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Shaydwyrm

 

Shaydwyrm
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I'm a student at MIT, and I've been playing go on KGS as Shaydwyrm and Warded since mid-February 2004. I'm usually happy to give teaching games to anyone from beginner up to around 12k, give or take, so feel free to message me if you see me online and think you could learn something. I also play regularly at the Massachusetts Go Association and the MIT Go Club, and am a member of the Sabaki Go Club on KGS. At the moment I am taking a bit of a break (with apologies to my formal and informal students and teachers on KGS).

Table of contents Table of diagrams
Moves 1-10
Moves 11-20
Moves 21-30

Blog

September 29, 2004: Taking a break from any serious go playing while I settle my job(s) and finances. My play is pretty much limited to when I make it over to the Massachusetts Go Association or MIT Go Club meetings, which I am managing rarely recently. Maybe a break will be good for me.

July 28, 2004: Broke a 4 day losing streak at the club last night with a lossless night. I am really starting to see the effect of my constant diet of problems - I won a couple of games in part by superior life and death skill, but more importantly, I can feel it when I'm reading out positions. Reading is becoming more and more natural, and I feel comfortable reading deeper. There are still holes, in that my reading is not as thorough as it should be in terms of trying all the variations, but I am hoping that working through Maeda's tsumego books and the Segoe Tesuji Dictionary will help with that, since they have a lot of shapes I'm not used to, forcing me to read out all the possibilities instead of jumping straight for a vital point. The Maeda book in particular is very helpful - I often read out a sequence that I am convinced is correct, then turn the page to discover a move I hadn't even considered.

July 13, 2004: Played in the MGA Summer Handicap Tournament, which was not only my first AGA rated tournament, but also pretty much my first tournament period. It was a lot of fun, and I did rather well, though not quite well enough to win (I was 3-1 for the day). The game I lost was giving 7 stones, and I have very little experience giving high handicaps - I gave it my best, but had to resign early after losing a fairly large capturing race.

Meanwhile, another poor unfortunate soul has asked me to be his mentor in the KGS Mentoring Scheme, now that my first student has risen to close to my level (hopefully I had something to do with that). Teaching is a lot of fun, and this kind of informal pairing makes it even more so, at least for me. I think more people should try it.

My progress through the ratings seems to have slowed somewhat, which is understandable now that I've reached single digit kyu, but I felt like I needed a more structured way to study in order to keep improving. With that in mind, I'm going to try Force Feeding for a little while, using the Korean Problem Academy from Gobase, on top of my usual casual regimen of random problems. If nothing else it will ensure that I spend at least about an hour on tsumego daily. I'm also working on the first book of Maeda's tsumego trilogy, and I'm starting to poke at Get Strong at Life and Death again, since now I seem to be strong enough to actually solve some of the harder problems occasionally. Plus, I have about 150 problems in 1001 Life and Death Problems to go, although those are getting a bit boring now. There's not all that much variety in those problems, Maeda is much more interesting (if harder). Finally, I'm working methodically through the games of Otake Hideo on Gobase. Hopefully all of this will take me somewhere. Incidentally, if you're interested, check out the problem series I posted on [ext] goproblems.com on handling the tripod group - I'm quite proud of them, and they got a pretty good reception there.

June 27, 2004: Memorized a pro game, to see if I could: Kajiwara Takeo vs Otake Hideo, 3rd All Japan Daiichi-i (1973-01-11). I may have picked a more difficult one than I had planned, since it involves a long multi-stage ko fight, many steps of which I don't understand well. Remembering the order of threats is quite a chore since I am unable to read out how much many of them are worth. However, I gain new insights into the game each time I play through it. Playing through the opening with a stronger player and hearing his questions about it also helped a great deal (he did answer some of mine as well, but his own questions were much more interesting). Here's the opening:

[Diagram]
Moves 1-10


[Diagram]
Moves 11-20

I guess B9 in the first diagram is a probe, to see how white will respond in the lower left and take that into account when determining how to play out the upper left. However, I don't totally see how the response there at B6 implies the joseki chosen and not the open connection (B1 here at a).

B5 is also an interesting move, although apparently it's a common way of playing quickly that I just haven't seen before.


[Diagram]
Moves 21-30

This pincer joseki (unfinished, I may put up the rest of it later) was also interesting to me - black gets a wall that faces the bottom side, and gets a stone at B1 which develops his star point at the top, along with sente, while white ends up with a fairly large corner and pokes his head out into the middle. I don't know if this is a joseki or not, but it seems to me that it would be very good for black if BC wasn't so close to his wall. Maybe it's still good for black, although white (Otake) won the game by 1.5.


In other news, encouraged by my success with Life and Death I decided to take a crack at Get Strong at Life and Death. A few hours later, my confidence crushed, I decided to return to One Thousand and One Life and Death Problems for a while...

June 15, 2004: I was quite psyched to have Zzero 3d offer to act as my mentor in The Scheme. Now I need to start playing more games online so we have something to talk about, insted of me producing spotty and incomplete records of games I played in person.

I finally finished slogging my way through Life and Death a few days ago. I must admit some of the later problems were quite hard, and I made many mistakes. In particular, the carpenter's square's reputation as the most difficult corner formation is well deserved. Luckily, I have yet to encounter one in actual play. I plan on going back through Life and Death as soon as I feel like I won't just be remembering the solutions. I am now slowly working my way through Get Strong at Invading, which is quite tough. I find myself often looking at the answers despite myself, since I am so often wrong when I try to read out the problems without help. Right now, though, I'm trying to work mainly on recognizing vital points where invasion is possible. A read through the opening chapter of Kato's Attack and Kill was also quite interesting, putting some theory behind my fairly uncontrolled attacking technique, although the problems are still too tough for me. Appreciating Famous Games is proving to be a nice diversion from these more serious pursuits. Finally, I am trying to work on direction of play in my games, another daunting task. Maybe I'm working on too many things at once, but it's hard to focus on one aspect of my game - I already feel like my endgame is suffering from lack of attention.

May 31, 2004: I really like discussing games immediately after I've played them. In fact, this is almost a compulsion - I find it very difficult to play another game before I have digested the first one a bit. It doesn't really matter whether I won or lost, there's always something that I was unsure of or think I got a bad result on. Often, if I don't deal with it, these things will bug me for days, or more. Unfortunately, not too many other people seem to like to do this online - this is the #1 reason why I prefer to play in person.

My inventory of books:

Stuff I don't own, but have read or will read soon:

  • Cho Hun-hyeon's Lectures on Go Techniques - I like this book, since it stresses the very basic fundamentals, as well as good shape.
  • All About Thickness - interesting format, and some interesting material, but I'm not sure how much it actually influenced my game. In particular, I don't think I can learn without any problems to test my understanding. It's a lot more difficult to just play games and try to focus on, say, how I used thickness, because games are so unpredictable - maybe I was forced to play a territorial game, or a big fighting game, and thickness just isn't the biggest issue.
  • Get Strong at Invading - I found it very tough, rarely could I read out a full solution having not seen the problem before.
  • Appreciating Famous Games
  • Kato's Attack and Kill


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