Bram Vandenbon

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Bram Vandenbon

  • Born: 1984
  • Learned Go: very young, about 7 years old I think.
  • Started taking it serious: march 2003
  • Current Strength : 25/01/2007 : 1d-1k kgs / 1k cyberoro
  • Local Club : Recently none

KGS handles: Spook and BramGo DGS handles: not playing there anymore

Always ready for a game.

Software

Also I have been working on several software projects. Such as Go-Software for sony Ericsson Monile phones (works fine, but not published yet), A KGS-IRC bridge that allows to vote moves for a gobot (finished, but not really used), A Joseki and fuseki patternsearch website, ...

My Graphs

[ext] BramGo, is the first account I ever created on kgs.
my current Go rating at for KGS (BramGo account)

I've been playing less and less on kgs these days, but it is true however that I reached 1d just before I quit playing there, which is also partially the reason why I did quit.


How I met Go

I started mind games when I was very young. I live in Belgium so one of the first games I learned to play was Chess ofcourse. When I was about 7 years old I learned how to play Go. I have 2 brothers. My older brother played Go with me now and then (about 3 times in a year) with a very old gamebox.

It was a Ravensburger gameset with a foiled carton board and white and blue plastic slices. I also had that very famous book of Iwamoto for beginners (translated to dutch). Back then I could hardly read boring stuff like that. So I never took a look at it. In fact when I asked what the book was for, they told me it contained nice pictures of animals you could reproduce using the stones.

I didn't play the game for ages after that. I did play a lot of chess and I was quit good at it too. I played a lot of chess at school, and against several chess programs.

Then last year when I was 18 years old, I restarted playing the game. My brother had restarted playing the game about a year before me. And I was determined to catch up with him.

I learned to know a lot of other go players on KGS. There's a Belgian room there "BelgianFridayNightClub?".

We decided to start a new go club at bruges... The first person I played over there was somebody claiming to be 21kyu. He played a very strange game with me. I was used to play corners and sides first. But he had no interest in those at all. But he did win by 20 points by closing of the center. At that time I played about 7 games a week. The other club members about 2 games/month

So I catched up really fast. It took me about half a year to equal my brother's strength (12k).

I have also learned a lot using TurboGo and Many Faces of Go. Many faces helped me to get to 11kyu really fast. Also GoBase was very helpfull

January 2004 I became 5k. School pressure became harder and I did not really feel confident in my rank. For the first time I bought a couple of books. I started with GetStrongAtInvading by RichardBozulich, PositionalJudgement by ChoChikun, TheMiddleGame? by SakataEio and theSmallFusekiDictionari of the NihonKi?-in. For the first time I learned the theory of counting points, invading and reducing. At first I did not feel much stronger. But these turned me into a 5k player with 2k moments.

I decided to give myself a chance in the first Iwamoto tournament (3th category 2k-7k players). And I was amazed as I won almost every game I played and won the tournament with 1 loss (out of 8 games). After that I received a very nice cup and I got the chance to play a simultaneous game with Liyue 9d from China.

The tournament took 8 weeks in total. And every game I tried to push myself to my limits of perfection. But after the tournament I fell in a hole and didnt really improve that much anymore. Maybe I was still too much thinking about the tournament I played. I was playing less frequent and I was not sure how strong I was. I won games from 2k players and lost from 5k players. I was scared to lose the strength I had worked so hard for. So, I tried a lot of different things. I was reading articles, replaying pro games, doing a lot of tsumego (because I lost 1 game in my tournament beceause I made a reading mistake).

Then finally I received answer from Velirun. He is a 2d player on KGS. He was looking for somebody to be his student (see the MentoringScheme?). I had several students myself. It is a nice system where people try to help out weaker players. Allthough it is not easy to help a weaker player it is certainly worth a try. It's a win-win situation. Velirun told me to do a lot of stuff I was actually allready doing at that time. He told me to discuss every game I played, to do a lot of life and dead and to study pro games by hard. Ofcourse it was nice to hear a 2nd opinion and I was reassured I was on the right path.

Shortly after I bought some new books. GetStrongAtLifeAndDeath, The Endgame?, [Get Strong At Joseki Volume 2[ and Yoshio [Ishida's Joseki Dictionary] Volume 2. I was looking forward to reach 1d by March. But I was terribly wrong. I had more pressure from school than ever before.

October and november passed without having the chance to play regulary. I wasn't improving, but fighting to stay in shape :)... And I assumed it would take till february, to get back in shape. And so it happened

In February I had a training period in a firm to complete my bacheler studies. During that period I suddenly found some time to play go again. I was suprised how much I had run behind, but pretty fast everything came back to the old. I was as strong as before but more experienced.

I have the strange feeling that every time I quit go for a certain period it is actually a step forward. It is a step forward because after retraining myself I feel like I understand things twice as good as before. Concepts become clearer, my play becomes more reliable, experience grows and I feel more confident.

In June I graduated as a bachelor and I had to make an important decision. Searching work, continue studying? ... I felt that I could do better and continued my studies to become an industrial engineer (master) in the electronics and computer science.

Suddenly my time to play dissapeared again, and so did my strength. At the end of November on a Wednesday evening I was surfing the internet and I read the following on the website of the Belgian Go Federation "Preliminaries of the Belgian Go Championship". I made the very impulsive decision to do some life and dead excercices and to participate.

I was totally out of shape but three days later I was amazed by the results of my efforts in that little time. The tournament took 2 days. And I was 1 victory away from being qualified.

After that I started making time for go again, allthough I didn't have any actually. But I forced myself to play at least a couple of games every week. But I didn't play on kgs anymore, because it took me too much time to find an opponent there. Instead I played on Orobaduk. And very soon I become 3k, ... 2k, ... And I feel like very soon I will become 1k.

The rating system of orobaduk is so much more transparent. On kgs it can take over 15 straight victories to gain a rank. On orobaduk only about 6 victories are needed. The consequence is that solid 5k players on kgs could as well be 2dan in real life.

In mean time I tried to retrain myself on kgs too and my ranks were improving again. I had been doing a lot of life and death practice over the last years and had grown into a real life and death monster. I was starting to feel more and more confident in my play and I saw myself playing very beautiful games.

In September I discovered that my girlfriend to who I have always been very fateful had cheated on me and we broke up. My girlfriend had always been the bottleneck of the time I could spend on Go. So, I knew right away what to do and I reached 1d on KGS just about a month later.

But strangely enough that didn't give me satisfaction. It more felt like "Is this now really it? Is this what I've been trying to reach so hard???". I had put up too high expectations and was kind of dissapointed. Now when I look back on it, I have no idea what had gotten into me to think that I would find <innerpeace> when crossing the dan line.

I was so dissapointed that I just quit playing go. For the Belgian readers: yes, that's why I wasn't at the Belgian Championship Preliminaries in November 2006. I simply didn't play anymore.

A couple of months later during my exams I restarted playing Go in my breaks. The game felt fresh again, but still familiar as if it had been waiting on my return. As always the damage caused by the long break was big.

Because KGS often just crashes my computer (I don't know why)... I decided not to play there that much anymore. At the moment I'm mostly playing on a small server with some beginners and a couple of 2d-5k players which can put up a good game now and then. Besides that I am especially focussed on Life And Death problems, which I believe will be the key to a good comeback. Currently: drifting between 1d - 1k level.


Greetings


This is a copy of the living page "Bram Vandenbon" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2007 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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