Malweth’s Metablog

In Hikaru no Go, both Hikaru and Akira play 4 games out to even results. I’ve heard a lot of you (well… at least one or two in the English Room) Hikago followers implying that it’s the mark of a true professional to be able to force at least one game to an even result. Well, the truth is that it’s relatively impossible to do unless the amateur player plays a good (near perfect) endgame. An excellent series of articles by Pieter Mioch begins with this fact - something he heard first-hand. I find I’m reading and rereading a lot of articles and information on joseki and the opening. Many people say that it’s bad to “learn joseki” but I disagree. The opening (fuseki and joseki) is probably the most important part of the game. This is where the large losses typically occur and, although they can be made up later in the game, I’d much rather play a close game where I was ahead in the opening and pushed around a bit in the middle than if I were the one pushing. Once you’ve reached a certain point in a game, it’s easy to just “play safe” where you read through a continuation and choose the safest route you can read. If it occurs that the game becomes too close, or even turns in the favor of the attacker, you can go on the offensive. An interesting thing happens when one is behind in the opening and attacks until the game favors you. Your opponent is now required to go on the offensive and you must play “safe” moves… the problem is, you’ve probably built up a good deal of momentum in getting to this point and either don’t realize that the game is in your favor or simply do not wish to stop attacking. This happened to me in a recent game where I played a mistake in the opening (two weak groups… if you see me, slap me and say “don’t leave two weak groups in the opening”). I brought the game to favorable results, but continued taking as much as possible when I should have been looking to the safety of my own position. Pushing a line of stones in between two heavy groups, my opponent was able to reduce far into my territory, losing me the game. (B N13 was the mistake).

I recently wrote two php scripts (based on my personal game database) that analyzed the average number of games I play per day.
At first I was pleased to see that my current average number of games played per day is hovering around 0.6. It’s not as good as I liked it, but one game every other day or so isn’t too bad! And then I realized that that’s over the entire conglomoration of games - I play 0.6 games per day when you figure that I’ve played for almost exactly a year and have played about 200 games. This drove me to write the second script.

The second script I wrote gives the average number of games played per day, figured over a 30 day period. So from May 25 to today, June 24th, I sum up the number of games and divide by 30. The same goes for May 24th to June 23rd, etc. And this 30 Day Graph indicates that I reached a peak of 1.5 games per day in February/March, but have since declined to only 0.3 games per day!

Which reveals my actual point… I need to play more often in order to improve… so I’ve taken a vow to get this number back up to a steady 1.5 or higher! Playing 2 games at lunch time isn’t impossible and even if I don’t play on any given weekend my average should improve!

I wonder how this will correlate with my rating increase velocity? Time will tell … but my focus on the opening may be helped through playing more often!

Apathy:
???1 : lack of feeling or emotion : IMPASSIVENESS
???2 : lack of interest or concern : INDIFFERENCE

This doesn’t exactly describe my go right now, as I still have interest, concern, feeling, and emotion toward the game. I cannot help but use the word as a description, though! I’ve resigned myself to DGS of late, primarily because of time reasons, but also because of some intangible brick wall I’ve run myself into!

It’s said that Go is partly a psychological game, but nothing can be further from the truth! Go is fully psychological! Certainly it requires “reading” and “intuition” but where do those come from, really? Some of the math nuts would like to believe that some parts of the game are mathematical rather than psychological (and I don’t refute the logic behind their argument), but this still requires a social effort of the mind!

Maintaining your drive in the game is essential to “master” it. (Yes, no such thing as mastery - “mastery” as I use it is one’s personal goal or continual growth). When I feel such rapid deceleration in ability, goals dry up and drive is all but extinguished! Where can I reclaim what initially led me down this path? When rank is unavailable (or slowed), what can convince me that I am making actual progress?

I’m looking toward two external things that can put me back on track:
???1: Continued Lessons
???2: Trip to Taiwan (more about this soon)
Hopefully these things will be enough to maintain my drive in the game.

Internally, I must also force myself to continue my studies - even when they seem futile. It’s also important to broaden my studies - just working on reading ability through Tesuji and Life & Death is not good. Although reading is the single most important aspect of the game, non-tesuji reading situations such as invasions and joseki are also becoming more and more important!

[ As an aside, I also think I may have figured out why we're told not to study (e.g. memorize) joseki: until basic reading skills have developed, joseki is impossible. All joseki involve  intermediate to advanced reading skills as well as basic understanding of "good" and "bad" results. It is important to have your joseki mistakes revealed during game play because stone placements in joseki affect the board differently than similar ones in Life & Death. ]

I feel I’ve hit a new level in go. I’m not really talking about my kyu rating, though that went up pretty quickly to hover between 13-15 (my current losing streak put it right around 14 kyu KGS). The “new level” I’m referring to is in understanding. I wouldn’t call myself a master or even highly go-educated; my kyu rating should tell you that much at least! The real difference is in how a 20 kyu player looks at a go game vs at 15 kyu.

When I first learned the game, it was via a program called “Nemesis” that was available on my school computers (we had a world history teacher who loved Chinese history and culture). At the time (1994-95) it may have been the best program out there, I’m not really sure as I was able to find that it won a 9×9 computer competition (and ranked in 19×19) in the late 80s. In any case, I found go online (I found yahoo go back in college, but being severely beaten a few times without explaination is discouraging) and instead of coming into it at 30 kyu, playing in the center and attempting capture-go I was a good 23 kyu with all the basic “corner enclosing” skills thereof.

Eventually I started reading a lot, whether about the opening (”In the beginning”), Life and Death, or anything online I could get my hands on. This was good fuel and helped me understand some of the concepts. Simply using opening tactics in my games gave me at least a stone or two. I still couldn’t make small groups live, no matter how much I studied hard Life and Death problems, and I finally decided to put the guitar on hold for a while and concentrate on go - even taking lessons with Tsurukame.

The lessons were probably the biggest help. These solidified me at about 17-18 kyu and pointed me in the right direction. First of all, the hard Life and Death problems are worthless. They might help your reading skills a little, but more important was to learn basic shapes.

(Rest of post lost and not recreated)