Game review

The following correspondence game was one of the most intense games I've played. Probably because my opponent was a friend of mine, whom I used to play quite frequently, but haven't done so in a couple of months. He started playing with me about a year and a half ago, so a nice competitive rivalry has taken place. Even though I believe he has long surpassed my level, I felt quite happy of making the game a game worth enjoying. In fact, I never had so much fun while losing so badly at the same time! Notice that the game took only 4 days, although almost all moves took place on one night. I was so focused and expectant for his next move that it was like playing a live game. Unfortunately my little daughter was quite upset with me that night for not paying her a deserved attention.

 The game was unrated because my friend is not a frequent DGS player, so his ranking is unreal. He is actually 5kyu in KGS.

Below is the game. I haven't made an exhaustive analysis. Remember you can follow the variations by clicking on the letters that appear on the board.

Game review

Along my previous posts I've laughed pretty much about myself and my silly mistakes, but this time, I want to show a nice tesuji I played that not only made me win a game in which I was loosing bad, but left my opponent so pissed off that instead of resigning he let himself lose by timeout. I can hardly believe it worked, honestly I didn't have it all read out, but I knew that I had to exploit the aji of my surrounding stones. Check it out below. The sequence starts at move 180 on the lower left.

Game Review

The following correspondence game was played at DGS a few weeks ago. It's funny because I thought I was taking the lead comfortably, ignoring the fact that a huge group of mine was dead. By the time I realized I immediately resigned. How did it get killed? Overconfidence. I ignored many threats thinking it was still alive, until I blew it with an incorrect move. Well well, too bad because my prospects for the game were quite good I believe.

See the game below, notice the white left group by move 164.

New Equipment

A few weeks ago, I finally made the decision and gifted myself a fine set of go bowls and a 2.4" shin kaya single piece go board. REALLY beautiful!

Although I expected to hear a harder CLAC when placing a stone, it felt quite soft... but hey, it's probably me not placing the stones properly!

Additionally, I bought a sample pack of slate and shell stones, to be able to compare them with the ones I already had. I must admit that the slate stones deceived me a bit, or maybe it's the glass stones I already have that are so beautiful, that they don't make a difference with the slate ones. In fact, I didn't toss them in the bowl with the rest fearing I couldn't tell them apart.

I don't think paying a lot more for these stones is really worth the money. Although if the shell stones were sold apart from the slate stones, then I would think of buying shell stones.

I bought them at GoGameGuru, and guess what, I paid with bitcoins! I was having trouble paying with my Visa credit card for some unknown reason. To my surprise, they accepted bitcoins so now I have two reasons to celebrate: my new go equipment and my first purchase with bitcoins.

Clic here for a great review of the bowls.

Go Seigen Birthday Pack

Yesterday I received 4 books from Slate & Shell. I don't know when I'll have the time to read them, but I couldn't resist the offer: they where half the price!

This is the offer from the webpage:

In commemoration of Go Seigen’s 100th birthday, Slate & Shell is offering John Fairbairn’s excellent set of books on Go Seigen at a 50% discount. The books cover Go’s biography and the historical situation in depth, and his significance as the greatest player of the 20th century, as well as providing detailed commentaries on many of his most famous games. Kamakura is about the ten game match with Kitani Minoru which is one of the greatest matches of all time. This book also covers Go’s early history and the beginning of his career in Japan. 9 Dan Showdown covers the ten game matches between the first two 9 dans in go history: Go and Fujisawa Kuranosuke. Final Summit is about Go’s ten game match with Takagawa Kaku, another giant of twentieth century go in Japan. Old Fuseki vs New Fuseki is about the revolution in thinking about the opening that was a major part of Go’s impact. This book is by far the fullest discussion of the issues around this revolution in go thinking that is available in English. It also includes Go’s famous game with Honinbo Shusai when, as an audacious teenager, he played the diagonal pattern of the 4-4 point, the center point, and the 3-3 point as his opening moves. - 

Watching

I was looking at my cellphone thinking about my next move. On the screen was the go board.
Suddenly my 4 year old daughter approached me and asked (in spanish):

- "¿Papi, podés jugar sólo por mirar la pantalla?"

Which translates to

-"Daddy, can you play by just looking at the screen?"

