Been a while...

..since I updated this blog mainly because the household has been taken over by wedding fever as two of my sons are getting married this summer. Wife is in heaven and I am always in the way :-(

I was looking through my GO Library, rather a grand title for such a small collection of books but like with my ranking one must have ambition, and noted that 2 were more battered and careworn than the rest. It must be that these are the two I refer to and read most often..indeed some in my library are in virtual pristine condition...showing a lack of something on my part. My most read books are 'Lessons in the Fundamentals of GO' and Davies' 'Life & Death'. Whereas the cleanest copy is Tesuji by Davies..this I am finding really difficult and have adopted a policy of looking at it as though iyt is providing arrows in my GO armourary but I as yet cannot fire them.

My rank seems to be stabilizing at about 10-11kyu on KGS. One disappointment is that I had hoped to find a mentor who would play with me one evening a week on a regular basis and perhaps review a game a week..this has not proved possible. So as a fall back I have been creating study situations based upon fusekis or shapes that occurred in my games and trying to use the KGS Teaching Room as a forum to get people to advise. This has proved quite successful but it is not the same as having a mentor who gets to appreciate your strengths and weaknesses and hence can identify the areas where most benefit can be had from a lesson, or point me in a direction to concentrate my study.

There is good news on the widening of the GO community in that I managed to generate some interest at work about GO and one person is becoming quite keen whereas 2-3 others are showing (luke)warm interest. I have also tried to teach, or at least to give some tips, to other players on KGS. I feel somewhat wary about this as I am not strong myself but I have found that if I keep to the very high kyu players then at least some of the basic principles can be explained.

The Kisei Clan

The Kisei Clan is making progress and posted below is the last weekly progress report that I issue.

On a more personal front, all this playing in the Battlefield may be making a little difference to my normal play as I have managed to raise my KGS rank to 10kyu...holding it, never mind improving on it, will be a real challenge for me.

Welcome All,

...and in particular a special welcome to our latest, and final, recruits, reenamuras and Koreangrl8. This brings our strength up to 23 with currently 22 players having taken to the Battlefield. Recruitment has now closed and so it is down to us.

The most active player this last week has been mb76 who completed 14 games and took his contribution to 41 games, making him our leading contributor.

A number of the Clan were active this last week and I am pleased to tell you that we have now reached the 250 game qualifying mark so we can complete in the Brawl at the beginning of August. So far, only V3 and ourselves have reached this landmark. Whilst we have reached the mark I hope that you will all continue to play and keep the Clan to-gether

The gaols are empty this week...no instances of Civil War, missed tags, bad time settings have been noted..perhaps we are all learning, but remember to add Koreangrl8 and reenamuras to your buddy list to help prevent disasters.

This weeks STAR player is reenamuras who has opened his account with 2 straight wins..congratulations!

I looked into getting a KGS room for the Kisei Clan but that proved not to be possible... I am tols that we should use the Battlefield Room and indeed there is a cleanup underway whereby the admins are trying to delete dormant rooms and reduce the total.

However, we may be getting our own web page as two of our number are looking into this in their spare time...when I am not chasing them to play more Battlefield games :-)

Finally, good luck to both Benwahwah and Prodigious who are competing in the Iwamoto Tournament. And indeed I know that Benwahwah has scored a resounding win in the first round. If there are others of our number competing in this tournament please let me know and I will follow your progress and the Kisei will cheer you on.

Tsumego and a too actve mouse

If I am going to have a teacher then I need to get a firm rank..so I have abandoned F games and played some R games..with disasterous results...a combination of exceedingly sloppy play, followed by a desire to put things right immediately, which caused me to rush, led to a rapid drop to16kyu following the loss of 3 straight games. The following night I could not get an opponent on KGS so played on IGS and managed a win..despite my best efforts to throw away a winning position. To-day, I played again on KGS and chose a slow game, then immediately followed my opponents speed GO, throwing away advantage after advantage, missing ataris both on my own groups and his and ultimately winning by 28points ( he was 14kyu ) courtesy of a successful invasion which lived. I think I expended 7 minutes in total..and I was supposed to be playing slow, thinking and cutting out silly mistakes..it was as though I had a hyperactive mouse!
But some good came of all this , apart from establishing a solid rank at 14kyu, in that my opponent attached to my hoshi stone on move 6, something I have not encountered. I raised this topic in the Upper Valley GO Club where FlameBlade not only kindly reviewed this opening position but the game as a whole. There were a number of tsumego positions which occurred during the game and afterwards he took me through a lecture he had given on the fundamental principles behind tsumego. First look for space and after that look for the vital points. Having FB go through with me these principles really helped and was far better than just reading the sgf files. When you have a direct teacher you have to concentrate because there is only YOU to answer the questions raised. This is the second time where iI have gained some fundamental understanding out of listening to the helpful advice from Upper Valley...thanks to them all for having patience with an old age pensioner Brit.

A change of name

As the Shodan year is over I thought that a new name for my ramblings was in order. So, as I see that there will be many steps to improvement then I will steal a thought from Makara, and rename this Blog as ' The Ladder to Shodan '

I have already had some responses to my offer to run again a Clan in the KGS Battlefield. Indeed two new recruits have offered to join so we have 6 members currently signed up; but more are yet needed to make an entry viable.

Interested.?

Then drop me a message

A New Year and a New Target?

