As I’ve been fighting off the onslaught of work and priorities that keep coming my way, I hate to admit that I’ve fallen quite behind on my go studies. In fact, they have become practically non-existent. I think the most exposure I’ve gotten to go is flipping through the new books that have been arriving. However, that cannot even begin to amount to any noteworthy type of study.

And to be honest, it’s not so much that I don’t want to study or play. In fact, I would love nothing more than to dedicate a nice chunk of time each day to my go studies. However, since that has been nearly impossible, I’ve been wracking my brain for ways to make progress before an obscene amount of time has passed since I last studied go.

As I was walking outside this morning, a thought occurred to me, “If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backwards.” (Of course, one’s progress in go is not even remotely that linear, but you get the idea.) And though this might sound repetitive to some, once again I realized the necessity of taking steps forward. And at this point, it doesn’t even matter what direction I’m taking the step in. As long as I am making efforts to move forward, it will be more valuable than simply waiting for the perfect time for me to pick go back up the way I want to.

So to those who are also caught up in the whirlwind of the responsibilities of adult life and being independent, I challenge you to take the smallest of steps forward (even if it is as simple as doing 10 easy life and death problems a day). For me, I will return to the Jump Level Up series to provide some structure for myself.

I’ll be sure to keep you posted as I begin making my comeback.

Though I wish I was already moving on with progress on the numerous things I want to do, I’m still deep in the trenches when it comes down to it. On the upside, I will say that I have been able to really gain some clarity on what I’m planning on doing. As a result, a lot of planning (and even more planning) is going on as I prepare to take off at full speed the moment all these extraneous tasks are off my back.

And though this might sound crazy to some, I’ve got a decent influx of books coming my way as I prepare for a second look at the infrastructure of the blog.

I’ve always had a vision for how I wanted to see book reviews written and organized, so I plan to begin making it a reality as I gain the final major pillar that was missing from my collection.

On another note, I wanted to give a shoutout to my friend Nate who wrote a great post today titled Don’t Break the Problem Chain. Be sure to check it out and comment if you liked it as well!

And though I haven’t been able to get on KGS as much as I used to, I hope that everyone is doing well and winning their games. Ganbatte everyone!

In my spare time recently, I started playing Infinity Blade 3 pretty obsessively. For those who have never played any of the games, it is essentially a hack and slash game where players are rewarded for their ability to determine how best to counter their opponent’s attacks. So for example, the computer might spin around and then try to slash at you vertically from the ground up. In order to ensure you don’t get hit, you can either dodge or parry the attack with the appropriate counter attack (which in this case would be a vertical strike down towards the ground).

With that said, there’s one boss (aka The Collector) that has been consistently crushing me (and taking my weapons which is demoralizing) when I lose. The sad thing is that it’s not because he’s necessarily stronger or better than me. In fact, there were a number of times where I was just one combo away from a victory, but then I choke at the last second and die.

Now most people might chalk it up to nerves or something, but it hit me that this was actually a pattern with me. In fact, I can recount numerous times where a game of go was within the clutches of my victory and yet it would slip through my grasp at the very end. And like any good inquisitive person looking to always improve, I started wondering whether I could locate the root of this pattern.

After a lot of thought and losing to The Collector a few more times, I actually noticed something right as I was about to lose once again: my heart raced at an incredible speed and I was extremely hyper-active. Yup. You read that right. I was able to notice an actual physiological change as I approached the line of victory and was about to choke.

Once I noticed this, I thought back to all the times of competition or when there was a lot of pressure and I choked. Sure enough, a faint memory of that sort of hyper-activity and heart rate speeding up was pretty consistent in each time that I choked. Of course, there were times where I was lucky and still managed to succeed, but the majority of the evidence was against me.

Hyper-activity might sound like a good thing at first; but in my case, I was actual becoming overly active and racing too fast for my own good. In other words, my brain raced ahead at 200 mph while the rest of my body was desperately trying to catch up at its 100 mph. As you might expect, this leads to a lot of actions that are disjointed. The intentions are but half-formed and the body’s intent to carry out the actions are more out of nerves than anything else.

In fact, upon much self-introspection, I came to the conclusion that my best performances were always during times where both my mind and body were one. If I was able to keep my mind and body running in sync, there was a synergy that did not exist before. Moves flowed easier, and I managed to be able to avoid choking at the last minute when battling The Collector once again. Perhaps with more training, I will be able to avoid ever choking in a game of go (or anything else for that matter) again.

Sorry for being MIA this past week. As most of you know, the U.S. Go Congress 2014 was last week, so I was swamped as you can imagine. Like I’ve done before for previous events, you can be sure that I’ll be doing a day by day recount of the Go Congress for those who couldn’t make it!

