Alejo's Tenuki

According to the American Go Association, and confirmed by some Senior KGS admins, today Tartrate will play against Gentlerain. Here you have the published text just in case you don’t know them:

THIS JUST IN (3/4/2008): “LEGENDARY” TARTRATE TO PLAY JANG BI ON KGS WEDNESDAY: Tartrate will return to online go this Wednesday when he plays Jang Bi on KGS. The legendary – but mysterious – online player known as Tartrate blazed a virtually unbeaten path across KGS in 2003, defeating Alexandre Dinerchtein 1P, Svetlana Shikshina 1P and Kim Myung Wan 6P before vanishing without a trace. Tartrate’s fabled invincibility was only broken once, when he took White with no komi against Charm, and the ease with which he dismissed tough opponents led many to people believe he was a strong professional. Amicable and somewhat chatty, Tartrate insisted on anonymity, however, refusing to answer personal questions. His impressive performance in 2003 was followed by a long silence; during a short comeback in January 2004, his winning streak continued and his game against Weems 9d attracted over 400 observers. “Tartrate has a message for the online go world,” a reliable source tells the E-Journal, “he strongly suggests that while he is playing games, all the dans — especially higher dans — comment on his game for the community, and is disappointed when they don’t.” Jang Bi is the Korean insei who’s been living and playing in the United States since last year. The tartrate-gentlerain game will be played Wednesday, March 5 at 6:30pm EST (3:30pm PST) in the English Game Room.

In fact, news have risen a lot of expectancy in the GoDiscussions forum, so we expect there to be some hundreds of observers, and lots of dans comments. I’ll see you tonight at 23.30 GMT!!!

After receiving some comments on the last post comming from Stonebase developers, I’ve realised I made some mistakes on my pre-review. In order to understand my mistakes here you need to find a way to make objective reviews of programs: a list of features a program must have. If I fail to find it, I use the help file. In this case, there isn’t any English help file available, so the only available support is given by 10 video tutorials in Chinese made with outdated versions.

The pattern search feature, though once disabled, is finally available on this version of the program. As the comment on the last post claims, you just have to select the area which is to be analysed, and click with the right button on that area, once the database are loaded in the basket.

Now we can see the games where this pattern is found, though the games (if opened) don’t directly show the pattern but start from the first move. Here we can also check the games by thumbnails, one of the nicest features of this program. On the other hand, it is not possible to apply the pattern search results to your game: you won’t see any A, B…

If you keep track of the Full of Surprises blog, you’ll have already realised the decline in Korea’s Go scene.

The first post related to this topic which amused me was the one called my two teachers, where she talks about how she learnt go and some possible reasons on why children don’t learn it nowadays.

Yesterday she wrote a new post: Only a matter of TIME, talking about the differences on time settings among the main go playing countries. It is a like a punch in my stomach to see how time settings are arranged to suit TV broadcasting. Amazing. Obviously, decreasing the time given for each move has dramatic consequences, but you’d better read them by yourself. I really recommend reading this post as I can’t really transmit all the fustration and pity you can read between her lines.

Today I played for about a couple of hours with Stonebase. Obviously I can’t say I’m an experienced user of this program, but I already got some impression on it. The last version I had used was 3.9 which had a couple of features that I’m missing right now.

Most things don’t work as I expected, to start with, I got strongly disappointed with the filtering tool: wide but limited at the same time. It doesn’t handle correctly the ranks, as it understands that both 4d and 23k levels are “more than 10k”, while you can only filter per one colour rank at one time (so you’ll have to set up to filters in order to filter rank for both colours). It doesn’t let you filter by player, only by white player or black player, so you have to set up two lines.

As already announced by the developers, the pattern search tool has been disabled, due to the strange results that usually appeared. I’ll be looking for this tool… I remember the pattern search thumbnails to be of great use and one of the strongest features of this program.

The counter tool, featuring both Chinese and Japanese rules, isn’t very good at calculating the life and death status of stones. Just to make a comparison, the estimation of the result of an specific game I was reviewing when my opponent resigned was in my favor for 2 points; the same estimation made by SmartGo in 2 seconds is that Black wins by 25, due to the dead status of one group. In stonebase, in order to declare one group as dead it has to be completely surrounded (just like in KGS), whenever an unoccupied space is left nearby applying “dead” to that group automatically sets all the territory to the opponent.

On the other hand, the wonderful database manager: You can have all the database categories you want, then load different databases in each, and finally filter the databases for the desired data (black player, event name…). The appearance and versatility of this program is musing, it lets you load lots of board skins which turn it into a colourful experience.

Preloading the games in thumbnails, while would work wonderfully when implemented the pattern search system, is a good tool too: you can check your lasts games with a single glance, if you want to recover a recent game where you played “that pattern” you may want to check among the thumbnails. The Guess next move tool has implemented a new radar system which informs you of the distance between what you said and the actual move.

There are still a lot of menus to explore but I don’t have much time recently. My intention was to make a videoreview but I finally decided it is too soon to make a serious analysis of Stonebase. It seems like the developers are capping the product while waiting for something to happen: Thumbnails are available and you can watch them but they are a bit useless without the pattern search engine. The count tool seems to be missing something too…

A couple of days ago I decided to buy two books I had had in mind for a long time. Being the fuseki and the tesuji my weakest points (I still think I don’t have strong points), I bought one of each category. Today in this post I’d like to talk about the tesuji one, the one I’ve already started devoting: the third volume of the Elementary Go series: Tesuji; written by James Davies and published by Kiseido.

The opinions in GoDiscussions highlight how useful this book is and it has received top marks by most of the reviewers. I happened to find by error an illegal copy on the internet so I could take a look at the book level and the writing style. After a quick glance I realised that the book could work wonderfully for me, so I headed for the library.

The level progression seems to be fine and today I reached page 40. I’ve got some sort of tesuji saturation in my mind currently, but I already start seeing the results, which is something that encourages me to go on. Where can I see my improvement? I saw it in page 40, precisely in this tsumego I’m going to show you.

White to play

I can tell you I wouldn’t have solved this a week ago. I guess I would have probably given up the white group in the corner and moved elsewhere or pushed at Q6 (poor me). Solving this tsumego without any hint, though having done some similar ones previously, helped to raise my moral a little bit this morning. I’d like to see whether I’m able of not to see this tesujis during a real game where noone says "white to live is possible".

I’ve left the solution in the continue reading section