Alex Weldon
Canadian 3d amateur. I live in Montreal and play at the McGill go club Tuesday nights. I also play on KGS as Suji, IGS as Xopods, DGS as Spodox and review games on GTL as Karoth. Also on Godiscussions.com as AlexWeldon. I don't use these different names just to confuse people; in most of these places, I made a new account at one or more points in time and had to change my username.
My style:
- I like to develop quickly and keep sente, which often leaves me thin.
- Because my positions are often thin, I've become quite good at sabaki and setting up sacrifices.
- I used to continue grabbing big points and trying to live everywhere and leave my opponent with little territory, but these days I'm more inclined to shift gears in the middlegame and start solidifying myself to stage a counterattack. I kill more groups these days than I am killed myself.
- The strange properties of the corner and edge still give me headaches, even now. I've become pretty good at killing large dragons in the centre of the board, but edge- and corner-based life-and-death situations still stump me a lot more than they should, in real games and as problems.
- Good shape is very important to me.
- I like loose pincers, especially the two-space high pincer (both hoshi and komoku, and also when playing a counter-pincer after running out).
- I have a hard time keeping the game simple when I'm ahead and throw away a significant number of my "won" games.
- I've been playing too many high-speed games on the Internet lately and am unfortunately out of the habit of counting the score. My play has also gotten more aggressive, sometimes excessively so.
I'm working on a book, called Breaking Bad Habits. It's currently on hold because I'm busy with other things, but I plan on getting back to it as soon as I have more time.
davou: Want to have some photos for the cover/inner work of this book? Id be happy liscense you free use in exchange for a copy.
Alex: I'm insanely busy with other things these days, so the book's on hold for the time being, but I'll keep you in mind if/when I get back to it.
blubb: Alex, was it you (70.18.229.198) who asked for undo at DotsGoOngoingGame?
Alex: Nope. All my edits should be marked as being by me, since I have persistent login enabled. I think it was someone playing for the Black side who made a move, then undid their edit, since the "mind if I undo" edit has no change to the page.
Phelan: Regarding your post at t:849, I think it's possible that there is no spoofing attempt. It could be some other person named Alex, signing his posts but not realizing there is already a page here. I've seen it in BeginnerExercise154/Solution and BeginnerExercise132/Solution. Perhaps he/she should be encouraged to get a Username and/or a Homepage, or the alias Alex could become a disambiguation page. Not sure what would be best.
Alex: Yeah, it occurred to me that this might be the case, and that the person might just be imitating others in putting the name between square brackets, not realising that it's a link that leads to my homepage. Anyway, hopefully the person sees my comment in the discussion page and/or reads this... in the meantime, if you see more comments from "Alex" that aren't from me, could you let me know?
I wouldn't mind sharing the username "Alex" and having a disambiguation page, except that I've been here a long time and there are a lot of pages with my name on them, and I don't see an easy way of going back and changing them all to AlexW or AlexWeldon... if he doesn't mind, I think it'd be easier if he picked an alias, went by his last name, or Alex and an initial, or something.
MrTenuki: Before he does that, I think you can give Page Rename Requests a try. If I remember correctly, all existing links to a page are updated once the page is renamed. (In other words: you can simply ask to rename "Alex" to "AlexW" to fix this problem.)