Bugcat / History

I thought I'd write a little about my history in Go.

I became interested in Go in late 2015. What was the Go world like at this time?

Waltheri did not yet exist. Neither did any computer program of professional level that could be run on a home computer. This was the time of AlphaGo's emergence and victory over Fan Hui.

Sensei's Library was probably already well past its peak of activity ca. 2000-2011.

Go on youtube was still quite young. Nick Sibicky, for instance, posted his first video in 2012. Twitch Go was likely even less established.

I began by reading large amounts of SL. It was only after much of this browsing that I played my first game, on OGS, in January of 2016. I played at a sub-15k level, without doing anything notable, for a little under 200 games until April when I lost interest. I did watch AlphaGo's match against Lee Sedol live on youtube, which I found very interesting.

I returned in January of the next year, 2017, and began playing on my current OGS account. I began to spend time in the OGS English chat. At some point I started to post on the OGS forum. This iteration of the forum was quite new, its first posts dating from 2014; I didn't post there much at this time. In September I made my SL homepage, giving my OGS rank as 8-9k.

I think it was also in 2017 that I founded my classical pro study group on OGS, The Tearoom, which ran perhaps into early 2018. It was in this period of late 2017, as well, that Agent Neigh created her study group on OGS, to which she was able to attract many players by buying lectures and an early screening of The Surrounding Game. When she tired of running that group, she arranged for it to merge into the Open Study Room, which at this time was expanding from its origins on KGS. For a short time there had been a group on OGS called the Nova League, which was organised by Stephen Hu, but this had disintegrated and left a void into which OSR was able to expand.

Having joined OSR, I participated in the leagues with as much success as was reasonably possible given the dominance of GoDave89?, until the general decline -- but not death -- of the community in late 2020. The centre of activity of OSR has always been its Discord server, although it does have its own site. Since OSR is quite unstructured in terms of rank, I was able to play many games with dan players and receive reviews.

It was, again, in 2017 that I played my first over-the-board tournament, in Sheffield, England.

In October 2018, I became active on GoKibitz, which was at least a few years old at that point. In the three years since then, I've accumulated 6,100 stars on my review comments, the most of any reviewer (although, at this time, I'm only 125 ahead of the excellent and much stronger gennan). That's about six stars / day.

I didn't do much of note in 2019 and 2020 or, for that matter, yet this year. I continued to be active in OSR, winning the monthly league twice amongst other accomplishments. I also became gradually more prolific on the OGS forum. I've played a few more IRL tournaments.

A few of my games have appeared on youtube, but not with any significant attention.