Happy New Year to everyone out there (read: all 3 of you) that read my blog! Before you ask, no, my new year's resolution was not to play more go or get to a certain ranking. However, my resolution is extremely short, very convoluted, and may very well lend itself to go if that's the path that my mind takes. What's the resolution? It sounds so silly and simple that I won't divulge it here. :)

Now, on to the extremely belated entry, now with new subsections!

Go and Everyday Living

A lot of what I've learned from go has lended itself rather easily to my daily living experience. I thought I'd highlight a couple of them here to spread the wisdom and what not.

The Experience of Trying Something New: This is something that I've struggled with, and continue to struggle with on a daily basis. Learning go is something that I've thought about for a long time (2 years, if I recall correctly), and just started learning recently. This sudden decision to do so was actually in conjunction with other things in my life that were also sudden (moving out of my house and going across town with only a week's planning, for instance). It also allowed me to start thinking about doing new things and having new experiences. Everyone needs some of those now and again. :)

The Ability to Tenuki: This really helps in personal relations where I best not be involved, or situations in which I have no control. I'm still a youngin', prone to know people that are destined to have "create and propagate as much drama as possible" be one of the controlling mantras in their lives. It's quite sad that while I try and do positive things with my life (job, family, close friends, my hobbies, etc), there are some people that take it upon themselves to attack me for no clear reason at all except to see a reaction. This has happened a couple times recently, all from one person in particular, but I won't spread the unnecessary gossip to a go blog. Needless to say, I could have responded to each and every one of these, preparing a counter-argument for every single accusation and false statement, and played this needless fight across the board that was started with a weak and needless attack (it could even be called false sente). Why waste all of my stones (energy) when I could be doing something more productive? Herein comes tenuki. I simply play elsewhere. I play the biggest move on the board, be it concentrating on work, spending time with my friends and family, or deriving enjoyment and pride from my interests.

The Right to Lose: Everyone loses sometimes. Especially in go. You need to lose some to win some, and be defeated soundly to learn anything important. That doesn't mean you have to like being defeated, you just have to tolerate it.

New Beginners!

Between Cecilm[22k]  and myself, we've addicted three people to the game of go, and have interested at least four others. Once my new board and stones arrive (details when it arrives), we'll have two great boards to play on and several other smaller boards that people can play on. I'm attemping to start 'go parties' in my circle of friends, where a bunch of people just sit around and play go. We can play games and discuss problems and tsumego. It should be a lot of fun once I get around to organizing the first one. I'll let you know how it turns out!

New Year's was the first unofficial 'go party', since I urged people to bring their go boards to play some games in my upstairs loft bedroom. It became the runaway hit of the evening, with games going on until 4am on January 1st. Surely that much go addicted some of my friends even more. :)

Study, Study, Study

I've been doing more studying than playing lately. I've lost the drive to play online somewhat, but I'm reading through Davies' Life and Death currently, at the suggestion of nachtrabe[-]. I'm quite proud that I used the knowledge of that book recently, in where I saw and correctly reduced the territory of one of my opponent's groups into a rabbity six. It's a reassuring fact to me, especially when sometimes I have trouble translating go theory and problems into real-game situations consciously.

Playing More, Wolvie?

I plan to play more, I honestly mean that. Right now I feel stuck at where I am, hence the studying. I think that through studying, starting go parties (which literally means teaching beginners), and watching the occassional HnG, that I'll start playing more often and with more confidence.

I am now officially back and playing on a semi-regular basis! \:D/

During November, I participated in National Novel Writing Month, or Nanowrimo. I was not the only insane one participating in this, but instead I was part of thousands of people who wanted to give this challenge a try. This was my third Nanowrimo that I've participated in, and participating with me was my roommate Acturi. We wrote many many words, had some ups and downs, but we eventually got through it, gleefully showing at least 50,000 words before the end of November 30th!

