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.