Day 26 - New Ideas, New Arenas

Mental Preparedness

I find that I do a lot better if I play after reading a chapter or two from The Fundamentals of Go. It gets my mind functioning in the right mode for playing. Something I have had a lot of trouble with is mentally preparing for matches. If I am not ready to put my all into the game, then I rarely get far. Repeating old habits and making the same mistakes, never learning.

I sent an e-mail to ChiyoDad(8k) awhile ago. He replied and suggested that I check out GoDiscussions.com. The (as far as I know) primary Go discussion board for English speakers. I have been lurking around reading the posts, and found one discussion about how people get into the correct mental state for Go.

One suggestion that especially stood out to me was one by somebody named Juwanji(link goes to his blog). His suggestion was that for every game you play, take your time on the first 50 moves, thinking out each stone. This hit just the right key for me for a lot of reasons. For one, I have been noticing lately the utter lack of care I put into my own openings. I just do what comes naturally and never put much thought into it. The opening is by far the worst part of my game, yet by many is considered the most important. The other reason that this advice, I feel, can help me, is that too often I have rushed headlong into a game, messed up greatly in the opening, and then suffered because of it, thus causing me a lot of grief which in turn causes me to play even worse which at last causes me to lose interest in playing, telling myself that the timing of my mood just wasn't right. This is wrong in many different ways.

I believe trying this will help me improve immensely, as I will actually start to learn some things about the opening and hopefully even be able to prep myself better for playing.

CyberOro

I tried an interesting new Go client today, called CyberOro. Unlike KGS, most of its players are either Japanese or Korean, and as a result, is a much more challenging arena. I set my starting rank to 20 kyu, thinking that would be a suitable downgrade. I was wrong, as I quickly found myself losing greatly to 21 kyu players. I played two games, resigning both, and then, to my complete surprise, got a game invitation from a Japanese 4d! I was intimidated, to say the least, but I accepted regardless. I only had 4 handicapped stones, but I did my best, and about halfway through he said I was doing alright. He did not know English, but used CyberOro's built in chat phrase feature to give me basic messages.

Of course by the end he completely destroyed any hopes for territory I had left. that is not to say that I did not have fun or did not learn anything. It was a very fun experience and I felt honored to just be given the time by such a high rank player.

I will give CyberOro more attention in the next few days, and see how I like it.

Until then,
-BuddytheRat