I laughed, put down my cellphone and gave her a huge kiss.

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.

Break

It's been more than a year since the last time I grabbed a book not related to Go. I'm currently facing many challenges both work and family related, that leave me with "fewer than before" spare time, and I realize I must let my mind wander too, so I decided to grab a literature book that I also enjoy so much, and I'll be giving myself a break with Go. I hope it doesn't take long though.

Game review

In the following 3 stone handicap game I was playing white, and had a clear lead (about 100 points) when starting the endgame ("starting the end", sounds weird huh). Everything was going fine and easy, so I started playing fast and light headed. Suddenly, I saw a whole group of white stones disappear! What happened!? I asked myself. My beautiful stones, vanished into thin air! I bet that playing on a computer has a much higher risk of heart attack, compared to a real board... Vanishing stones are a real health threat, really.

Why did this happen? How could this happen? Can it be possible that you can lose a game like that. Fortunately it is, and for me this is one of the beauties of Go, and what makes it really interesting. A group is not dead till it's dead. Groups are never captured unless necessary, and while the game progresses, pressure gets higher and higher. Not to mention if a Ko takes place. Buying oneself tranquility may have too high a cost.

Besides lack of attention, I made the mistake because instead of doing things the easy way, I preferred a "smarter but riskier" way, maybe appropriate for another circumstance. I hope this gives me a lesson.

This is the game, move 223 is my fatal mistake.

Single digit kyu

Today I hit a milestone in DGS, I reached a 9kyu rank! Fortunately I'm not at the point in which I lose more games than I win, so I suppose there is still room for lowering it even more. I'm still ranked 13k+ at IGS but in that server it takes quite some time to reach a stable level.
Time to go for a beer and prepare for next stop - 5kyu :)

Game review: Most territorial game ever!

I believe the most boring Go game is one in which both black and white draw a straight line through the center of the board. Obviously this favors black as he extended one line further by playing first. White is then forced into a tough invasion with poor chances of success.

The following game I played at DGS didn't go to that extent, but wasn't very far from it. Not a single cross-cut was played (well, 2 actually, but they turned out being irrelevant), not a single fight (except the final invasion). It was sort of a peaceful conversation, "you take this, I take that, and we both shake hands". Even though I love this kind of play in spirit, I must admit that it is quite boring. What do you think?

Game review

In the following game, a few funny (sad) things happened. First, I had managed to disconnect a big group with no room for eyes, and kept on playing happily without noticing I was in the middle of a capture race, while thinking I was reducing my opponents remaining territory, I was removing my own liberties! By the time I realized it was late, my huge group was dead and the chances of winning were reaching zero. To make matters worse, I made a silly mistake putting my own group in atari, but my opponent didn't notice so I immediately went and fixed it, but allowed him to enter my territory and perform a huge reduction.

I was led by my anger and answered almost without thinking (and thus made a mistake of course) letting him get even more territory.

Afterwards I thought that if he hadn't noticed my previous mistake, I should have fixed it later, in the chance that maybe he didn't see it. After all the loss was almost the same. This mistake made me lose the game.

By the end, an interesting battle took place, after an invasion. I managed to kill the invading stones but I have the feeling that I complicated it too much.

 Checkout the game, I'm playing black.

 Oh, and by the way, now I'm using WGo.js for the SGF player as it's much nicer than maxiGos, isn't it? If you want to see a variation, click on the letters that appear in uppercase.

SGF utils

As a software developer I spend great part of my time inside a text editor, in particular, Emacs. Fortunately, Go game records in SGF format are nothing but text, so I wrote some utilities to help dealing with these files.

For example:

• I like to rename my SGF files in a consistent way: 

[date]_[black player]_[white player]_[result].sgf 

This involves parsing the SGF file and searching for the fields [DT], [PB], [PW] and [RE].
To do this I simply put the cursor over the file when in Dired mode and type

M-x sgf-rename-file-dired

where M-x means pressing the Alt key and the x.

• Selecting all files in which I won or lost. In Dired mode type

M-x sgf-mark-wins

SGF files in which I won are selected

• Rotate/mirror the board. 

Something weird that I noticed in IGS: if you download the file directly from GoPanda2 (Pandanet client), it's rotated compared to the one you get when downloading from the web.


