When we learn the rules of go, our esteem is risen by the fact of learning a challenging and interesting game. A few minutes later, we’ve already realised that our reading ability and our innate capacity to predict the opponent’s move is… suboptimal, so to call it.

After a few games, our reading ability starts to improve. Not much, but being able to read 2-3 moves at the beginning seems like a major achievement and we start to feel more comfortable while playing. Reading ability is improved and becomes natural after a few dozen games and the proverb “Lose your first 100 games as soon as possible” suits perfectly to this phase. Sooner or later, we happen to reach a level around 15-17k, a level where our reading has improved over the 5 moves barrier in certain positions and we can read 2-3 moves in almost any situation. Victories start to flow and our opponents’ stones are massacred if their reading ability is just slightly worse.

On the other hand, when a 16k player faces a 13k player, the weakest one realises Go it’s not about killing and capturing. There is something more on the board. 12k moves aren’t directly attacking its opponent, but rather far away. From the point of view of the weakest player it doesn’t really make sense during the first games, till he realises that 12k players chase territory and it behaviour is completely different. While the weakest player may hold up to its rival on a corner fighting, the general result of the game is settled by another factor the 16k player still lacks: strategy.

Improving strategy is one of the toughest parts of learning go. Basics are easily grasped: making a base, extending from walls, shimari facing and the corners, when to pincer… and they are easily played during the games. Extending from a wall, creating big moyos without fighting… both of these strategy concepts give a boost to players’ self-esteem.

During our training, eventually we happen to watch dan games. But it is only when you reach SDK level, that players realise the huge amount of josekis available, the subtle difference between placing a stone one line above or below, further or closer a wall… the flow of tenukis all over the board from dan game crash against the SDK concept of go. SDK player self-esteem collapses as it realises the huge difference that 3 stones make at a SDK.

“These people are nuts!” and “They play something different, with the same rules, but a different game” was my reaction to the first pro game I saw. I guess I still haven’t got over it.

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One of the toughest tasks as the club teacher was to teach reading and I’m afraid I wasn’t successful. They’ve been playing against bots in order to get a basic grip on the game, but it seems like they haven’t really improved. Though club players seem to improve during the lessons and the games, they fail to improve their reading ability.

After spending some brainstorming, I found out that giving out problems to them would prove to be useful… I’m still to see the results.

Any piece of advice would be appreciated

Related posts:

1. Teaching Go in Pamplona

When they asked for training I recommended getting a feeling on life-and-death against the computer (igowin, for example) and then moving on to a server like KGS. Sincerely, it was what I did a few years ago… and it wasn’t that bad

A couple of weeks later two club members were playing 9×9 with an awful botish style. Diagonal moves were all over the board, going unprotected and uncut. It took me a couple of games to realise that they had adopted this style as a logical defense against the computer.

Me: -Ok, so this works against igowin. What about humans?
Newb:-We can’t play against humans.
-Why? I told you to log in KGS and play there with 30k.
-We can’t, there aren’t such players there. We were forced to move to IGS and play on the lowest level.
-Wasn’t the lowest level on IGS 22k?
-Yes, it is. That’s why we’ve lost every single game there. So all that’s left if playing against igowin on our iphones.
-…(facepalm)

I couldn’t believe my ears, no newbies in KGS? Back when I learned, there were lots of players below the 25k level. The automatch feature should have made it easier for these people to play among them.  It should be simple to start an unranked account on KGS and play against 30k.

After discussing it for a while, they challenged me to start a new account on KGS and find 30k to play with. I tried. Twice. 30 minutes each time. I failed. Though there are some bots available for beginners, it’s quite difficult for a complete beginner to find an appropiate game. It seems like KGS population has matured, but it lacks newcomers. A few years ago I saw a graphic with KGS levels demography, I wonder how it would look like now.

So, if you’re reading this, Mat…, you’re right.

By the way, IGS, with 22k as the lowest level, it’s just a slaughter.

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Actually, it’s only been 12 games on KGS plus a few more on real life with my flat-mate, which places me around the 20 games per month. You may say:”that’s not too much, in fact, it’s too few”… but you’d do better to remember that I haven’t played a single game on KGS for the last 15 months and that 2007 wasn’t a very productive year either.

Well, let’s see if I can surpass the 6k barrier where I’m stuck at…

Related posts:

1. KGS and its rank

Due to some unexpected facts, I was asked to teach Go during Saturday. So, with just around 10 days, a friend of mine (who was asked in first place to teach go) and I happened to get a few boards and some hundreds of stones for each colour.

