cornucopia

Table of contents Introduction Restarting go Personal links Go Diary 09/2018 - 02/2019 03/2019 - 04/2019 05/2019 - 07/2019 08/2019 - 03/2020 04/2020 - present

Introduction

• Real name Philip Vlummens
• Belgian go player born in 1984. Started playing go in 2010 at the local go club, just after finishing university.
• Officially reached the SDK level in 2013 after the Amsterdam Tournament.
• Online, I play as cornucopia, mainly on DGS and OGS. On KGS, my handle is lowlykyu. Rating graphs can be found on my player's page over at the GGG.

Restarting go

I have tried to reboot my go playing career a couple of times now, mainly due to life getting in the way. The second half of 2017 and the beginning of 2018 were very intense for me, so I decided to spend less time on my job (I was a real workaholic so I still spend more than enough waking hours at work) and more time on studying go. Hence my restart on 25/08/2018. At this moment, I'm around 6 kyu (based on the people with a stable rank that I can win against).

In view of getting stronger: I'm not going to put statements like "shodan by Christmas" or the like here. My aim will instead be to:

• Regain my focus when playing go.
• Have a deeper understanding of the basics.
• Study shape and get better at reading overall.

I hope to achieve this through :

• Study sessions with Furuyama Kazunari
• Teaching games with Kim Ouweleen (Murugandi).
• Reviewing my own games
• Most importantly : play more games!

I will try to post updates of my progress in the my diary blow.

Personal links

• KazSensei : Kaz's exceptional go lessons
• Murugandi : Webpage of Kim Ouweleen
• Dwyrin : Dwyrin's Twitch channel (US based)

Go Diary

09/2018 - 02/2019

• Lately, the quality of my games has gone up a bit. I'm losing the bad habit of playing moves that are too slow. There still is a lot of work to do but I'm capable of playing at the level of 4 kyu players over at DGS (so probably 8 kyu EGF?), which is fun! Subsequently, I'm challenging a lot of 2 and 3 kyu level players, hoping to improve but most likely I'll get clobbered in no time.
• In a sudden frenzy, I joined the Belgian team for the IGS/Pandanet European Team Championship. Hope I don't let them down, we'll see.
• Blew the dust off my tsumego books, my reading is too slow.
• Applied for another round of lessons both with Kim (teaching games) and Kaz (working on my bad habits and learning the honte style of play, which I've always admired greatly).

03/2019 - 04/2019

• Lessons continue and I feel that I'm getting more sense of important points but I tend to oversee the "best move" in a certain position and as such I end in gote or fail at harassing my opponent (as stated by Dwyrin). As such, I'm going to focus on shape in my upcoming games.
• Bram has started a new go club in Brugge a few months ago. I got an email from him a few months ago and decided to drop by this month. I played a game against Maarten Van Steenkiste and lost by the smallest of margins. This was a real motivator for me as I didn't expect to get this result against him (he was much stronger than me in the past). I visited again in the beginning of April and it was once again a very nice experience, so I'm planning of visiting the club more often (despite it being farther away when compared to Ghent).

05/2019 - 07/2019

• Tried to play more games, which was a success (for now). I'm also attending (part) of the AIGT so hope to see exactly how much stronger I have become there. Updates will follow.
• Playing and reviewing at the club in Brugge has proven to be very fun. So hope to be able to attend more often.

08/2019 - 03/2020

• Nothing much to see I'm afraid. Wasn't able to keep up playing sufficient amounts of games. My reading skill decreased enormously.

04/2020 - present

• Attempt number 'I don't know how much' started ...
• Restarted doing tons of go problems (Internet Go School for repetitive learning, GGPB volume IV, TsumegoPro app) to improve on my reading. I seem to have adopted the bad habit of playing a certain move (that looks good but mostly isn't) and start to read afterwards. As such, I hope to be able to improve my reading.
• I am currently participating in the Dutch Internet Go Competition, an online tournament in which I can play slow, serious games (40 min + 15 stones/5 min byo-yomi). Very fun indeed. I forgot how much I enjoy playing slow games. My second game was reviewed by Rob van Zeijst afterwards; the review was very confronting as I am far from a decent level of go. But it was a unique learning opportunity!