Alejo's Tenuki

On the 20th of June I started a new poll in order to know the level of the players who usually visits this blog.

Back from holidays I checked the results and the highest mark had already gone over 100 results, so it is time to extract some conclusions from the poll. The ones who already answered the question already know it, but for the ones who didn't, the categories where separated in the following way:

As you can see the lower categories have been truncated into more parts as the website is intended to be focused for these users while it may be of limited interest for dan players.

The results are shown in the next two graphics:

As you can see, most of the audience is ranked over 15k, being the most common level between 10k and 15k, closely followed by the weak single-digit kyu players (like me). Generally speaking, over 50% of the visitors have a level among 15k and 1k, which is not very surprising as it is the most common population. However, there are quite a few dan players who visit this blog, even more than complete beginners.

It would be nice to know the statistics for every single entry, as I think differences would be much more relevant, while videoreviews would be interesting for certain levels, my own reviews would be for others.

Here you have a review on the final release of Universal 3D Chess:

Currently you can only watch it through youtube or download this version with a 1036x676 resolution HERE (encoded with Xvid).

The final public realease is already available at the project's homepage: VoilaMonsieur

Last Sunday was held the final game to decide who would go to the World Mind Sports Games representing the USA in Beijing in October. The game confronted Joey Hung 8d vs Jie Li 9d and it was very interesting and very didactic as a sample of how to count ko threats and how to handle them.

But what strikes me the most was a sequence I found during the game and I'm still thinking it's worth trying. I was said during the game that my move wasn't good, but without explanation.

As you can see on the next image, there is a big fight going on the upper right corner of the board where there are several white and black groups involved and winning this fight would almost decide the result of the game.

Now that you've seen the board I'll tell you that the original sequence ends up with a huge ko for live or death. You can see the whole game on one board and my variation on another one.

When I saw that there some beta testers needed to work in the project I signed up immediatelly as I wanted to get involved in the project. The fact is that I can't tell you much about the program but I'd like to show you this image I got on my laptop with some boards opened, different zooming on each board, with the 3D ultra-high-details enabled, so that you make yourself an idea of how it looks like

The image is made on a 1440x900 resolution (but compressed with JPG, in order to save space). You should take into account that this image does not represent the actual quality of the final product.

If you want to see more images and know more about this program go here: U3DChess at GoDiscussions.com

This week I got into a new job where everything I knew is futile and the daily routine is based on pouring information into my brain from 8:00 to 18:00 (with a lunch break). Unfortunatelly, in order to understand the slightest amount of this knowledge, my brain needs to process it at a lower pace at home during the following hours.

The result is that my free time is reduced to it's smallest representation and I'm too tired to place stones in a goban in any sort of logical order. Just to give you a quick sample, I haven't checked my computer in 3 days, something which I used to do at least twice a day, and I didin't go to the usual weekly club meeting. So, in the end, the spare time for Go has been reduced to weekends where I have to combine it with my girlfriend... so I guess I won't be playing as much Go or reviewing software on the forecoming months as I had been doing lately.

A couple things more before finishing the post:

-The pro games database has been deleted from the databases' site in order to avoid some copyright conflicts. It seems that there are different points of view in this field, so if I don't want to get into trouble with anyone, deleting it seems the most reasonable behaviour.

-I've added the possibility to announce yourself on this site, you'll see the link at the upper left.

-The videoreviews of MoyoGoStudio and Stonebase are partially done, but as they require quite a lot of dedication to finish them in order to get a decent result, and some video post-processing, so these two projects will be delayed until said otherwise.