To post or not to post

I'm back! Well, no, not really. Having two kids is a very demanding and time consuming enterprise, and my awaited time for studying Go is long gone. Anyway, my enthusiasm is still high, so I hope to at least make an appearance over here every once in a while.

These past months I've only been playing correspondence games at DGS, at most 8 simultaneously, specifically the maximum amount of allowed matches for the ladder tournament: I can challenge four people and get challenged by other four.

Fortunately, and contrary to my belief, I kept on improving: from 10kyu in March (my last post) to 7kyu DGS. It's quite interesting to remark that I'm playing much more relaxed and confident to try out new things. I'm not worried about playing the joseki's properly, and relying a lot on intuition. Maybe it's because not investing time to study relieves me from the pressure of amortizing the investment, who knows.

If you never heard about the ladder tournament, I recommend it! It works like this:
Once it starts it can go on forever, new participants start at the bottom of the table. You can challenge players that are N positions above you. If you win, you climb above the defeated opponent. Games are even (without handicap), without regards to rank, although they are rated.

I like it very much because it's a good opportunity for playing against much stronger players (and weaker ones also).

I'm currently in position 147 out of 645, although at this stage I honestly don't care about it (as long as I'm above my friend aurelito), what matters (if anything matters at all) is the rank, and having fun of course. Check out the table here.