The novel, for those who are curious, is mostly about go. There are other things that happen besides go, such as sex, fighting, backstabbing, and coffee. The game of go, however, is something that my four main characters all have in common, and it brings some people together, and tears others apart. I also had many different themes in this book, such as looking at the game of go as a model of the universe (and playing accordingly), and looking at the universe as a model for go (and also playing that accordingly).

When writing this novel, I would sometimes log onto KGS and play a game or two, and surprisingly, I jumped up dramatically in rank, from a solid 28k to an unstable 20k?. From my games, I'd wager that I may be a 22k or 21k though, but that will stabilize in time. When people have asked what I've done to have a sudden rank change, I tell them "err.. nothing?", and this is mainly the truth. Occasionally I will look at some tsumego while on my lunch break, and twice in November, I dinked around on goproblems and did some 30k and 25k time trials.

The leading cause of my sudden jump has now been deduced to "your subconscious has digested the information that you've been exposed to, and now you can finally use it!"

December has unofficially been declared my go playing/studying month. I'm not sure how well I'll fare with this, since this weekend I'll hopefully be up in a cabin in the Colorado Rocky Mountains with some friends. Rest assured, I am bringing some books and my ghetto goban, and one of my friends that is coming also plays go. It'll be a nice start to a hectic month, where holidays may try and triumph over playing go. Oh well, either way I'll be happy. :)

Time for bullet points! :D

• I've been sick for the past week or so, and I've taken time off of playing games on KGS during this time. I tried playing once while I was sick (last Friday), and managed to lose by 90+. I'll start playing again once I feel 90-100% better.
• In this downtime, I've been practicing tsumego and thinking a lot about the fundamentals of go (cutting, connecting, etc). When I have time, I do the 30k and 25k time trials on goproblems, which seem to help me keep at my regular playing level.
• I'm participating in Nanowrimo this year (this is my third attempt, I started doing this in 2003), and this time the basis will be around Go. I am using the "Tarot readings as plot points" method. I have created 4 characters that the story will be based around, which I have also done Tarot readings for character creation. I can tell you right now that the novel may have its happy points, but overall it seems like it will be one heck of a depressing novel. I'm really excited about it though, and it will allow me to get more into the game of Go. Since I want to make the novel approachable to all people, I'll need to explain how the game works and delve into even more technical parts of the game as the novel progresses. That way, I'll be able to see if I truly understand the basis behind Go, since in order to explain it, one needs to know it.

That's it for right now.. I hope I start feeling better soon so that I can play games! (I'm hoping to play Saturday.. but we'll see how I feel then! :D)

I didn't play any ranked games today, but that's alright, for in its place I got one free game and one teaching game. :D


wolvie [28k] vs. goeasyonme [?] : W+Res
My first game, I think I lucked out, since I feel that I got away with a LOT in the game. B started out with a very interesting opening (see the .sgf for more details), and I should have responded sooner and wrecked the moyo. This game inspired Agilis to give me a crash course in fighting, so we started a training game.


Agilis [10k] vs. wolvie [28k] H9 : W+8.5
This game hasn't been reviewed yet, but I think I did learn a lot about fighting from this game, since I was pretty much *forced to* by Agilis' moves. I was leading until I was caught in a nasty snapback in the endgame, which nachtrabe said was worth about 25 points. :(

Hopefully tomorrow or the next day I'll get the game reviewed by *someone*, and become even stronger. :D

Oh, and I may have gotten more people interested in learning go. \o/

I'm still on my winning streak, it seems. I'm still learning a lot from the games though, so it's cool. :D


wolvie[29k] vs. toastcrumb [30k]: W+21.5
Points to work on:
- Reading out moves. I still make some unnecessary moves because I'm not reading out what could happen.
- Life and Death. I assumed a group was alive, and they ended up dying a most miserable death. This will also help out towards reading.

