You ever have one of those moments where you play an opening and wonder how far you deviated from the joseki? Well, when you had one of those moments, did you ever happen to find out that you managed to play the proper moves without any joseki knowledge? Because that happened to me a couple of weeks ago, and it was one of greatest moments ever because I felt that it was a sign of growth and understanding of why certain moves are played.

Check out the game record below starting from move 7.

Pretty neat huh? But here’s one thing I will say to my fellow go players who are trying to reach dan level: While I have been a big advocate of avoiding joseki study throughout my own growing process, I believe that I may have reached the point where joseki study can no longer be avoided. I must admit that I never thought I’d reach this point, but it seems that the time will be upon me very soon…

I’m not sure if anyone else feels this way, but there’s just something about playing an even game with someone much stronger than you that tends to bring out the best moves in you. And although I did not know this at the time, my game with Tilwen is what I needed to regain my composure and leave behind the reckless go I had been playing.

After the game was over, Tilwen gave a fantastic review that really opened my eyes regarding vital concepts that I never quite grasped:

#1. Attack from far away.

#2. Contact moves are for defense.

This may be common sense for many of you, but I assure you that the simplicity of the concepts never occurred to me throughout my study of go. Perhaps it was simply the reinforcement I needed after much studying, but his explanations of these concepts really helped to solidify the concepts. For those who still find these concepts difficult to grasp, just read it over a few time for familiarity and I assure you that I will write an article on these to better clarify them for you.

Many thanks again to Tilwen for his help and advice!

Weekly Go Wednesday, Issue #7

Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results. - Narcotics Anonymous

If we rephrase it into a go context, it might look something like this.

Insanity in go is playing the same level of moves over and over again, but expecting to gain a stone in strength.

That being said, this brings us to a critical aspect to getting stronger at go: experimental games.

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So over the past week, my rank on KGS actually went up to 6k and I managed to defend it properly against a 5k. Good news right? I’m back at 7k now. (-.-) How does that happen you might wonder? Losing four straight games in a row. That’s how. Haha.

You know those times where no matter what you do (whether it’s fate or you just sabotaging yourself), you keep on losing? That’s me right now. Haha. I’ve gone through four straight losses and it’s been pretty pitiful.

I lost my first match to in a relatively normal way. Not on tilt quite yet, and then I decide to challenge him to a rematch. And then I get excited when I think that his group is killable, and end up losing my entire corner early on in the game. There goes my second loss.

From that point on though, it was like I was on a pure vengeful pursuit to win against him. I played him once again, and decisively won a number of key battles, and then I lose on time.

As if that weren’t bad enough, I then go off and challenge another 6k. This match is going great, because he’s in a killing mood too but I’m managing to outread him for most of the game… and then I failed to realize one of my sequences put a big group in atari and then everything died…

ARGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

I’ve played my fair share of ranked games lately, and one thing that I have noticed about myself: I do not like 10 minute ranked games. Although I’ve always considered myself more of less a fast player, I realized that I actually like (and need) to have a decent amount of time to think through what I’m doing. In today’s kifu, I found myself hitting byoyomi pretty quickly and then playing the later portion of the middle game and endgame in sudden death. And in my experience, that is the time where any mistakes made will usually turn the game around. I was scrambling to try and find the best moves without accidentally killing myself. Enjoy watching as I squirm and have only my instinct to help me make the correct moves.

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Go Problem: Black to play and win.

For those who are skeptical of the importance of the correct approach to studying tsumego, let’s consider the following:

1. Your reading ability is the primary foundation for your go ability. If you can’t read worth diddly squat, don’t expect to get any stronger.

2. It’s the most convenient form of go that is available to players if they’re unable to play an actual game. So why not make it an enjoyable activity that will help you get stronger?

3. Finally, since most go players will spend a good portion of their time on tsumego, it is only logical that you would want to maximize the growth you’ll get from the time and energy you spend on it.

That being said. Let’s dive right into how one should properly study tsumego.

#1. As a rule of thumb, spend at least 75% of your time on easy problems.*

If you primarily focus on hard problems, there are three issues that will arise.

A. You will get frustrated because you are going to be wrong most of the time and will be unable to see why you’re wrong. Therefore, you will not learn or gain much.

