Back Home!

Back home from the workshop, I had a wonderful time. We arrived Friday night, and studied a pro game for a while. After dinner, she gave a lecture on that particular pro game, very interesting. When everyone went off to bed, I found myself an opponent and we played a game of midnight go. I got 3H and experimented with a new way of playing 3H games, I am still not sure whether I like it.

Saturday was playing, playing, playing and reviewing, reviewing, reviewing. I won one game and lost another one, mostly because I decided to suicide a 50 pts group in the center ("Oh, this group should be ok... Oh, it isn't...") Still lost by only 9pts, so not too bad considering the big blunder.





Sunday was more playing and reviewing. Again, lost one game and won one, so I am 2-2 for the weekend on my 'official' games. Played a bunch more 'just for fun' games.

Sunday night we played the traditional Survivor Go. The group gets divided into two teams and we play like rengo, taking turns making moves. When someone makes a bad move, he gets kicked out. This time one of the players managed to get himself kicked out twice... I got kicked out after a bunch of moves, I will post the game later.

Of course, I played even more go before going to bed, and then fell asleep while doing tsumego.

Monday morning, simul against all of us, 12 boards, and she won all of her games. I took 6H and did pretty well, it was a close game. In the end, she won by 4 points on the board. Not bad, considering she gave me 9H last time and I had lost very convincingly by late middle game back then.

My PDA acted up just now while downloading the game records, so they got lost for eternity, which I am not happy about. I am trying to recreate the game record from memory, but it turns out my memory isn't that good. Here is what I got. At least it gives some idea of the game, but I am very, very annoyed with my PDA just now.

Food for thought from this weekend (I made a list on my PDA and lost them, blech)

• When playing rengo, stronger player should follow the weaker player's lead, not the other way around. Interesting concept.
• One Chinese go teacher advises his students to just lose all their kos, giving a better overall result than fighting it and losing points that way. I have to think about that one.
• She stressed very much to play the open areas in fuseki, not make small local moves. And she had quite some opportunity this weekend to point out when yet another player didn't follow that advice.

The group was quite small, only 12 players. Strong field though, I was one of the three kyu players, all the others claimed dan rank. Players came from all over North America, farthest travel were from Georgia, Ottawa, and Oregon. It's a great group of people, we had so much fun.

Now back to real life and to studying the games I played.