David’s Go Dojo

The 13th Move:

Tonights match was at the SGC on Beginners Night, an auspicious event marked by the complete lack of any vehicles at all in the parking lot that appeared to belong to owners inside the same building. See, tonight the USGO Congress ‘07 is in full swing, so many of the regulars are all in Pennsylvania right now. As the evening went on, “in charge” moved from person to senior Go Center person at least three times in an hour. It reminded me of a game of tag with a bunch of 12 year old boys. “notit!”"You’re It! No Tag-backs!”

I played an 8 stone handicap game with a 7 kyu player who I have met before, a young programmer for Microsoft’s Visual C development platform. In our last match on a 13×13 I think it was, he won quite easily. I expected nothing different on the full board but decided to make a try at it. Fighting spirit at hand, we began combat on the full board. this picture is just after he has placed the 13th move of the game, since we started with a whopping 8 stone handicap.  He had to show me how to place them properly, since I was unfamiliar with this.

Midgame:

This is the position at a point just into the midgame, where I stopped to take a quick picture and survey the status so far. He has already established a well defined portion along the left hand wall, walking along the third line. I’m trying to make trades that give profit in exchange for position, and paying attention to the situation in the lower left corner. We are fighting for eyes and development into the center. Score estimate?

Endgame : loss for Black

My opponent had to leave I think for a bus or something, but it was clear to me that this was a loss for Black and we were just playing to find the end of the game. I had just made a rather stupid blunder in the upper right corner of the board. I’m going to try and get a score estimate based on the pictures and reconstructed details. I took about 6 pictures total during the evening, at least one of them looks just fabulous upon examination at home. I keep thinking I need to maybe start a nice photo stream somewhere… I mean, another one

Good learning experience, all around. One positive thing that happened was that a group of about 5 stones were resurrected and saved when I played a ladder-breaker on a set of previously threatened stones. They ended up linking into the left side of the board and living, to swing the score a bit more my way. It is perhaps easy to get overconfident when I play only a single person against whom I am measurably improving over time (Bob). Basic confrontations with higher ranked players can still give me quite a bit of trouble, indicating some basic weakness in the fundamentals. I will spend more time thinking about this later. As always there is a great deal of material available for study, not least of which because of the event on the East Coast that most US Go folks are at right now…

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I love this quote from this evening’s AMA Go Newsletter this evening:”JON BOLEY 6d of Shoreline, WA, is the Program Director at the Seattle Go Center. He won the 2007 Verna Castanza Memorial. Hobbies include dancing, yoga, classical, fusion and jazz guitar. His favorite thing about go is “The dichotomy inherent in the game which is first introduced when one realizes how complex the game is while being so simple.”

I should find and link his myspace page, lol