Addicted!

Recently, I'm playing a lot in turn-based Dragon Go Server. I always used to laugh about people when they couldn't take their eyes off the smartphone, checking out the latest comment from whatever social network they're stuck into. Well, that is me now when checking for my next move. I'm running about 20 simultaneous games, and I guess I'll leave this as my top limit, if not lower it down to 10. The problem gets worse because many of my opponents are as addicted as me, so they play many moves a day. Fortunately, sometimes I get a message like MySQL error: Too many connections. That forces me to wait for a while.

What I also find ironic is that instead of taking myself a lot of time to think about each move, since I have so many games going on, I have little time to spend on each one! (be right back, I have to answer 3 moves...)

A rule I impose myself is not to try sequences on a board before playing a move. They must be performed in my head. I don't know if doing it is acceptable or not, anyway I don't care if my opponents do it, I don't like cheating myself.

As a side note, I don't know why they call it turn-based as opposed to real-time, I prefer calling it correspondence games, after all, a real-time game is also turn-based.

The following game was played in DGS, in a period of 16 days. I find it interesting because, as usual, I lost an important fight at the beginning, Black was building a huge moyo so I had to dive into it, barely managed to run out, and in the process Black was in a nice position to cash in the whole bottom of the board. Then there was an exchange, I let him into my territory but got into his as well, and managed to cut his invading stones. At this point the game was close, but the final blow came when I killed his groups at the bottom, an he resigned. I guess the merit on my part was taking advantage of my opponent's distractions, if he hadn't done them I would have had no chance. Anyway I had nothing to lose, because the game was lost from the beginning.