1 Dan on OGS!
I reached 1 Dan level on OGS this past week. While it looks good on paper, I don’t think it will will hold for long. Let’s see.
Whatever the case, I have been focusing more on my middle game over the past few months. That focus will continue for a while, maybe throughout 2022.
I am also starting on the book, The Breakthrough to Shodan by Naoki Miyamoto. Fingers crossed. It looks intimidating.
One Year Anniversary of Go Lessons For Beginners!
A big thank you to all my past and future students!
Lesson on Eyes and False Eyes
I released my first video on Youtube! Please show it some love by liking and subscribing to the channel.
Update on my Go Goals
I have checked off my first two Go Goals. The first was to get familiar with a new enclosure, 3-4 with a two-space high extension. The second was to get a lot more comfortable with the 3-3 invasion on a 4-4 corner. I am considering these goals achieved as my rank rank has held stable.
I love the enclosure from my first goal and now play it exclusively in all my serious games, as black at least. I’m still trying to figure out what works best for me as white.
My new Go Goal is to better understand the 3-3 opening. I created a new account on OGS, reverser3-3, a week ago and have reached 3kyu with it. I was a bit surprised by this rank, as I thought it to be too high, but I think it only shows that 3-3 is a struggle for my opponents as much as it is for me. I will consider this goal to be achieved when I reach 1kyu with this new account. After that, I will probably experiment with a 4-4 and 3-3 combo and then also the 3-4 and 3-3 combo to better understand how they are different from the double 3-3 that I am currently learning.
And, further down the road, I am looking forward to doing something similar with the 5-4 and 5-3 openings.
Music Rec.: John Tejada - Year of the Living Dead
For me, playing Go and listening to music go hand-in-hand. Whether during lesson prep, during lessons, while I am trying to rank up or reviewing my own games, I am definitely grooving out to something on my headphones. And so I thought, why not recommend some music on my blog?
If you are into electronic and especially techno, please give Year of the Living Dead a listen!
I reached 4kyu!
In my last blog post, I wrote about my Go Goal #1 of achieving 4kyu rank while learning and applying a new corner enclosure. (You can read about it here.) Well, I am still grinding away with that challenge. I am close, at 5kyu, but it still feels far, far away.
For a little distraction, I have been playing on my experimental account on OGS, only noodles, this past week. I use this account when I need to break out of the rigidity of my usual playing style or to just try out some risky experiments. It turns out, risky experimenting got me to 4kyu!
So, why can’t I get my normal account up to 4kyu? It may be me or it may be my opponents. Maybe both? My goal involved picking and learning a corner enclosure that I felt was not very well known at my rank, although it is frequently used at the pro level. My thinking was that this enclosure was compatible with my influence style and betting on it not being so well known at my rank would pay off with my rank increasing a little bit. Seems like a pretty solid plan to me. The challenge is, many of my opponents, it turns out, can respond to this enclosure with a surprising level of understanding and depth. How can this be, I asked myself? I think it is a number of things. Firstly, if I am taking the time to study this one specific aspect of the game, it is reasonable to assume that there are others at my rank that are doing the same. And secondly, I assume, many players, when confronted with a corner enclosure they are unfamiliar with, are tempted to find assistance from a joseki tool.
I will never know who uses assistance and who doesn’t when playing online and so it is not much use to dwell on these thoughts for too long. Instead, I continue to grow and improve my understanding of the enclosure and how it fits on the board. I also continue to experiment with ideas that are, to my knowledge, outside of joseki tools. And maybe, the biggest goal of all is to figure out how to combine what I am doing and learning on my two different player accounts.
Go Goal #1
In my first blog post, I talked about my past Go goal of becoming 1 Dan. Sadly, that goal has not been reached. I also hinted at not knowing what my current Go goal or goals are. That is no longer the case. I have decided to focus on specific knowledge goals instead of having my goal be to achieve a certain rank.
My current goal is to become comfortable with the enclosure in the lower-right corner. This is the 3-4 corner with a two-space high enclosure. I chose this because it was new and unfamiliar to me but seems to be compatible with my influence-oriented style. And as a wonderful coincidence, one of my favorite GO Youtubers, Jianqiu Chen, posted a video on this exact topic. The video is a great intro to the enclosure and helped to clear up a lot of my confusion. It also makes it clear that this might be a big challenge to get to the point that I would say I am comfortable playing this way. And will I gauge my success in accomplishing this goal? When I started this blog, I was ranked 7kyu on OGS. My rank has dropped to 9kyu, largely due to experimenting with this enclosure. I plan to stick with this opening for a while and will consider this goal complete when I manage to pull my rank back up to a stable 7kyu.
Update: To account for recent changes on OGS that adjusted ranks, this goal will be considered achieved when I reach and can hold 4kyu.
Experiment with the Wacom Tablet
I was streaming on Twitch yesterday and thought it might be interesting to draw up a record of the game I was playing, as I was playing it. It did end up being an interesting experience but, as you might expect, playing Go and drawing at the same time might be one activity too many.