361points.com/blog

Feedback on users’ feedback

There are some interesting points and questions users have brought via the anonymous feedback on the website. I am going to address here 2 of them.

Of course it’s good to get advice from someone who has insei experience. I’m not sure fast games make people read faster, though. I think the temptation is to read *less*. Tsumego training can help read faster, though.

This is about my article titled “To improve at Go, play a lot of fast games”. Just as a reminder, this is part of my guidelines for studying Go.

It seems to be such a controversial issue, a lot of people disagree - maybe I should make clear once again that I am not advocating playing only fast games, but I (strongly) believe that playing also fast games is one of the necessary steps to improve. As I explained in the article, “fast” is a relative notion, bottom-line is to gradually shrink one’s comfortable time limits to be able to play faster.

Reading fast is of course important, but it’s also very important to know what to read - and that knowledge comes with intuition, not with reading all possible variations. Playing fast games develops intuition.
When I first went to Japan in 1990, for the World Amateur Go Championship, as he was watching one of my non-official games Otake Hideo 9 dan told me: “Too slow, Romania, too slow!”

I agree that blindly repeating joseki is bad, but White’s living technique in Dia. 8 is one I learned recently from studying a different joseki! Knowledge still helps you strong players to find the right way, even if it is non-standard.

This comment is about my “Sometimes It’s Better Not to Know Joseki” article. I definitely agree that knowledge is power - the more we know, the more choices we have, normally, but what I described in this article is an instance of me only thinking in joseki terms in a situation when it was completely wrong to do so.

I read in the AGS newsletter a while ago a comment of Janice Kim’s on joseki. I don’t remember the exact words, but it was something like “what if josekis didn’t exist”, so basically we just regard them as any other local fights. I liked that idea a lot!

I want to thank everybody who left feedback, from encouraging words, to corrections on grammar, to suggestions on what to focus on - I am reading all of them and hopefully put them to good use!

Women’s Meijin - game 3

I added a few thoughts of mine on the 3rd and last game of Women’s Meijin in the tournament page. Just briefly, it is very interesting to study how Black is attacking a group in a sequence of 50 moves or so.

It was not clear to me that the result of the attack favored Black in the end - as I was looking at the variations on Cyberoro there were a lot of them showing what looked to me as more profitable variations for Black - but Black keeping the initiative for so long surely payed off on the psychological side, with Aoki overlooking what must be a pretty simple tesuji for a professional.

Site design update

I updated the site design a bit recently, tried to make it more colorful. Since I am not a web designer, I realize it’s very far from looking even remotely pleasant - please let me know if you have any suggestion.

There is a new Women’s Meijin, since Kato Keiko won the title from the previous title holder, Aoki Kikuyo.

I found today a blog entry of someone from Busan, South Korea, about people playing Baduk (the Korean for “Go”) in a park.

See one of the pictures below; click on it and you’ll see more, on flickr.com:

It reminds me of parks in Bucharest, Romania where I grew up, except that people there play chess and backgammon, not Go

Now that I think of it, I don’t remember ever seeing people playing Go in parks in Japan…

The Ing Memorial 2007 European tournament is over: the winner is Fan Hui (2 dan pro from China, has been living in France for the last 7 years) with a perfect score:

Pl. Name                 Str Co. MMS   1    2    3    4    5    6   Pt  SODOS SOS
  1 Hui, Fan              7d CHN  6   14+  12+   4+   8+   2+   3+  6     23   23
  2 Taranu, Catalin       5d ROM  5   19+  13+  10+   5+   1-   6+  5     16   22
  3 Dinerstein, Alexandr  7d RUS  4   20+   4-  13+   7+  11+   1-  4     12   22
    Silt, Ondrej          6d CZE  4   16+   3+   1-   6-  13+  19+  4     12   22
  5 Pop, Cristian         6d ROM  4   21+   9+   8+   2-   6-  12+  4     12   21
  6 Juan, Guo             7d NED  4   24+  10-  12+   4+   5+   2-  4     12   20
  7 Surin, Dmitrij        6d RUS  4   13-  19+  16+   3-  15+  11+  4     11   18
  8 Shikshin, Ilya        6d RUS  4   23+  15+   5-   1-  17+  10+  4      9   19
  9 Kulkov, Andrej        6d RUS  4   17+   5-  18+  11-  21+  14+  4      8   15
 10 Mero, Csaba           6d HUN  3   18+   6+   2-  17+  14-   8-  3      8   20
 11 Groenen, Geert        6d NED  3   12-  14+  22+   9+   3-   7-  3      8   19
 12 Burzo, Cornel         6d ROM  3   11+   1-   6-  22+  18+   5-  3      6   20
 13 Dickhut, Franz-Josef  6d GER  3    7+   2-   3-  23+   4-  21+  3      6   19
    Soldan, Leszek        6d POL  3    1-  11-  23+  19+  10+   9-  3      6   19
 15 Bajenaru, Dragos      6d ROM  3   22+   8-  17-  20+   7-  18+  3      5   15
    Lazarev, Alexej       5d RUS  3    4-  20+   7-  18-  22+  17+  3      5   15
 17 Hora, Jan             5d CZE  2    9-  21+  15+  10-   8-  16-  2      4   18
 18 Teuber, Benjamin      6d GER  2   10-  24+   9-  16+  12-  15-  2      4   17
 19 Nijhuis, Emil         6d NED  2    2-   7-  24+  14-  20+   4-  2      3   19
 20 Corlan, Lucian        5d ROM  2    3-  16-  21+  15-  19-  23+  2      2   14
 21 Donzet, Frederic      5d FRA  1    5-  17-  20-  24+   9-  13-  1      1   16
 22 Bogackij, Dmitrij     6d UKR  1   15-  23+  11-  12-  16-  24-  1      1   14
    Fenech, Antoine       5d FRA  1    8-  22-  14-  13-  24+  20-  1      1   14
 24 Jacenko, Dmitrij      5d UKR  1    6-  18-  19-  21-  23-  22+  1      1   11

Second was Catalin Taranu, who only lost to Fan Hui. Then there is a large group of players with 4 points (including professionals Guo Juan and Alexander Dinerstein, and former insei Ondrej Silt and Cristian Pop).

The tournament page doesn’t have yet game records from the last rounds - I am especially looking forward to the game between Fan Hui and Catalin Taranu, which decided the first 2 places.

For those who don’t know yet: Fan Hui is the official trainer of the French Go Federation, and he also has a mailing list which you can subscribe to for free that delivers weekly Go problems to your email box. Check out this page.

The title of this blog entry is from the book “First Kyu” by Sung-Hwa Hong.

I wrote an article on this book which contains my review. Just to summarize it here: it is a wonderful book (about youth, love, Go and life in general), with a lot of interesting information about the Korean Go scene in late 60’s and early 70′, and very sound Go advice on how to study.

Read the whole review in the “Articles” section on my website.

I’ll go now to replay the “blood coughing game” that the book describes so nicely:

On a rainy day when I fall into loneliness and despair, I replay the game of Intetsu’s. Powerless against moves unfairly coached by ghosts, Intetsu’s stones sigh as they did on a hot summer day in 1835.

A very strong invitational tournament has started yesterday in Europe: the Ing Memorial.

Among the 24 players, there are 4 professionals (Guo Juan, Catalin Taranu, Fan Hui  and Alexander Dinerstein) and 8 ex-insei (Cristian Pop, Dragos Bajenaru, Ondrej Silt, Csaba Mero, Bejamin Teuber, Emil Nijhuis, Dmitrij Bogatski and Leszek Soldan).

See all 24 pictures at this link.

Here is the tournament page, with links to the results and rounds so far (with game records and more pictures).

Two professionals already lost to ex-insei in the second round: Guo Juan lost to Mero Csaba and Alexander Dinerstein lost to Ondrej Silt.

I am sure there will be a lot of exciting games!

Kato Keiko lost the second game in this year’s Women’s Meijin title, so it’s 1-1.

She is my favorite, because she was also insei at Igo Kenshu Center when I was insei.

I wrote a page about this match - just with some interesting moves from the first game, but I also have something in mind about the second game to add soon.

Problem from the first game: Black to play in the diagram:

On a different note: thanks to the anonymous user who left feedback asking “so what was the rule of thumb in the Kobayashi fuseki article?”. Good question - I updated the article to clarify.