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.