi-automatic plays and won’t realize they’re trapped (e.g. ladders). Above 20 kyu the play improves but is still a bit robotic.

In terms of how my games have progressed, you are always more than welcome to browse the KGS Archives for Zenix - month of August. To sum it up, my very first 19x19 game on KGS was a loss of 312.5 points to a player who did not have a rank. (For those who do not understand the magnitude of that loss, there are 361 points available assuming no stones are placed down.) My games continued down a lot of resignations and losses of gigantic proportions (e.g. +132.5 and +296.5). I would even lose to bots that were technically weaker than me.

Where am I now? It seems that with just a little under a month of Go under my belt, I’ve managed to compete on relatively even ground with LibertyBot [14k] (I win with about a 30-40 point margin) even though I make some egregious errors sometimes. So not too shabby… but I got a long way to go.

Where do I think I’m headed next? Assuming I can maintain all other aspects of my life pretty well, let’s shoot for the moon shall we?

September’s Goal: I’m going to rise to a strength of a single digit kyu within a month.