As a result of this game, my rank went to a solid 28k. We'll see if it stays there. :D

My other three books that my brother gave me for my birthday came in, so I'm happy that I'll have some really good reading material once I get past my first 50 games. :)

Today I reached 29k... and then it went to 29k?. I guess I just keep riding on the edge of an actual rank. :/


JohnBrian [25k] vs. wolvie [30k?] H5: B+94.5
I'm now on a 4-win (5-win if you count the escapee) streak. The rank change should change that a little bit though, but according to my scores, I may even need to play games that are ranked at 28k. We'll see. :)

This weekend is *ultra busy*.. I'll be *very* suprised if I get any games in. :o

Well, it was bound and determined to happen later. Played a 2H game with Machao, and around move 147 or so, I had an escapee on my hands.

Oh well, hopefully sometime it'll go into resignation and then I'll be able to review it. From what my friends tell me though, I was "kicking some butt" and expressing a lot of RAWR. :)

For those that are curious.. the lyrics are from a Garbage song. It seemed appropriate. :)

Run my baby, run my baby, run
Run from the noise of the street and the loaded gun
Too late for solutions to solve in the setting sun
So run my baby, run my baby, run.

Yup, my rank still has a ? by it. It actually managed to be 29k? for an entire 10 minutes before reverting back to 30k? (just from me sitting in the channel, no less). Unsure ranks can be quite volatile. I don't have much of a problem with it, however. :)


LeegleechN [28k?] vs. wolvie [30k?] : B+35.5
When this game was finished, I wasn't sure if I really deserved to win the game. I made a couple big mistakes, including attempting to make life with a 3-3 point and failing. In an attempt to take the lead, I started an invasion, and my opponent reacted in the wrong way, completely swinging the tide of the game and making my aforementioned group live and taking quite a bit of stones in the process.

(Btw, this game was from yesterday, I was just too lazy to update last night. Whee!)

I turn 24 today. Where's my cane? ;)

It turns out when I say I won't be able to play over the weekend... I end up playing at least once. Note to self: always make a comment about not being able to play on the weekend every week. :D


berrybear[29k?] vs. wolvie[30k?] 0.5 komi: B+34.5
In this game, I played some unneeded stones (example: connecting when they're already connected). I think I did better at not making useless gote defensive moves, I think this stems from an ever-growing assurance that my stones are infact safe and a speculative invasion there would be fruitless.

This did not stop W from attempting speculative invasions at D19, G6, K5, L6 and O6. In the past B would have allowed such speculative invasions to go through, but B connected instead of chased, and let W play useless stones in B's territory.

I'll probably do a full thoughtful review on Sunday, after I have a chance to relax and get a clean mental slate.

Have fun today, people! I know I will! :D

My second win on KGS also turned out to be the oddest game I've played thus far.


Naruto202[25k?] vs. wolvie[30k?] : B+305.5 (B+88.5)
One of the main oddities that happened was the unbelievably high point difference. This occurred because there were some places that still needed to be played when we both passed.. and the computer counted the center dead, when it was alive, for all intents and purposes. Black still would have won.. but by at least 200 points less. Another crucial point that should have been played was A2, but it was neglected by W.

The game progression was very odd as well. As a beginner, B errs on the side of defense instead of attack, because they are still worried about the life and death potential of their stones. In this game, B was basically forced out of this mindset due to W's constant overplays. Since the only way to counteract an overplay is to attack and punish.. B had to do just that. Combined with a lack of reading on W's part, B got away with some plays that should have ended up dead. Not exactly the way to play most games.. but at least this game forced B out of the comfort zone.

Note: I'm trying to get out of the "me and them" way of describing games, and instead using "Black and White" to describe the game. Makes it impartial. :)

Now.. the weekend. I rarely get to play on KGS during the weekends, but I usually spend the time giving my mind a breather, and also working on L&D problems. I probably won't be able to play on Friday, since the evening seems to be booked with roleplaying + Serenity.

Have a good weekend, people! Also, thanks to everyone who commented on tonight's game! :)