Expected amount of visitors? Unknown. Expected duration of the session? Unknown. Expected media available (computer…)? Unknown. Expected number of tables and chairs available? Unknown. F**k…

Now I think you’ll already start figuring out my feelings as the day approached. Finally we were given over 25 small boards printed out on paper, so that we could teach the basics on 9×9 and 7×7 boards, though the smallest board were only used to teach atari-go. Stones, borrowed from a club in Barcelona, were placed on plastic glasses.

Saturday, 5:00 pm, the show gets started. Luckily, we’ve managed to arrange several tables on a row, placed the boards and chairs before anyone happens to ask us for a game. Actually, they were waiting for us to finish the preparation since I could only take a single deep breath before someone came to take a peek.
This man, in his middle 30s, with a nicely-shaved beard, a polite shirt and a -unnoticed by me- huge camera by his feet. Ten minutes later, we’re playing a normal game on a 9×9 board and, from my point of view, it seems like he’s enjoying the game, but he refuses to play  more since there are other people waiting. A few seconds later his camera depicts the whole situation: most chairs are occupied with people ready to attend to the explanation.

Players range from 6 years to slightly over 50, but there is a pack of 3 guys who happen to be board game players or good strategists, they pick the game within a few minutes and spend 3 hours playing. Yes, they learnt to play Go somewhere close to 5:30 pm and left after 8 pm. Since they’ve already made a few matches on a 9×9 board, I lend them the 13×13 board. As I wasn’t able to check their game, the consequences were predictable: it’s a chaotically-offensive game. But since they are 3 of them, I’m left with one of them and start a 9×9 game with 5 handicap stones.
To sum it up: he’s able to count up to 5 moves and manages to create a seki situation without being aware of its existence. Scary.

So, after three hours of intensive teaching, over 25 people have learnt to play go in Pamplona. They’ve asked for shops, history, taken photos and everyone has been given a board. I’ll be looking forward to hearing from some of these.

Edit: As far as today, 27th July, I haven’t heard from anyone playing go in Pamplona. They are either too scared or I was too optimistic. Either way, I created a forum just in case someone wants to join Play-In-Plona

Related posts:

1. Teaching how to read

Finally, after three years struggling to get the job done with Serendipity , I decided to follow the mainstream and join the wordpress community, but on my own server. Though I managed to get a similar theme and style, the code behind the page is completely different and much, much better. WordPress has lots of features which Serendipity lacked and the list could go on and on for a few pages.

Related posts:

1. Optimizing Go Blogs vs Overloading Feeds

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.

Related posts:

1. KGS and its rank

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 right.

-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.

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The result: (in pink the new inactive ones)

All in all, 15 blogs had to be removed from the Active Blogs list due to the lack of activity during the last 6 months or the impossibility to reach their addresses. Some of them already announced their desire to stop blogging, but others were just left to their own luck by their owners.

Even there is still a nice list of active blogs, if you check your feeds reader, you’ll realise that there are only a few of them which are regularly posting on their blogs. In fact, most of the feeds you received last month came from only 5 authors. Now I hope you get what I mean by Go Blogs Crisis.

Related posts:

1. Optimizing Go Blogs vs Overloading Feeds

I’m not to blame planetgo for this, since it is not only its designer fault, but also the bloggers contribute in it (myself included). Image optimization is not as widely used as desired: it’s nicer to see an image of a board with a “tree texture” painted on the board rather than a plain colour, even if it occupies 10 times more.

Related posts:

1. Go Blogs crisis

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In fact, there is a Double-Digit Kyu Workshop available too at his site but I still haven’t seen it yet. I’ll add it here, but I can’t comment on them (though it will problbaly be of the same quality). I hope you enjoy both of them.

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Last September, KGS decided to modify its internal rating. Now, it is supposed to be more difficult to reach high levels while the lower levels are narrower; so lots of players concentrate at the 15k-1k zone. Everyone was affected by this change and players’ rating grew about 5 stones by this procedure. Everyone was affected in the same way, so all your opponents also increased by 5 stones their level.

It is well-known that internet ratings are slightly higher than the real ones: as you can see KGS’ ratings are always a few stones higher than AGA’s or European’s on the lowest levels which should be restored somewhere later to have a good equivalence on the higher ratings.

Where is that?

It’s on the 9k. As you can see, a 9k KGS player varies up to 4 stones on each real scale.

