this game owns

post

Let’s try that again.

so yeah, i just put my stones away and washed my hands thoroughly

on lunch i’ll be going down to home depot, see if i can get a home lead testing kit to check out my stones and find out for sure if they’re contaminated

i’m kind of in shock that i never heard about this issue before today
yunzi stones are still widely sold and really popular

Sorry for the shock but I’m glad that you know now so you can be safe.

It was a really big story quite a few years ago.

definitely! thank you again for saying something

despite how much i post on the zone i’m not terribly Online so i tend to miss out on some of this stuff sometimes. nobody in my go club knew about it, and i didn’t see any kind of warning or anything when i was buying my set

and i wasn’t an AGA member until last year so i wasn’t getting any journals or anything

so yeah i really appreciate it

i’ve got an older friend who emulated me and bought the same set i did, i let him know as well

ok, my test was negative fwiw. i checked both black and white stones, negative on both and the swabs were good

I’m happy to hear that!

Did your friend who bought the same set check?

no, they chose to trust that their set was clean based on my results and having bought theirs in a later batch

which, idk. if it were me i would have checked still. but ok

If they don’t eat, drink, or smoke around their set, don’t let pregnant women or children handle the stones, understand that cleaning up a broken stone is more than just picking up the pieces, and wash their hands when they’re done playing the risk is minimal.

Agreed that it’s not worth taking though.

yeah

Trying to move my daily tsumego into my phone since I’ll often forget and leave my book of problems somewhere that I am not.

I used to use GoGrinder on Android but I have moved to iOS and am trying to see what is out there for that. I don’t want to spend the money on SmartGo Kifu yet.

I’m half tempted to write something - say, port GoGrinder to Swift - but that’s a lot of work and I’m lazy…

hmmm

yeah i’m on android myself so i’m not sure. i use a program called Tsumego Pro cause it’s free and has daily rotating problems

I had some SGF files converted from “Graded Go Problems for Beginners” and a few other collections that I would put through GoGrinder for Android.

i’ve been engaged in a really interesting set of experimental games against an online friend on OGS, we’ve been playing a game every day or every other day for a few weeks now. not really playing to win, but more to experiment with moves and see what’s going to work and what doesn’t

yesterday’s game and the one before it were particularly interesting. i opened with dual 3-4s, but then got forced into playing for influence after the opening. so i leaned into it instead of fighting for territory and won by a narrow margin

then in the next game, i opened with sanrensei because fuck it. i leaned hard into an o-moyo strategy and ended up winning by resignation (because i was on track to win by about 70 points)

my path to getting stronger has been pretty rough, because my natural style tends towards influence / o-moyo, which is basically like playing the game on hard mode these days lol

the moves i see, the really inspired stuff that i come up with naturally, it’s all in furtherance of building these huge huge areas efficiently. if i can hone this ability to its absolute limit, i can still win games with that style against people at my level, but it’s like having a target painted on me lmao. everyone knows the reducing and erasure moves these days

and everyone also wants points in hand, so if i also try to play for territory, it just becomes this huge fight right away, and frankly, reading is not my strong suit. i like to wait to fight until i know i’m going to win, which in my case means having the advantage of influence built up by the time the killing fights break out

but games like these, i find really encouraging. influence CAN still work

The number one thing holding me back is the regression in my reading skill from when I played much more often. It’s like a muscle that needs to be worked out in order to be strong.

definitely true. reading is super important

for me, even at the height of my reading abilities i always miss something stupid lol. some 1-liberty gap i didn’t count, or some variation i don’t think they’d ever play in a million years and of course they do it

my strength relies on knowing far in advance where fights are going to happen based on the opening and early midgame. which i can definitely do, i can see the flow of the game really clearly

but i need to prep the battlefield in advance and then invite my opponent to come to me, or i just get crushed in move-to-move fighting

for me, the path to getting stronger has been trying to negotiate and understand this weakness of mine and figure out how to compensate for it and grow as a person while also understanding the mindset of territorial players

had a pretty invigorating game against one of my OGS friends today, we disabled the analysis and score estimation features of the site and just played at a good clip with nothing but our own power

i had Black and won by 7.5 points :3

the opening was ridiculous. we just played on all the star points

this is not the kind of thing you’re supposed to do lmao. but it was super fun, and i knew that, without analysis helping them, my opponent would struggle to play a pure influence game whereas that’s my big strength

they won in a local fight or two, for sure. that’s nothing new. but i used my global awareness to box them in and seal off the areas i wanted with minimal problems, making sure i didn’t fight them until i was ready whenever possible

