Overview

Whew. I’m hitting the one month milestone in my training and I’m proud to say that things are still going well. Granted, there are times where I almost skipped out on my regimen, but my past self was smart enough to keep it at a manageable level where the task was easy enough that it wasn’t onerous to complete.

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Overview

Three weeks and counting! I am feeling like I am starting to make some real progress as I continue to adhere to my training regimen. Though I thought about upping my problem solving regimen, I think it’s at a good place where I am making decent progress while the task is relatively easy to accomplish. And as you’ll notice, I also added a playing regimen as well which is very easily supported via the GoQuest app I talked about in my journal entry earlier this week.

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Overview

I am proud to report that I am starting to hit my stride. Not only have I been keeping up my training regimen with little to no effort, but I even increased the minimum requirement because the prior regimen was getting too easy for me to do. Even now I’m considering upping it again, but I’ll stick with it another week and probably start sprinkling in other books in order to keep my interest perked up.

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Overview

This week is the mark of something new, yet old at the same time. I am going to do my best to draw on all my experiments in the past and forge another road for myself once again. I’m not sure what lies ahead of me, but I’m ready for whatever life has to throw at me. Let’s do this!

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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.

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.

Overview

This has been a rather rough week for me. I have lost pretty much every game I’ve played and even lost my crucial match in Yunguseng Dojang (YSD). And to be honest, I was so frustrated with how I played that game I couldn’t even stay for the review afterwards. Sigh. And though I’ve resolved not to take a break at this time, I think I will be meeting everyone halfway by simply taking a break from playing games (except for my regularly schedule YSD match).

I also have a lot going through my mind in regards to how I’ve been spending my time and how to get out of my turmoil. So my training regimen has been cut down again because I’m not sure what I’m doing anymore. I apologize for this week’s progress report being a little short on the content, but I have a new vision for what it’ll be soon. So I’ll be working on that in conjunction with taking a second look at my approach to everything. Hope you all are having a better week than I am.

Training Regimen

• Play 1 game a day.
• Work on Get Strong at Tesuji.

Games

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

Books

• Get Strong at Tesuji by Richard Bozulich

Overview

Once again I’ve decided to trim down on my training regimen in order to up the quality of training. This means more time spent on each topic as well as increasing repetition in order to further solidify what I’m learning. In other words, I’m no longer simply looking to find out what the correct answer is; but to instead really try to immerse myself in it so the reading ability becomes more ingrained in me.

In terms of gameplay, it has been a rather abysmal week. I got into a weird mood and ended up losing 5 games in a row. It was pretty awful considering my go deteriorated to the point where my final game was a resignation against a 4k. Playing on tilt is just not a pretty sight for me at all. Haha. But on the upside, I did manage to recollect myself enough to manage a win for my Yunguseng Dojang match. So hooray for that!

And as mentioned earlier this week, there are some changes coming up on the blog that should hopefully improve the reading experience and value that this blog has. So I’ve been working on that as well and trying to iron out some of the changes I’m trying to make. Fingers crossed it goes smoothly!

Training Regimen

• Play 3 games a week.
• Complete 1 section of Jump Level Up 1 per day.
• Work on Get Strong at Life and Death.
• Work on Get Strong at Tesuji.

Games

• Pandanet-IGS - 1 game
• KGS - 9 games
• DGS - 6 ongoing games
• OGS - 6 ongoing games

Books

• Jump Level Up 1 by Baduktopia
• Get Strong at Life and Death by Richard Bozulich
• Get Strong at Tesuji by Richard Bozulich

Lessons Learned

• Playing on tilt has consequences… like dropping two stones in rank on KGS. Hahaha.
• Take all your opponents seriously regardless of their rank. I’ve posted about this multiple times, but it’s come to bite me in the butt again.
• There is a huge difference between winning a game and crushing your opponent. Taking one attitude versus another has a profound impact on your approach to the game mentally, but more on this later.
• This might sound utterly basic, but I seriously need to use my brain more when I play. I miss the most common variations in my blitz reading. I read one variation and think it’s good and fail to consider other obvious alternatives. Oy vey.

Overview

The theme of this week has been: Ben needs to improve his reading abilities. Haha. Many thanks to all those who commented on my WGW post and helped me refocus my time and energy on the correct area of weakness. I even had the pleasure of hanging out with local go player Justin (AGA 7d) who helped to straighten me out a bit. It was a fun time of playing and going over some variations on joseki that I should be familiar with. It certainly showed me that there is still much more I can do to improve, which is always motivating.

Finally, as I continue trying to improve this blog, I have to keep in mind the time and energy required for each post along with whether or not that material I’m writing is even relevant anymore. After all, all of this is meant for your reading enjoyment (and a small percentage for chronicling my own journey)! As a result, over the next few weeks, I’ll be asking for feedback on what you see on this blog to help optimize everything.

To start, I wanted to do a quick poll on your thoughts on this weekly series: Friday Go Forward. So if you don’t mind, please leave a comment below to let me know if you think this series is worth keeping around and/or anything I could do to improve it (i.e., specific things you’d like to see me talk about in my Overview section since I’m sometimes unsure of what to write in here). And if you think it’s good the way it is, it would be good to hear that as well. Thanks!

Training Regimen

• Play 3 games a week.
• Complete 1 section of Jump Level Up 1 per day.
• Work on life and death.
• Work on tesuji.
• Replay 1 game of Go Seigen (Time Permitting)

Games

• Tygem - 0 games
• Pandanet-IGS - 1 games
• KGS - 3 games
• DGS - 6 ongoing games
• OGS - 6 ongoing games

Books

• Jump Level Up 1 by Baduktopia
• All About Life and Death - Volume 1 by Cho Chikun
• Get Strong at Tesuji by Richard Bozulich
• Get Strong at Life and Death by Richard Bozulich

Lessons Learned

• One must not underestimate the power of “ordinary moves.”
• My idea of being “creative” on the board is the equivalent of stupidity. Haha. And though it sounds hurtful on paper, it was actually a very helpful comment.
• I really need to work on my reading abilities if I want to take my game to the next level.

Overview

During the past few weeks, I ended up skewing my training to playing games and sacrificing study in order to re-acclimate myself to playing games again. As a result, my weaknesses became very clear as I would lose game after game after game.

After discovering my Master Wu, my training has once again gone under another stage of growth as I really begin to immerse myself in practicing “deep learning” as is discussed in The Talent Code. And though it’s too early to tell if it’s working, I feel like the wheels of progress are beginning to turn. Fingers crossed that I’m not wrong. Haha.

Training Regimen

• Play 3 games a week.
• Complete 1 section of Level Up Review 2 per day.
• Study 10 life and death patterns/problems.
• (Time Permitting) - Replay 1 game of Go Seigen.

Games

• Tygem - 1 game
• Pandanet-IGS - 1 game
• KGS - 1 game
• DGS - 6 ongoing games
• OGS - 7 ongoing games

Books

• Level Up Review 2 by Baduktopia
• Shape Up! by Charles Matthews
• All About Life and Death - Volume 1 by Cho Chikun
• The Com­plete Game Records of Go Seigen - Volume 1

Videos

• Analyze the most often played patterns: Star point chapter

Lessons Learned

• Though difficult to grasp, learning how to make proper trades throughout your game is one of the key milestones to being a strong player. This is particularly evident in the way Go Seigen plays (and yes admittedly difficult to do).
• As I replay more and more of Go Seigen’s kifu, I’ve realized how constricted my go has become. It is missing the freedom that is so glaringly exists in Go Seigen’s games.