Kokiri
Ian Rapley, Central London Go Club;
aka kokiri2, kokiri3, tripitaka
My Style
Like most of us, my style is not always the same, probably defined more by the nature of my mistakes than my good moves and I reserve the right to play differently from it but in general i would say my characteristics are:
- used to play perpendicular 3-4 points with black, and approach with move 4 with white, now trialling 3-3, 3-4 with both.
- a style that fits well with black in handicap games - thick, aggressive and happy to fight but probably weaker with white in handicap games - not so good at sabaki, for example
- very reliant on confidence - i tend to feel either invincible, or doomed to lose
- a healthy disregard for territory, a love of thickness and a real distrust of moyos.
- love to sacrifice stones. I really love this; I also love the opportunity for a big furikawari
- better at attacking than defending
- too often I find myself needing to kill something to win a game; too often I manage...
- trying to learn how to keep games close, rather than staking it all on one fight
- my feeling is that recently the games I lose are generally because of my inability to turn the secondary groups I form from two eyes into 5-10 points so i end up with one big area, or two corners, say, and a couple of 2 eyed groups.
- no clue whatsoever about the endgame
他山の石
this is my new favourite proverb. Tazan no ishi - Stones from another mountain. It means to learn from another's mistake. My understanding is that it means that what another might regard as useless (mere stones, common as muck on one mountain) is useful to you (rare jewels on your own mountain).
岡目八目; 傍目八目 【おかめはちもく】
Oka Me Hachi Moku means, roughly, that when you are deeply involved in something, you may not see things that that are obvious to onlookers. The go application of this is that kibitzers may see things that the players themselves don't. I don't particularly agree with this in practice but:
- 傍目, okame means onlooker, but 岡, oka, means hill, so okame could be somebody on a hill.
- 八目 Hachimoku is literally 8 eyes, but 8 is often used to mean all directions much as we say things are scattered to the four winds (eg, 八方美人 or 八方睨みの龍). On the other hand 八目 also means eight points in go terms, or even 8 stones.
- therefore it could be translated as from a hill, you can see in all directions or, with a little leeway, kibitzers' komi is 8 points, or if you don't like the alliteration kibbitzing makes you 8 stones stronger.
miscellany
Mark Glickman's work on ratings is quite interesting (courtesy of DougRidgway)
pages i would like to write:
- towards a stochastic model of rating? - i think that a random walk might be a pretty good model for the game of go, and so might provide insights into the nature of ratings. Unfortunately, 1) i'm not very good at stochastic anything, 2) i'm usually quite busy and 3) etc
- a negative view of Joseki? - rather than listing which variations are possible, i feel that perhaps one should concentrate on ruling out moves for which there is an absolute refutation;
- /yose investigation - currently stalled
- /3-3 exploration
- /wop
- 他山の石ーStones from another mountain
- /introduction to the 3-3 invasion
2004 stats:
- IRL: 65 wins, 55 losses 3 jigo @ 2 kyu, UK.
- IGS: 4k account, got on a winning streak, but didn't get bumped up to 3k, got bored, moved to kgs...
- KGS: 67-47 @ 6k, ended the year with a 15 game winning streak during which my rank somehow fell slightly, I'm blaming the rank of this account on the fact i watch TV while playing...
2003 stats:
- IRL: 42 wins, 42 losses (that I have records for, so approx) at 2 kyu, UK. European rating 1780ish
- IGS: 42 wins, 52 losses at 4k* (with the occasional dalliance at 5k*)
http://kgs.kiseido.com/en_US/graphPage.jsp?user=tripitaka
Tournament History
- London Open 2002? 3k, 2 Wins, 2 Losses.
- Wanstead autumn 2003 2k, 2 Wins, 2 Losses.
- Letchworth, Summer 2004 2k, 1 win, 2 Losses.
- Welsh Open, Barmouth, June 2005, 1K, 2 Wins, 2 Losses, 1 Jigo
- Northern Open, Manchester, August 2005, 1k, 2 wins 4 losses
Subpages
/book collection
/recent game 1
/recent game 2
/recent game 3
/recent game 4
/recent game 5
/recent game 6
/recent game 7
/recent game 8
/recent game 910
/recent game 10
/recent game 11
/recent game 12
/recent game 13
/recent game 14