In terms of a short term update though, things are starting to look better. The Go Congress helped to provide perspective for me in terms of where my efforts and energy really need to be invested in order for me to see the results that I want. It’ll be different from my past approaches (where there was a high risk of burnout), so I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with this new approach.

Hope that everyone is doing well!

With the U.S. Go Congress quickly approaching, it only seemed appropriate that it be high time that I returned back to go. And to be honest, it couldn’t have happened a moment sooner.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve taken some serious time to truly re-evaluate how my time and energy have been spent and whether my efforts were helping me move towards a larger goal in life. As a result, I cut back on almost everything and spent a lot of time thinking and testing out new approaches to my time, my energy, and my life in general.

For a while, I had a hard time figuring out how I was going to work go back into my life. After all, it was a highly time consuming activity that I had begun to feel frustrated with since I felt like my game had gone to crap. Nevertheless, I knew that the problem wasn’t the game; but that the problem was me.

I won’t go into great detail about my thought processes and the various choices I’ve made along the way since it would end up making my post sound like some sort of productivity blog. However, the important thing is that I have found a way to bring go back into my life. It will be a much simpler approach than before and not nearly so haphazard, which I hope will be effective in the long run.

As for the blog, I will take a similar approach to my study of the game and approach it with a simple yet effective method instead of trying to do ten different things at once. So if you’ll bear with me for a bit, I’ll be testing out different tactics for consistent blogging while slowly reviving popular posts like Monday Go Meditation once I have a handle on things again.

With that said, I’m happy to be back and look forward to what the future holds!

As some of you might have noticed, I’ve been pretty MIA for a while. One of the major events that happened last week was I moved out to a new apartment. And for those who know what it’s like to move, you know how much of a monstrosity that can be when it comes to sorting, packing, and cleaning.

The move came at a rather funny time in my life as it happened to be a perfect representation of how I’ve been deconstructing my own life lately as well. Reassessing what I’m trying to do and where all my time and energy is being placed. On one hand, everything is a gigantic mess and it’s difficult at times to figure out what I’m trying to do in all this chaos. However, I have confidence that it will work out for the best.

As I’m reassessing my strategy for my life, it should come as no surprise that I’ve had to reassess how I’ve been approaching my study of go as well. I’ll be honest in that I have not been happy at all with my numerous training regimens and have felt like I’ve lost focus. In fact, my Yunguseng match which was rescheduled for today was the first time I even looked at anything go related at all in the past few days. It was quite a weird feeling.

So while I would love to continue the momentum I had going with the blog, I’m putting a hold on all the weekly articles and game commentary in order to give myself time to really sort through things. So I hope you’ll forgive me as I must tenuki for a while as I try and figure out what my whole board strategy for my life is.

I’ll be sure to drop in and update you on my thoughts and progress, so no need to worry that I’m simply dropping off the face of the planet. I’ll still be around.

Hope that all is well with everyone.

Overview

This week has been very sparse in terms of study and playing, but extremely heavy in regards to writing (if you didn’t notice with the Weekly Go Wednesday article). And though my time has been a bit more biased towards writing, I don’t think any of you are complaining. Haha.

It’s taken some time to break into my productivity system, but the cogs and wheels are starting to mesh together better now. I’m much more aware of where my time is going along with how I’m progressing as a whole in life now. Whole board thinking. See that?

I’m looking forward to when my entire system works effortlessly and I can really amp up my go training. No matter though. Slow and steady wins the race.

Training Regimen

• Work on go for at least 10–15 minutes a day.

Games

• KGS - 1 game
• DGS - 6 ongoing games
• OGS - 7 ongoing games

Books

• Get Strong at Tesuji by Richard Bozulich

Lessons Learned

• It doesn’t matter if you make mistakes during your game because your opponent is just as likely to make mistakes if not bigger ones. So don’t be too hard on yourself during a game because you’ll only be making yourself more vulnerable than necessary.

I played the second round of my Yunguseng match tonight. To be honest, it was a game of mixed feelings. Though I hate to admit it, I’m not quite out of my slump yet. I could definitely feel it as I started getting antsy when the game began. I started being negative and worried that I would lose again. Yet on the other hand, there were moments where I managed to give my game some life as I surged forth with a desire to attack and try to harass my opponent’s group with as much vigor as I could muster up.

It was a bit weird being in this bi-polar/gray area of feeling like my go was rather aimless, having it spring back to life, making bad moves where I was completely off with my reading, and then having lively energy again. Then again I guess this is all part of trying to put the pieces together again. They don’t quite fit together at the moment, but I’m optimistic that they will become whole once again.

And though I would normally be concerned with how fast it would take or when it would happen, I’ve realized that doing so will not do me any good. I’ll just keep working on my weaknesses and play to the best of my ability. Everything will fall into place in due time.

