Blogging again !

I will start blogging again. I have been lazy in August, especially since I did not know what to say, but I will try to post at least once a week from now on. My holidays are over, and I am back to the go club which should give me material to post.

So what happened to my go during August? I started playing on DGS, I have more than 40 games ongoing there. I barely played on IGS but enough to become 4k again, and even enough to become 3k after my last game!

This weekend I am going to a go camp. Motoki Noguchi (rated 2nd in France) and Benjamin Papazoglou (French champion 2 years agao) will be the teachers. We will also play the first round of the team French Championship. I will note my games and post the game records here as soon as I can.

The friend I talked about in my previous message could not come this week but I had the opportunity to play with another friend instead (he plays as "gimme" on KGS if you want to see some of his games). We played three games at even and he managed to win two of them, one of them with only a half pointer! The games were all very interesting but I was a bit disappointed to lose. Especially because I felt that I could have done better but played too soft. This softness is probably a consequence of the great amount of games I have played against beginners lately.

This softness also cost me some loses on IGS, I am back to 5k at the moment. More sadly, I also lost somes games there because of blunders, basically self killing my groups. Still I am confident in my skills and I am sure I can become 4k again soon.

Motivation

In fact I did not work on my go skills as much as I wanted to. I have mostly played against much weaker players and did not do many problems. The only good point is pro games: I kept replaying pro games and looked at commentaries carefully.

On Tuesday I went playing out playing with a guy I met on the internet last year. We had not played together since summer last year (he was a bit stronger than I back then). But on Tuesday I won four or five games, only losing one. He said he would work hard this summer to be better than me in a month. He was so nice to play again on a real goban and find some rivalry. I guess I'll need to work hard too to stay ahead. We should meet again on Wednesday next week.

Time to study

Well I have been quite busy with the football world cup this week because France has been doing extremely well and as a consequence I did not cared about Go as much as I wanted to.

My books arrived on Wednesday. I took a couple of hours to go through Think like a pro: Haengma. It seems quite interesting; for those who read Cho Hun-hyeon's lectures on go techniques, the books are quite similar, but Haengma covers much difficult topics. The example games are all recent, some are even less than a year ago.
Yang Yilun's Ingenious life & death puzzles volume 2 looks harder than volume 1, as expected. Some solutions are explained on three pages ! Starting tomorrow, I plan to do 10 problems everyday (f'rom Volume 1).

I did not play on IGS this week so my rank remains the same. I played a few games on KGS and Oro which satisfied me overall.

My intentions for next week:
- 10 life and death problems from Yang Yilun's books every day
- a couple of games on IGS every day
- replaying a couple of pro games every day

New book

I bought a new book on Saturday: "Think like a pro, Haengma". A friend of mine won this book at the tournament told me it looked interesting (he is around me strength). The book was sent today so I hope to have it tomorrow or on Wednesday. I will write a review here at the end of the week. I also bought Yang Yilun's Ingenious life & death problems volume 2. I bought volume 1 three months ago but I have not started working on it yet; the problems are really hard for me but I guess I can't pretend to be shodan if I can't solve them. I hope buying volume 2 will urge me to work on volume 1.


I did not play on IGS today, but played some games on Oro and KGS, none of them being really serious.

4k !

My internet connection was down for most of the week, so I did not get a chance to play on the internet until today. This does not mean that I did not study this week. I have a few Go World issues, which I read carefully, replaying some of the games on my go board. I hope it will pay off in my next games.
At least it did not hurt; I played two games on IGS today, won them both and became 4k after my second win. I have to keep the momentum.

The challenge begins

Go blogs are very popular lately so I decided to start mine too, at least I hope to find a couple of readers :)

I should probably stard by introducing myself, so here we go: my name is Arnaud, 21 year old student in maths, living in Rennes (north west of France) . I started playing go in August 2004, which I discovered thanks to Hikaru no go, a few weeks before.

As the title suggests, I plan to become shodan before Christmas. I want to make it on igs because it is the go server where I play the most. I am already 5k+ there so it's 5 stones in 6 months seems quite feasible. To make it harder, I want to change my soft style to a more severe, fighting style.