Since my goal is to play more, I have decided to revive my mess-up R account and have been playing with it during the day. During the day means that I get interrupted all the time by fighting or crying kids, kids who need a diaper changed, requests for bandaids, demands for food, phone calls, visits, and escaping pets. This makes it a bit harder to find my focus, and I can't play as well as I can do in the middle of the night, when the house actually is quiet. But hey, at least I am still playing.
Today, I decided to start the day with a game. The distractions actually weren't too bad, maybe only seven or so, and the game went pretty well. I was nicely ahead, I had killed one of her groups. She even died in gote. I happily played on, knowing I had a won game now. Decide to try to get as much as possible in yose, while she tried to kill the group which is partly surrounding her dead group. I counted and decided I am fine, so ignored the moves I could ignore, while raking up points.
Suddenly, disaster struck. She made another move, this time in her dead group, and all my earlier reading had told me what I had to do then. The group was still dead, just needed a move. Of course, you can tell already where this story is going... Yup, I played tenuki from that move and put a stone somewhere else... So she lived and I cried.
Too much tenuki. Just as bad as too little tenuki. Some day I'll find the balance. Although maybe it's all about focus again. I knew what the right move was here, but just forgot to make it. Great learning opportunity.
The bad thing was that I wasn't even getting interrupted while this happened. Only one person to blame :)
At least I have a solid rank now. Will be easier to get games. It just is a bit sandbaggy rank, but that should clear up when I actually win some games again, right?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Karen,
I presume your "R" account is on KGS. Can I ask the full name? [If you don't want to post it on your blog you could let me know privately [if that's ok].]
Sadly, I can identify with this now. I'm in the midst of a game in which I was so far ahead, like a cat with a cornered mouse, I started toying. I had already killed two groups and was up by around 50. There was a nice fat group in the middle that my opponent left without two solid eyes, so I proceeded to kill them until only one eye was left. That started a running chase across the board. What I hadn't paid attention to is that in killing off an eye, I had removed an outside liberty that I needed in my killing group. Oh, the horror when a stone plunked into my eye space and I couldn't capture because of a shortage of liberties! Suddenly, instead of being up by 100 or so (with the third dead group), it seems like 30-40 stones may spring back to life and my killing group may be dead. It remains to be seen what I can recover out of this. Die and learn. I think a 100 point missed gote move must be some sort of record :-)
No, 100 points would not be the record. I've made a ~140 point gote move in the exact same situation which changed my killing of his obstinate huge dragon (created by a hopeless invasion) to his killing of my entire side of the board. Ouch.
Post a Comment