For me the GO year commences about now and it is time to look ahead and consider whether I want to set a new target.
But first to summarize the closing events of the year past. Last night the GoDiscussions Battlefield Clan which I formed ( GDS or the GoD Squad ) managed to make it through to the last 6. There were a total of 24 clans of which 11 qualified for the battle royal and 9 turned up to fight. I was non-playing administrator, which has dramatically increased my respect and understanding for all tournament directors..it was like herding cats! And over the internet you cannot stop people going Absent Without Leave!! We drew the first round 2.5-2.5 which was good enough to get us through to round 2. Here we met a Dan Squad and we were comprehensively out gunned ..though we did manage to score 1 point. The Clan has now disbanded but if there is sufficient support then I would be prepared to run it over the next period.

Karpov, a great chess player, when asked by a mortal, ' What should I study to improve? ', answered, ' what do you study now? '. 'Opening Theory' came the answer. 'You should be studying end game theory ' said Karpov. 'Whilst not as glamorous as Openings, it makes a world of difference to one's results.'
In GO, the same is true of Tsumego. I find they can be hard and frustrating, but I MUST persevere. I use the Korean Academy problems together with 1001 Life & Death, and aim for 9 a day..but that is just the 'one move problems'...I expect the strike rate will decrease as the problems increase in complexity. I wonder if there is a guide on how to approach these things...I have Life & Death by Davies and so use that to give me the idea of living shapes.

I must also now firm up my rank, it currently stands at 10kyu? on KGS which I believe to be about 2-3 stones optimistic. I have played few rated games for a while now as focus was upon the Battlefield qualification ( all games are Friendly ) and it was suggested that it would help to remove an attack of GO anxiety. But now I feel ready to move on, or perhaps backwards first if my gut feel about my ranking is correct.

The real question is whether to formally enter the Shodan Challenge, take up the offer of a new mentor and map out a Training Programme for the year ahead. I feel that if I do seek a mentor then I am honour bound to keep my side of the contract, play ranked games, play in some tournaments and back it up with a regular study programme.

My mentor last year was very understanding and introduced me to a lot of techniques and I didsnot really repay his effort by more tournament play. This year I will burden someone new :-)

On that latter point, NannyOgg kindly invited me to join the Upper Valley Go Club which meets on KGS and in 'real life ' Whilst attending the Club in person is impractical,( a return trip of approx 10000 km makes my local trip of 140km seem a doddle! ) they do put on some study sessions which look really useful, even though I do have to rely upon the SGF files and have conversations with myself ( nothing new in that says my wife :-) There was an interesting session on 'fast and slow' and then 'light and heavy ' which I found really useful. I need now to try and get the next lot of files.

So, am I up to the Challenge ?

Stock Taking

Well, time to take stock.
The year of the Shodan Challenge is over and I have not really achieved the target that I set myself, that of reaching 15kyu BGA . I only managed to attend one tournament where I scored 2/3 and elevated my rank to 18kyu. The reasons for not attending more tournaments are various and centre around the distances involved..but that is an excuse. I think the real reason is apathy. I also failed to attend a 'local GO Club as often as I intended, again the 140km round trip on an evening after work deterred me.
On the more positive side, my KGS rank has risen to around 10kyu and I seem to hold my own at that level. I went through a period of 'rank anxiety' and NannyOgg's suggestion of ignoring it entirely and just playing Friendly Matches certainly helped. Many people over this last year have helped me out; kamper has provided advice and shown me a number of tools and techniques which are now slowly creeping into my GO armourary. VincentV has played many 9 stone games against me, and actually getting promoted to 8 stone handicap when I at LAST beat him is possibly one of the highlights of the year! Javaness has always been ready to spend a few minutes when requested explaining a position I did not clearly see and maproom reviewed a game of mine and gave me a valuable piece of advice to STOP playing 'ghost moves' as an alternative to reading out the tsumego and trusting my judgement.
I have formed and led a Clan in the Battlefield and that certainly increased the number of games played and indeed the opportunity to play in a friendly competitive environment certainly increased my enthusiasm. I have spent probably a little time every day doing something GO related, whether it be studying tsumego, playing on turn based server like LittleGolem, playing on KGS or, more commonly, chatting in the British Room .
There are many others who have helped me this last year and thank you to them all.
I may not have completed my self set Challenge, but I have enjoyed the experience and made many 'virtual ' friends in the process.

BGA Membership in decline

I received my notice of the AGM for the BGA the other day and noticed that the membership has been declining. Indeed they have lost 15% over the last 2 years, or 100 people in two years if you do not trust percentages. Along with this notice was a reminder that my own membership would be expiring soon and an invitation to renew. All this made me think and I started a couple of news threads, one on GoDiscussions.com and the other on GoTalk, a mailing list used by the BGA. Both threads were the same topic... Why did people think that the decline was taking place and what should be done to reverse it?
The other side to this question is why join the BGA ( or any national association ) in the first place.
For a player like me it is not a cost effective way to spend money in that I rarely attend tournaments so the discount is meaningless and I would need to stock the Bodelian to reap the reward in book discounts... so why join ( or renew ) ? Out of a sense of 'the right thing to do ' perhaps.
Anyway, the discussion threads evoked a considerable response and a raft of suggestions to make membership worthwhile. It should be said that a similar thread on GoDiscussions was also raised by someone else with respect to the AGA. Whether any of the suggestions will be acted upon remains to be seen.

As it stands I am now actively thinking about whether to renew, as opposed to renewing automatically.

What does my readership think I should do?

I have posted a POLL to monitor feelings