The End Game

I have been studying some end game, trying to figure out how big moves are, working on keeping sente, finding nice tesuji to grab a few more points. Sometimes things go ok, sometimes I just am not paying enough attention, playing the first sente move that I see. Or the first move I think is sente, but turns out to be gote anyway. It is nice to have yet another area where I have room for improvement.

Today, I tried to keep sente during the end game, ignoring small moves to play some bigger or equal-sized sente move instead. Doing really well, until I think that yes, I can ignore this pushing into my group. It's only one point, right?

I am sure you can guess where this is leading. Yes, it was a bit more than one point. It exposed a connection weakness in my group (which would have been totally fine if I had replied to his pushing move) and he could put 4 stones in atari, which I couldn't save. This was about 10 points. Instead of just taking this minimal damage, I decided to make a second wrong move, and lose another 16 points... Two totally avoidable mistakes. It's amazing how often I get this learning experience. I am starting to wonder whether it will actually lead to real learning some day.

All this happened while I was in byo yomi, so I can try to use that as an excuse. But frankly, it's a lame excuse and I can't say that I believe in it. It was purely a matter of focus and attention. It was game losing too, I was ahead till it happened. Such are the ways of the double digit kyus :-)

Yesterday, my Korean Problem Academy books arrived, all the way from Korea! So exciting! I recognized a bunch of the problems from on line, but there are more than 700 problems in each book as opposed to only 200 on line. I worked through the first 100 pages of volume 1 already, so that must have been about 400 problems. I can see already that those books are going to be very helpful.

Also working on Getting Strong at Tesuji. I gave myself a challenge to try to do as many as I could in a day. I managed to get the first 150 done. Not bad, they are not that easy. And I had my normal 3,511 interruptions by life. Excellent reading practice. Maybe some day I will be able to read deeper than just one move :-p