Archive: undefined/2012

Winning My First Shidougo Game

Today’s shidougo lesson comes from a person that I’ve come to befriend and look up to: frozensoul. If you’d like to help support his efforts in helping out players trying to get stronger, please visit his site for more information!

I guess you could call this my first “shidougo” victory… but I wouldn’t classify this as that due to the fact that frozensoul was actually trying to create a tie. So in reality, congratulations are in order for frozensoul for being only one point away from creating a tie!

Overall, I was really happy with my performance in this game. It honestly has nothing to do with the victory and more on the fact that I played almost every move with confidence. And for those who would remind me that frozensoul wasn’t actually trying to play anything crazy, the confidence I’m speaking of is more of a “I read it out to the best of my ability and I’ll give each move everything I got.”

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First Official Shidougo Game

Prior to this game, I was on a decent winning streak… so I was feeling pretty good. Feeling good enough to think I could outplay a 5d? Apparently so….

Now granted, this was a teaching game; but I assure you that I did nothing less than try to outplay him and hope to catch him off guard. For those who are still new and wondering why this is incredibly stupid, the difference between a 5d and 9k is at the bare minimum 8 stones. So… yeah…

It’s been so long since I played against an opponent so vastly stronger than me that I forgot what it was like to play just to simply survive. That’s right: just survive. Instead, I tried to take big points and was under the false assurance that my groups were alive and that I was giving frozensoul a good game.

That being said. There are too many mistakes to be mentioned and the prized moments are practically nonexistent. If you would like to see what 9k mistakes look like and how they get properly demolished, please see the kifu below!

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Archive: undefined/2010

My First One Point Lesson

So I played my first teaching game on KGS today. It was a pretty quick game with a 3-dan who UTTERLY demolished me. I couldn’t help but laugh as I watched my shapes get cut up into tiny little pieces and get swallowed up whole by Leviathan. Don’t even want to think about what it would be like to play a pro right now…. head explodes

Anyhow, here is the following onslaught. The 3-dan has an interesting idea called: One Point Teaching Game. At first I was like do I pay him a point or something…. but then it became clear to me at the end. He gives one solid point for the player to work on. BRILLIANT! Considering weak players are being pulled five millions different directions at once (e.g. life and death, tesuji, opening theory, etc.), it’s nice to have one solid thing to focus on.

So I’m sure the question then is, what was my one point lesson for today?

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