The Joy of Eyes

Have been happily playing and messing up. But yesterday was a big mess up, even for me. I was playing an even game against a much stronger player, and was doing pretty well in the opening. It wasn't till middle game, when disaster struck. I had this nice center facing wall, which I knew was safe, so I didn't have to pay attention to it anymore, just needed to use it. Which I did not do correctly, instead played some moves at different locations of the board (Tenuki! Trying to play tenuki more, but still haven't found the right balance :-) Got distracted and carried away, chased a white group, was having a great time, while W was busy taking away all my eye space. Now it's one thing if that happens if I notice and can fight back. But in this case I truly had not noticed it at all, till I started counting to see how far behind I was. Counted the top, got a decent number of points. Then wanted to count the number of points in my dragon, and came up empty. Oops!

Funny how I totally lost track of the big picture while focusing on the small fights. Shows very clearly one of the many areas in which I still have room for improvement. Quite the learning experience :-)

Well, at least it wasn't a self atari. Grateful for small blessings.
Needless to say, the game result was W+Res.

This all happened a few days after I missed a totally obvious ko, which would have killed my opponents huge group. At least that one was at 4am, so I can claim that I was tired. But didn't have a good excuse like that in the eye less game.

So many avoidable mistakes to correct. Well, at least turning off my rank worked in a way, because I was able to beat a 10k whom I had never beaten before. So maybe there is some improvement in between the screwups :-)

Runnerup

Last weekend, I played in yet another KGS tournament. I had decided to enter the Asian day time division, because at that time my kids usually are asleep and I can concentrate on my games. I had been losing a lot of games lately, so I didn't really expect much from the tournament, I was actually tempted to only play the first three games (1am, 2am, and 3am) and then go to bed instead of playing the 4am one. I kind of expected to lose most of my games anyway.

Of course, reality was different, and I won my first three games, so couldn't resist playing the 4am one too. And to my utter surprise, this was another win! I ended up second place because my SOS (Sum of Opponents Scores) was just 0.5 points lower than the first place winner. Still very happy about it all. I won a crown next to my name on KGS, lucky me.

I decided to turn off my KGS rank for now. I hadn't been playing ranked games for a while because I wanted to experiment. But a few weeks ago, I decided to start playing them again, and just experiment in R games too. I found out that that might not be the best idea, because I immediately lost a stone. And I also found out that I did not particularly liked playing ranked games, even although I am still not sure why not. Because I can't say that I particularly care about which rank I have next to my name at KGS.

One theory is that it's all about focus. I was really focused on my tournament games, and did just fine. But my R games, I just wasn't as focused, had a lot of kid interruptions and other things going on. So I would miss things that I did not miss in my tournament games.

Yesterday, I got myself back to my old rank and then decided to stop bothering with R games. So I turned off my rank and that felt good. Now I can concentrate on playing, and studying, and getting stronger, and not on my KGS rank. I'll measure progress by which level players I can play even and do well against. Or the number of handicap stones I am getting from stronger players. I just played a even game against a KGS 10k and won. Haven't won from him before, so that was nice.

Rengo

Last week, finally played rengo for the very first time. It was interesting. And a bit frustrating. And challenging. And lots of fun! I managed to get myself positioned immediately after the strongest player of our group, which meant that I had to try to figure out how to reply to his vicious attacks. Well, I guess it will help to make me stronger :-)

This week has been a week of go blunders. Lost a lot of groups, totally avoidable. Made all kinds of other silly mistakes. This all culminating into a self atari on the Dragon Go Server of all places. Yes, it is a turn based server. So yes, you can think about your move. And yes, you can see it on the board before submitting it. But I still managed to do the 'Oh, simple endgame move, plunk, glance, submit, really look, ARGH!!!!, trying to stop the submitting' thing :-) It is a vital part of a group too, will lose that game now. Oh well... I could call it a learning experience, apart from the fact that I don't seem to be learning from it.

Thinking about it, it seems like my main issue still is playing too fast. I click and then think, instead of first thinking and then clicking. In real life play, I have gotten better at thinking by not having stones in my hand while playing (thanks, Tristan) I have considered sitting on my mouse hand while playing, but it seems like too much of a bother. Still...

My other issue is byo yomi. Once I enter byo yomi and that time thingy starts blinking at me every 20 secs or so, I start panicking. Which is not a good thing. I have made major blunders just because I get the 'Have to put down a stone, ANY place, can't think about it!' madness. Not sure what to do about that, sitting on my mouse hand would only make it worse I think. Maybe I should play more blitz, so I get more used to the time pressure. Or maybe I should get good enough that even my panic stones still are well placed. I think I like that last solution.

Smartgo

Last week, I turned out to be the happy winner of a copy of the Smartgo combo in an AGA drawing for the Shodan challengers. I have been playing around with it for a bit, and I have to say that it is a really cool program. It came with more than 30,000 pro games, so that should keep me out of trouble for a while.

I used the analyze game option, it's very interesting to see what professionals would have done in a certain situation. Usually something else than I had been doing :-) I know this program is going to be very useful in my go studies.