If curious, you can grab the code from here and here. It's in two files because one of them has the utilities, and the other is an incomplete mode that I started, that simply fulfills my needs, such as syntax highlighting, for example.

IGS Blacklisting

If you were wondering how to blacklist somebody on IGS, this is how: (and yes, it deserves a post since I find it a bit contrived, and discovered it by accident, not when I searched for it).

First click on Member search.

Once you're on the member's page, click on Register in refusals.

The Refuse option (in the first image) show's all the people in your blacklist.

I don't like players who run away by disconnecting from the server when they're loosing, so I add them to this list to avoid playing with them again.

A similar method applies if you wish to add to your favorites list, or request friendship.

Pattern search

I added to the links section on the right, an entry for the excellent Waltheri's go pattern search web application. It's very useful for searching go positions such as joseki and fuseki in professional games. When studying, if you aren't sure how some joseki is played, just create a position on the board and you will find all occurrences of given position in pro games with continuations which have been played.

The site is not only beautiful, but works very well, very responsive, and easy to use.

Vice-versa

The following two games were played almost simultaneously against the same player on DGS. Both games turned out very territorial, no big fights were involved. In the first one, by the endgame I was ahead by about 10 points, but I left a defect that was well exploited by my opponent, who turned the tables and won the game. The same thing happened on the other game but the other way around! (well not exactly, by the endgame I was also ahead but by only 2 points). At least we both got our share, haha.

L&D Fundamentals

The following problem was taken from the book Life and Death from the Elementary Go Series by Kiseido (page 59, problem 4). It has at least two solutions, but one is better than the other.

1st solution: Black lives with 3 points
2nd solution: Black lives with 4 points
It's pretty uncommon that once we find a solution to a problem, we keep on searching for better solutions. So this is to remind myself of that fact. Also, I realize that my search for a solution starts from the opposite direction, instead of first checking if closing the border works (which gives better follow up moves), I first try to make eyes from the "inside". This behavior is a pretty common pattern so that's why I wanted to point it out. And now that we're at it, why not remind ourselves the Fundamentals of Life and Death:

Life

1. Get more room (widen your eye space). 
2. Occupy a central eye making point (vital point). 

Death

1. Reduce the enemy's room (narrow his eye space). 
2. Occupy a central eye-making point.

Walkover

A few times I won games on IGS without playing a single stone. My opponent probably accepted the challenge by accident and then didn't show up. Not only do I find this unfair, but it bothers me that my rank increases for reasons that have nothing to do with merit.
Why would anybody do this on purpose, and so deserves punishment?
Additionally, the game doesn't appear in my list of games, even though it added to my rank. Isn't this inconsistent?

Fortunately when this happens, one must only wait a minute until the server declares a win by timeout.

Hikaru no Go manga

Yay! My nephew came back from the US and brought me the first three volumes of the manga series Hikaru no Go.

Even though I watched the TV episodes, I still find the read very entertaining, and it pushes my desire to play even further. Additionally, I can study the go diagrams in detail, it's astonishing the hard work the authors put into this.
Unfortunately it will take a long time until I complete all 23 volumes, since it's very expensive to get them all the way to Argentina. I know there is a digital version available, but I like the real thing.

Lizards

Lizards have a great lesson to teach us Go players. They have the ability to drop their tail as a defensive mechanism. This is known as autotomy and literally means “self severing” or “self amputating”. A tail that has been autotomized will continue to move for several minutes, giving the lizard time to escape while the predator is focused in on the tail. 

If you don't believe me, check this video from YouTube:

The lesson is quite obvious. Many times when under attack, we hold on to our whole group without sacrificing a part of it, and end up trapped with a huge group.

The following game is an example of this. Things were quite fair by move 100. I was playing white, and had a four stone group deep into black's framework. For some unknown reason, I decided to rescue it by running away. While doing this, I helped black destroy my own potential territory. The runaway would cost me the game. In a probing (desperate?) move, I tried to take the offensive with move 158, that I can't recall as a tesuji, since the damage it produced could have been easily mitigated, if my opponent had only remembered our lizard friends. Instead, it led to a succession of mistakes, one after the other, and I ended up killing a huge group.