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Alex Weldon
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Canadian 2d amateur. I live in Montreal and play at the McGill go club Tuesday nights. I also play on KGS as Xopods and Spodox, and give lots of lessons.

September 3, 2004: I'm off to the Canadian Open? tournament, which starts tomorrow. Hopefully I'll do at least as well as in the Toronto Open?, in which I took 3rd. I'm not getting my hopes up, though, since I'm a bit rusty these days.

September 6, 2004: I'm back, a broken man. 1-5, my worst tournament record to date. Worst part is, most of those were games I should have won; as usual, I got very sloppy on the second day.

September 11, 2004: Played in the little HikaruFire informal tournament on KGS and came in first. I'm going to write some commentary on the final game tomorrow, and hopefully post it somewhere.


My strengths, as I see them:

  • Whole board thinking
  • Defensive tesuji/shinogi
  • Turning the tables, and counterattacking an opponent if he attacks too strongly
  • Sabaki
  • Shape
  • Leaving and exploiting aji
  • Determination and finding clever moves to catch up when behind
  • Fighting in the center
  • Very good when taking handicap.

My weaknesses:

  • Killing unreasonable invasions or weak groups that probably should die.
  • Lack of attention, esp. when I'm far ahead (tendancy to blunder)
  • Too confident in my ability to rescue groups in danger. Sometimes tenuki too early and let something die.
  • Impulsiveness and lack of patience, in general
  • A rank-chameleon. If I'm playing a weaker player without handicap, I end up starting to play at their level.
  • The strange properties of the edge and corner mess me up.
  • Less good at reading than others my level.
  • Poor when giving handicap.

My style:

  • I play two-space high pincers to almost any approach, unless the likely joseki results don't look good to me in the overall position.
  • Like playing low, solid moves.
  • Dislike any game involving omoyos.
  • Oscillate between a balanced game slightly favouring territory, and a ridiculously territorial weak-groups style.
  • Almost never try to kill anything outright
  • Also getting less hesitant to engage in a complicated fighting
  • Lure the opponent into attacking my seemingly weak groups and aim at a counterattack.
  • Tend to play one hoshi and one komoku in fuseki (e.g. Kobayashi Mk II? or Orthodox fuseki). Starting to play nirensei more frequently now, especially as White.
  • Very quick to tenuki, try to be fleet-footed and take sente
  • Like to abandon stones for aji, when possible.

Pet Peeves:

  • People who only ever play Chinese Fuseki
  • The tsuke-nobi joseki, especially in handicap games
  • The komoku high approach, one space low pincer joseki
  • People who play nonsense moves instead of resigning, in the hopes that you'll blunder
  • The Big Cross? and Great Wall fusekis (I usually win against them, but still, they irritate me)
  • Kyu disease

Floris?: You say your one of your qualities is whole board thinking however you also claim to be a greedy player. How can you possibly have good whole board thinking if you invade, invade, invade???

Alex Weldon: Good point. I guess it's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I have good whole board thinking. I have greedy, invasion-prone urges. On a good day, against a worthy adversary, I'm a thoughtful, strategic player, who simply has a stylistic tendency towards territorial play. If I'm in a bad mood, or overconfident against a weaker player, I give into my primal urges and invade impulsively. I'll change that line of my style-description, since it was written during a period when I was in a perpetual bad mood, and playing like that almost every game.

Cloud122: thanks for the reply im usually on when ever mostly early evening to late evening eastern US time maybe we can setup a specific time we can play



This is a copy of the living page "Alex Weldon" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.