So what`s going on lately in my go live?I started again to play frequently at KGS, for some time rated as a 4 Kyu, now back to 5 kyu. But that`s fine, i think 4 kyu was highly overrated… i won some fast games by luck.
So… i`m still not very good at Life and Death, which, in my oppinion, is training the „key ability“ in go:  reading out possible variations. Your intuition, your sense for the fuseki or for the strategy can be good, but without the possibility to really read out, more or less, long sequences, espacially L&D your will be soon lost in go and make no further progress.
I use to not see this clearly, i thought
„i`m so bad at soving L & D and  it is soo boring, i will just play more games and become better at    l&d naturally“ … but this does not work (at least for me) and so i started to push my self to do some problems every day. I still have my problems with them, sometimes thinking 5 minutes or more over a problem labled as „10 kyu“ 😀
But even with life & death i have my good moments, and i`m very passionate to get better at it. When i`m not playing or reviewing my own games, my main study object, at the moment, is solving L&D and reading books about it. There are a lot of fine books about this topic, for example  „Key Concepts of live and Death“ or „Life and Death Problems“ by Robert Jasiek. And suddenly, after i acepted the need to learn l&d, it started to become a bit more fun than before.And as i mentioned in a earlier update recently i tried out the „solving in the mind“ tsumego technique.
Somehow i forgot to go on whith this in the last few  days, but i will start again from now on.
And there was a first sucess allready,  i managed to visualize and solve one problem 100% in my mind, that was a great experience. You should try this as well!In the mean time i did not play many long games at KGS, even while i think i`m a bit better when i play long games. In my every day life i`m a bit slow as well… and even in school i almost never finished my exams right in time hahah 😀 To play fast games often has many benefits, it helps to learn basic things very fast… after each game you can check the joseki and fuseki, and so learn new things fast. When you play a 2 hours game, it is a bit more complicated to not feel sorry if you play a somehow „stupid“ move. Fast games can be taken easy and are fun too. (I`m not talking about lightning/blitz games here, these are fun as well, but i think you do not learn much appart from strenghtening your intuition, which is of course important too.) Last year, before our daughter was born, i remember how important it was for me to draw a line between fast / long games … to somehow say
„no this was just a fast game, i`m much stronger when i play serious…“
But i learned that the game should allways be played serious, and that how you manage the time limit, on which both players agreed on, is a important part of ones own „strength“.  But of course, i still think, that the true beauty of go evolves when playing long games… even when i see more benefit in playing much faster games…
In order to, besides that, enjoy a lot of long and slow games as well i play a lot at DGS at the moment… maybe too many games 🙂 and because i started soooo many games i tend to play fast at DGS as well… hahahaha  😀

But i was playing a few long games at kgs and espacially two of them i want to share today.
The one with much comments  by myself was when i played as 4 kyu against another 4 kyu.

The other one was a long awaited game with BenGoZen, i think you all know his wonderfull Go blog! http://www.bengozen.com/
It was a great pleasure to play such a long and interesting game. Before we played the game i allready started with the review of the other long game, so the game against BenGoZen is not yet reviewed.

Finally one more random thing:

As i allways tend to hang arround a lot on twitter, i was posting a tweet

„Intuition is good, reading is better. #key #Go #baduk #weiqi“

and @igoPau replied

“there should be a meme „why not both“ with your tweet ;)“ 

soo i quickly made my first, and as far as planed ONLY go meme ever (I`m not really a big meme fan, but in this situation i could not resist =)

 

Maybe you enjoy the following review of a very long game i played as 4 kyu vs. a other 4 kyu, i won with a very small margin of 5,50 as white… and i think it was a interesting game. Please leave comments on your thoughts  🙂
The Sakata Eio – Go Seigen  game is given here as well because i mention this game in my review.

 

 

 

 

This game record was from the Gogood-Database.

So…  next here is the game i played with/against 🙂 BenGoZen … enjoy!