AI hated it but i was particularly proud of this sequence of moves, played after White put down P9:

then i put pressure on the lower left corner, leading to a cut-through invasion where i reconnected with those same stones to live on bottom. that area ended up making the difference in points

i’ve won our next 3 games in a row as well

by 23 points:

by resignation:

and here i have White, won by 25 points:

being a moyo player in 2020 feels like playing the game on hard mode sometimes but it’s also made me strong pretty quickly

i’ve had to improve at a very rapid pace just to even stay in the game post-AI

it feels good to get games under my belt where i just completely surround and outclass my opponent, flexing my full strength and seeing that yeah, i really do know how to play this game actually

beat my online friend by about 40 points with White, because he’s been lax in studying new AI corner joseki

i taught him the new variations after the game

first mistake: trying to use the old joseki here but hane’ing instead of extending, putting him into a liberty shortage which i bullied to break into the center and expand along the side

what it’s supposed to look like (even result):

second mistake: not knowing that this exchange here results in White life and Black sente, so he pushed and tried to kill unsuccessfully, ending up giving me a much larger reduction than i should have gotten

here’s the new variation he wasn’t aware of:

in this instance, if you fall down to the second line then either wrap around or knight’s move in the other direction (depending on what your opponent does), you’re good. you live, your opponent usually gets sente

if you want to be certain you’ll get this sort of result, you can even fall back to the second line immediately rather than pushing, as the 3-3 invader. if your opponent pre-emptively wraps around, you wrap around too. if they extend, you knight’s move. either way you’re good, they’re good. even result

if you push out after a 3-3, you MIGHT get this result instead:

which is why i fell back in that particular invasion. didn’t want to just have a line 2 ponnuki in the middle of Black’s influence like that. this is more of an early game joseki, trading the marked stones for a forcing move later and a ponnuki low down which can run and live along the side, while the defender gets their corner back

the forcing move in this case is to play White B14 after extending? which here just doesn’t work. like i said, early game stuff

I’m sorry that I haven’t been more responsive in this thread. I need to set aside time to digest what you’ve posted since my skills have atrophied, but I do see your posts.

Thank you for posting to this zone. You’re not alone, even if it may feel that way sometimes!

no worries haha, i play with lots of my friends on OGS and talk about it with my partner irl and stuff. i’m not broken up about it if this zone is mostly dead

whenever you have the time, come back and post!

Feel free to invite them to this zone if you think they’d enjoy it!

got to play a really cool game against my mentor and review it this evening

very instructive. we talked a lot about how to shift gears during the game, stopping to notice whether you’re getting territory or influence, how to use influence a bit more effectively, things to look for to indicate timing of certain moves, and the directionality of making tiger’s mouths and how to check

really quality game and review. feelin good

feels like i’m getting stronger again, little by little

side note: correspondence games are tough in a peculiar way. when you walk away from a game completely and then come back to it another day, you just play very differently than if you do it all in one shot

something i really love about Go is it’s on a level of complexity where you have to grow as a person and change how you see yourself and stuff at times, in order to break past certain walls

for me, i’m learning that i project too much of my own attitude onto my opponents. and i’m actually an extremely aggressive player. one of my opponents described me today as “relentless” and it really opened my eyes

i need to take time out to defend and be more solid sometimes. and i also need to scale back what i ask for on the board a bit. if you get 50% + 1 in any local slice of the board, and you just do that every time, you win. there’s no need to live everywhere, kill everywhere, etc

beat the 8k cpu by 85.5 points lmao

I’ve been researching the sanrensei more lately and you know, I honestly think it’s probably a fine opening choice

it’s a touch over concentrated but in exchange you get nice influence right away. it takes the flexibility of the nirensei and gives it an edge

beat the everloving shit out of amybot-ddk lol

pretty effortlessly, too

i had a trip out of town this past week and i spent all my downtime on my phone working tsumego nonstop in tsumego pro. got my “progress” rating up to 10kyu and i think i finally “get” tsumego and what they’re for

as you grind out hundreds of them, you start to see recurring patterns. tactics you can try, as well as vital points of various shapes. and it makes you a better reader through narrowing down the possibilities. but it takes working a ton of them for this to click

Love to grind tsumego and generalize the lessons I learn from them.

That’s probably my favorite constructive thing for me to do in my downtime.

super turnabout victory against one of my online friends. working hundreds of tsumego was the key. he tried to overwhelm me with extreme aggression, but i fought back and in the endgame was able to kill one of his corners entirely, after which there was no way for him to come back. he resigned immediately lol

i’m also doing some research on the taisha joseki because it’s complicated and if your opponent hasn’t put the same level of study in and chooses a bad variation you can easily get an advantage

From: Applebaps at 2020-07-16 18:43:59
so yeah, i just put my stones away and washed my hands thoroughly

on lunch i’ll be going down to home depot, see if i can get a home lead testing kit to check out my stones and find out for sure if they’re contaminated

i’m kind of in shock that i never heard about this issue before today
yunzi stones are still widely sold and really popular

Can you please explain? I have a very nice but old Go set from like 2000. Are you saying the stones might be made of toxic materials?

From: Tsukasas Kite at 2021-06-15 22:53:50
Can you please explain? I have a very nice but old Go set from like 2000. Are you saying the stones might be made of toxic materials?

If your stones are yunzi then they might contain lead. You should get a lead test kit to see if they contain above the allowable level of lead. If they do, you should replace them.

what MoM said

the chance is there if they’re yunzi stones. regular melamine or glass or plastic stones won’t have lead

i’m 9k now, don’t remember if i posted about that

i probably did

You did! https://baduk.thread.zone/thread/6/1-50

Congrats again!

From: Applebaps at 2021-06-15 23:11:43
what MoM said

the chance is there if they’re yunzi stones. regular melamine or glass or plastic stones won’t have lead

Idk what a yunzi stone is. These are the stones I have

Hold the black stone up to the light. Let the light pass through it. Is it slightly green? Then it might be yunzi.

If you’re not sure then get a lead test kit like this and test a few stones, even if they’re not yunzi.