PS. There won’t be any detailed commentary for this game, but I just wanted to mention that there are quite a number of mistakes and overplays in this game. So in case anyone wants to point out things like my lower left corner was supposed to die and so forth, no worries, got it all in the review.

During my game review for the first match of the month, I had a disturbing revelation. As Inseong was talking about my mistakes, he then commented on how attacking was one of the most pleasurable aspects of go. Suddenly, a lightbulb went off in my head as I realized what had been missing from my games all this time: I had forgotten how to attack.

As I sat there, I thought, “Me? Not attacking properly? Not enjoying the attack? How far have I fallen?”

Needless to say, it got me wondering if this was what was wrong with me over these past couple of weeks; but what’s funny is that life had something else in store for me as well. Though I didn’t know it at the time, something that I had volunteered to help out at was happening the same weekend: the Smithsonian Folklife Festival was about to give me the wake-up call that I needed.

At first, with me being down lately, I have to admit that I was a bit reluctant to go as the day crept up. Before I knew it though, Saturday was upon me and I was sitting down and teaching person after person. And with each person that sat down, seeing their eyes light up as they learned the rules and enjoyed their time was really heart-warming for me. Out of all the ones I taught though, there was one in particular that I want to mention here.

A young girl (probably around 6-8 years old) and her mother decided to stop by to learn the game. As I taught the rules to the girl and proceeded through my own curriculum of how I believe go should be taught, she picked it up with relative ease. And with each new milestone in learning the game, her eyes lit up and a smile spread across her face that I can only describe as absolutely adorable.

Fast forward a bit, and I decide that she’s ready to try an actual game of go. I had commandeered the big 9x9 magnetic board (with huge pieces) that is used for demonstration at the time. So as one can expect, there was a bit of a crowd around us by the time our game started. I gave her 7 stones as a handicap and we started playing.

To my utter surprise, she ignored most of my overplays and played such calm and beautiful moves! If I tried to hane on one stone, she would ignore me and just connect her stones together only to leave me in dismay. And before I knew it, she killed my entire group and owned the entire board.

Now, while another person might have found it to be embarrassing, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to demonstrate to the crowd what it looked like to get demolished and to explain that resigning was an honorable thing to do in this game. This got quite a big laugh of course. And as I turned to the girl and her mom to tell her how she did an incredible job crushing me, she beamed with happiness and pride that made the entire spectacle entirely worth it.

The reason I’m writing this is because it’s really easy to get caught up in the competitive aspects of go. After all, most players who end up playing this game long term are usually playing to become the strongest player they can possibly be. But after my experiences these last few days, I’m reminded of the fact that there is far more to go than simply gaining that next stone.

Though it’s easy to forget, finding happiness and fun in go is just as important (if not the most) when taking that next step in your journey as a go player. I’m not quite out of the woods yet in regards to my own slump, but I can tell you that this weekend was the ray of light that I needed as I start to make my way toward the end of the tunnel.

Overview

I swear my training regimen is getting shorter with each week that goes on by, but in all fairness, I am working on developing a system that focuses on consistency over a long period of time as opposed to having my life be extremely skewed towards one direction or another based on how I feel. Of course, this doesn’t mean that I’m only doing that much every day, but it’s my bare minimum requirement per day.

One of the things I’ve been working on throughout the week is designing a better blogging system. I was currently working directly out of WordPress and collecting notes where I could here and there, but it wasn’t a very efficient system and took up quite a bit of time. To my luck, in the process of me restructuring other aspects of my life (i.e., time management, project management, finances, etc.), I actually stumbled across Scrivener and have been testing out recently. I’m still in the trial period, but I have to say that this tool is really quite impressive for serious writers out there. It’s starting to really help me get my thoughts together and allow me to blog more effectively.

Another thing that I want to mention is that after next week’s Friday Go Forward, I will most likely be pushing out these progress reports to Saturday since they are more status updates than anything else and can be scheduled ahead of time. I’ve found it to be near impossible to blog on Saturday, so this will add a consistent content item to Saturday while allowing me to blog about more personal things on Friday if I want to.

Finally, I plan on releasing an online document that will allow you to check my training and efforts in go in real time! By doing so, you can get a real detailed look at what I’m doing since status reports are generally more an overview than anything else. Hopefully this will be of interest to some of you, but if not, at least it will be another artifact to track my progress and possible analysis in the future.

With all that said, hope all those living in the US have a great 4th of July weekend! See you all next week.

Training Regimen

• Work on go for at least 10–15 minutes a day.

Games

• KGS - 3 games
• DGS - 6 ongoing games
• OGS - 5 ongoing games

Books

• Get Strong at Tesuji by Richard Bozulich

Videos

• YSD 2nd Month 5th Round Reviews

Lessons Learned

• I’m still bad at framing moves in terms of how many points / potential it can provide when playing games.
• I need to start trusting my instinct more. Apparently it is correct more often than I give it credit for.