KGS Tournament

I have been playing in the May KGS tournamentI have been wanting to play in those tournaments before, but never actually got myself together enough to sign up in time and play. This time is different!

This tournament stretches over five days, and there are four rounds per day, six hours apart. So there will be a total of twenty games to be played, but you can request byes for 15 of them. This means that you have to play a minimum of five games over those days, which isn't too bad.

For me, the games are at 3am, 9am, 3p, and 9pm local time. I tend to be on the go server at 9pm and 3am anyway, so those rounds are easy to make. The day time ones can be harder, because of real life getting in the way, but so far I have been able to make them. Played seven games so far, which means 42 hours of a tournament game every six hours. Funny how 42 always pops up everywhere.

Out of those seven games, I have won 4 so far, so pretty average. I have played my share of good games, and my share of less than good games. My last game was cool where my opponent gave me ¾ of the board in the first fourteen moves, so nice of him. One of my reviewers is that this is where the game was won.

Yes, it does look kind of overwhelmingly black now.

Another fun game was my first one. I had misread a fight, and things got kind of iffy, and I lost a string of 8 stones. It still had three liberties though which I thought I might be able to use. So while I was playing, I looked and found this great tesuji, which basically sprang the string of stones back to life, killing sixteen stones of W in the process. This swung the game from 30 or so behind, to an endresult of +13.5. I love making up tesuji! I did read and re-read and triple-read this one though, just to be sure it really would work. And then I read it some more :-)

We'll see how long I can keep up the pace of a tournament game every 6 hours. So far so good though, and I should be able to play at least the next three too.

Oh, current results for the tournament puts me at 11th place out of 108. Not that it really matters, but I still like that I am not that far from the top. My sum of opponents scores (SOS) is the second highest for now though. I first thought that was because I got nice, tough opponents, but then my common math sense kicked in and I realized that it was because I played more games than most :-) Amazing how other people sometimes have to sleep!