 AGA   CHINA  EUROPE   JAPAN   KOREA  |  IGS  DGS  KGS ---   -----  ------   -----   -----  |  ---  ---  ---   26K    30K     28K     25K    32Gup  |  BC 25K    29K     27K     24K    31Gup  |  BC 24K    28K     26K     23K    30Gup  |  BC 23K    27K     25K     22K    29Gup  |  BC   25K 22K    26K     24K     21K    28Gup  |  BC   24K 21K    25K     23K     20K    27Gup  |  22K  23K   15K 20K    24K     22K     19K    26Gup  |  22K  22K   15K 19K    23K     21K     18K    25Gup  |  21K  21K   14K 18K    22K     20K     17K    24Gup  |  21K  20K   13K 17K    21K     19K     16K    23Gup  |  20K  19K   13K 16K    20K     18K     15K    22Gup  |  20K  18K   12K 15K    19K     17K     14K    21Gup  |  19K  17K   12K 14K    18K     16K     13K    20Gup  |  18K  16K   11K 13K    17K     15K     12K    19Gup  |  17K  15K   11K 12K    16K     14K     11K    18Gup  |  16K  14K   10K 12K    15K     14K     11K    18Gup  |  15K  14K   10K 11K    14K     13K     10K    17Gup  |  14K  13K    9K 10K    13K     12K      9K    16Gup  |  13K  12K    9K  9K    12K     11K      8K    15Gup  |  12K  11K    9K  8K    11K     10K      7K    14Gup  |  10K  10K    9K  7K    10K      9K      6K    13Gup  |  9K    9K    8K  6K     9K      8K      5K    12Gup  |  8K    8K    7K  5K     8K      7K      4K    11Gup  |  7K    7K    6K  4K     7K      6K      3K    10Gup  |  6K    6K    5K  3K     6K      5K      2K     9Gup  |  5K    5K    4K  2K     5K      4K      1K     8Gup  |  4K    4K    3K  1K     4K      3K     *1D     7Gup  |  3K    3K    2K *1D     3K      2K      2D     6Gup  |  2K    2K    1K  2D     2K      1K      3D     5Gup  |  1K    1K   *1D  3D     1K     *1D      4D     4Gup  | *1D   *1D    2D  4D    *1D      2D    4-5D     3Gup  |  2D    2D    3D  5D     2D      3D    5-6D     2Gup  |  3D    3D    4D  6D     3D      4D    6-7D     1Gup  |  4D    4D    5D  7D             5D                   |              6D  8D             6D                   |              7D  9D             7D                   |              8D 10D                                  |              9D

This table is extracted from Sensei’s Library: World Wide Comparison.

So, if KGS has to recovers this 4 stones at the 9k level… why didn’t they leave the old system? Sincerely, I don’t know the answer. I don’t mean that KGS2 rating is better than KGS3, but it may have been more "real".

Talking about "better"… I think that none of the KGS rating systems are good. For example: how can you improve your level at KGS? By NOT playing.

In fact, my original account at KGS "alejo" showed this image today:

Which is something obviously wrong. I haven’t played with this name for a couple of months and there are only 3 games listed for the last 6 months… As you can see, inactivity is the best way to increase your rating.

The real fact is that I’m at 9k. Yes, 9k at KGS, which means that I don’t know where I’m at all.

Related posts:

1. “What’s your rank” poll results
2. Founding a club with complete beginners
3. Alejo returns to KGS

April 9, 2006 54th NHK Cup Go Tournament
Nakano Yasuhiro 9 dan(B) vs. Ishida Yoshio 9 dan(W)

With this great video I’m going to introduce the concept of “God’s Hand” move into Go. Which is basically the contrary of what the video shows.

Most of you might already know this concept from Hikaru no Go, so this won’t tell anything new to you.

God’s hand move is a PERFECT move, and it’s a perfect move in that exactly position. Each turn there is a possible God’s hand move, and the better you are, the closest you are to that move.
So, you may say, if everyone plays God’s hand move, is it a draw? No, God’s hand move is something abstract, because only God would understand how perfect it is. Top world go players might play it without realising (though I’m doubtful that they play it too), but it is absolutelly impossible to play them in a row. And once again, we wouldn’t even know about it!!

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This blog will let me publish some ideas I come up with while playing games, mainly Go (baduk) but also some other hobbies, like kiting and so on.

For anyone who might want to learn Go I’ll recomend this link:
English: http://playgo.to/interactive/
Spanish: http://www.thinkchile.com/playgo/

I’ll leave the English link at one side of the blog. If you want to know more about Go, visit: Sensei’s Wikipedia

Currently I’m studying for an exam, so I won’t make many posts till 21st January.

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