B. Although you would think that learning how to solve hard problems would result in you being able to solve easy problems, this is rarely the case for tsumego.

C. Finally, you must understand that every game of go you play consists of a majority of easy to intermediate level problems, and then a handful of complicated situations. So instead of understanding the proper moves to make for most of the game and being a little lost for only a small part of the game, you hope to win a game where you make mistakes during the majority of the game and make the occassional correct move for a small part of the game? You might want to think twice about this approach if you want to win any games.

With that in mind, isn’t the only logical thing to do is train your intuition so that your basics become flawless? After all, once the basics become instinctual, you will not even have to consider the trivial moves that once plagued your mind. Instead, you will now be able to focus on more complicated situations that will ultimately allow to rise in strength and ability.

*If you’re wondering what qualifies as easy, it means that you can read out all of the variations in your head with minimal effort.

#2. If you use tsumego software, do not get in the habit of just playing things out because you can.

The short version of the rationale for this is that tsumego software permits you to be lazy by letting the software show why something is wrong. This is a habit that will not only fail to help you improve your reading ability, but will deteriorate it instead. For a more detailed explanation on this topic, visit this post.

3. If you do not understand why your variation does not work, stop and figure it out before moving on.

Although this piece of advice will be difficult to follow as you grow in strength, this is one of those things that will truly help to fill the void where you are not seeing the issue with your variation. If you take the time to properly understand which counter moves negate your solution, it will serve as a big boost to your abilities over time because you will begin to see variations you could never see before. And if you feel like you’ve tried everything (even though in reality you haven’t) and feel strongly that the book is wrong, get a stronger player to help you figure it out. I’ve done this a number of times and without fail, there was always one variation that I left out.

Well I hope that this will get you on the right path to studying tsumego. If you have anything you’d like to add from your own experience, please leave a comment and I’ll be sure to revise the post with ideas that other players can make use of!

Hey everyone. I just discovered a brand new go resource that got me so excited I had to post about it instantly!

It’s called BadukMovies and is made by Peter Brouwer 6D and Kim Ouweleen 4D and looks like a magnificent wealth of information. I will put up a detailed review for the site in the future, but at the bare minimum I wanted to let you guys know about this site first!

BadukMovies

Introduction — Round 1 — Round 2 — Round 3 — Round 4 — Conclusion

When I first walked into the tournament room, I remember staring longingly at the trophies lined up at the front of the room thinking, “Wouldn’t that be awesome if I could bring one of those home one day?” Never in my wildest delusions did I think that it would happen that very day. Nevertheless, there I was, with a 4-0 record and standing with the rest of the winners of the NOVA Pumpkin Classic 2012.

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Introduction — Round 1 — Round 2 — Round 3 — Round 4 — Conclusion

THE ULTIMATE SHOWDOWN!!!

Both players: 3-0, and I was facing my worst nightmare: another 4 stone handicap game.

In terms of competitive play, this is probably the most intense of all scenarios. Both you and your opponent are aware that only one will emerge victorious, so there is a huge pressure to fight with everything you have till the very end because neither will yield in this kind of game. And as someone who has never been in this situation before, it was an overwhelming feeling that made me shake with anticipation.

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Weekly Go Wednesday, Issue #6

Introduction — Round 1 — Round 2 — Round 3 — Round 4 — Conclusion

I looked down at the empty board before me and waited for the third round to start. In all honesty, I was still shaken up from the second round despite the pep talk I gave myself at lunch. Part of me was worried that I would play another crazy game that would be disgraceful. Life has a funny way of jostling you out of your mood sometimes, and little did I know, but I was about to be given the spark I needed to get out of my funk.

Anderson and his friend had just checked the pairings list and were making their way into the room. I was still sitting at the table closest to the list, so as Anderson’s friend made his way to his table, he noticed that I was sitting there. He paused by our table for a moment, looked at me momentarily, then turned to my opponent and said, “You be careful! This guy is a wild player!”

I was a bit stunned and embarrassed for a second as I recalled the miserable game I had just played… but then a burning blaze took hold of me and I thought…

“Crazy player huh? I’ll show you how wrong you are about that!”

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