Thursday, July 14, 2005

An encouraging game

During my lunch break today, I played a quick 13x13 game against Zero9090 (22k). I hope that I didn't keep him up since he's in Pusan, South Korea.


I won the game by 16.5 moku and Zero9090 said that I had improved. I very much respect his opinion and appreciate his kind assessment. It will take several 19x19 games on my part to see if I have truly earned his compliment.

When I asked him for this match, I consciously planned to follow some guidelines based on experience and what I had read. One of my readings suggested that beginners should experiment with a small set of rules in each game and examine the outcome.

In their small ways, I believe these self-set rules helped my game.
  • Not let my opponent get ahead in securing his corners - I learned that in my 5.5 moku loss in a 19x19 game against Piro (30k?) on KGS yesterday. He had secured a large swathe of territory in the upper right corner and it was impossible for me to reduce it after the middle game.
  • Make good shape - Actually, I still don't know what good shape is. But I learned a lot of bad shape and bad places to put your stones from my previous games. My intention was to avoid playing them again. I had read somewhere that a pro can usually defeat a kyu player just by playing good shape.
  • Think quickly - But not play mindlessly as I oftentimes had done. This relates to Sorin Gherman's (6d) advice which I had reproduced in this post.
  • Not make any empty triangles - Not make any stupid empty triangles. Not make any dang, stupid empty triangles.


Later in the day, I edited my information on Sensei's Library. I didn't know this was possible. Tamsin (1d) left me some gracious words and a lovely welcome.

I also discovered that KGS automatically archives your games in SGF and that they can be accessed at this link.

3 Comments:

At 12:15 AM, July 15, 2005, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hello.
Which Go site did you play?
The board and stones are very beautiful.

 
At 12:49 AM, July 15, 2005, Blogger ChiyoDad said...

The client you see in the screen captures is glGo v1.2 which is used exclusively for the Internet Go Server (also known as PandaNet). It was developed by Peter Strempel and is customizable. You'll find free background tiles in my file library.

I believe that the final version of the client is available for all major operating systems (including Linux).

 
At 12:59 AM, July 15, 2005, Blogger ChiyoDad said...

It's, of course, available for Mac OS X, which is what I think you're using.

 

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