Tuesday night my friend Bob canceled our game due to his newly announced job offer, since he had to be up and working his first day bright and early Wednesday. So, after work I drove to the SGC for Beginners Night for a game there instead. I played Eric, I think his name was, and he gave me a 7-stone advantage on a full board match. I lost by 40+ points or so, because of at least two large blunders: I failed to make enough eye shape for my 4-5 stones in the lower right, and lost a large capturing race in the upper left that could have swung the game to my favor. It was a close thing for that large dragon-shape, but there seemed to be nothing I could do unless he missed an attack or failed to respond. I did manage to create a couple of ko situations which I think I played correctly to threaten his position, but he allowed me to keep the ko rather than give away the capturing race. It was a pretty thorough spanking, all in all. I believe Eric said he had been studying less than a year or so, and already he is playing well at 8kyu. I want to be an SDK so bad!!!

Towards that end, I am renewing my commitment to continue working tsumego each and every day for a month. I had to leave town for a couple of days last week for work, and then catch up on all the latest family time here, but today marks the beginning of a renewed effort on this. Guo Juan recommends working daily on these to improve reading level, and I believe that based on what we know about “brain exercises” that daily practice can truly make measurable physiological changes and improvements in a players overall abilities. (<–warning, large pdf) I will try to track that here and perhaps I can generate my own data to prove it.

Many many thanks to NannyOgg, a fellow Go-blogger who recommended a solution to the need for a diagram generator: Drago. Here is one of my exercises for today as an example:

tsumego1.5 and tsumego2.5

black to play in both left and right. Can black _absolutely_ kill?

I think these diagrams look lovely, don’t you?