Go Club

Hey~ Yukigami です！

I added a new section about Go.

Today I am still in the midst of post-revamp post editing. Not only am I editing all my previous posts to make them work with the new scheme, I'm doing a proper edit of the language and style, which includes toning down the fun-but-all-over-the-place-ness of some of them. Having written some of them pretty quickly or when I was pretty tired, I went a little overboard with bolding/underline/colour/text size/etc.

Well, by the time I even have a substantial number of readers, that stuff will have all been long since edited.
I might not finish today, but probably within a few days. It's not easy posting as much as I'd really like to (which is several posts every single day) while juggling all my courses and everything else in my life, but...
I'm doing my best!!
マジでがんばっている！

While I write this, I happen to be listening to my favourite Sword Art Online OP/ED, which is this:
Yume Sekai (夢世界)
On that note, I should mention that my friend over at WakeGaNai is a big fan of SAO, and like me, happens to be working hard on a fanfic or sorts (AU?). He's writing one based on SAO, whereas mine involves Pokemon.


Now, onto the main point of my post...


My school's Go club meets every Friday, and yesterday evening/night was the first meeting of 2014.
I brought up a lot of deep discussions about Go in order to collect the thoughts and opinions of my peers and use them to help me figure something out a little better. What I'm really interested in is all of the complicated elements involved in Go improvement. As I am a 5-6 Dan player (I teach, if any of you are interested), I am particularly interested in how it works for someone who has already gotten a strong and innate hold of the fundamentals. Two friends in particular joined me over dumplings in this discussion. One friend, a very high-level player who has attained American professional status (the American Go Association has just installed their own sort of professional system). More on the professional systems here.

He believes that it is purely about reading ability, and that style (for lack of a better word to describe the unique taste and tendencies and preferences in the way a person plays) and other internal factors have little to nothing to do with it. He also argued that getting stronger is not about playing stronger players or being taught, but rather, is based on personal study and solving a lot of life and death problems ("Tsumego"). Although the part about tsumego is a thing fully understood, appreciated, and applied by any player who has, largely by that very means, achieved my level or higher, and although it is the same advice that I give to my peers and my Go students and is a form of study I have utilized to the point that I am actually quite confident in my reading when playing against another player of even or lower level, I just cannot agree with that overly simplified answer. Moreover, it's not the kind of answer I was looking for - I was looking for a much deeper discussion. Still, my friends listened to my various proposals and questions and the logic and purpose behind them and did seem to acknowledge the depth of my ideas despite their simple answers. Here are some example subtopics discussed:

• Go improvement and affect of mental age
• Ability to reach 7-Dan if already aged 30+ or 35+
• How a built up style or bundle of built up tendencies and ways of thinking can promote or hinder improvement past a certain level
• Caps on personal potential
• Improving past 5/6 Dan: All about reading, or are concepts involved

This pro friend of mine later contradicted himself though; when the subject of playing environment/playing stronger players/being taught was brought up again, he advocated it as a great way to improve this time.

The other friend, a weaker Go player who is really great at music (and extremely enthusiastic about deep intellectual subject matter such as math and philosophy, a really interesting and receptive guy to talk to), was in full agreement with my other friend, and very strongly advocated the use of time and effort over stronger players and teachers. However, I think it's not quite that simple with Go, particularly once you have reached a level where you both know all the fundamentals well (and have lots of Go experience), and have little to no one strong to play with or learn from. Go is extremely complicated and ambiguous, so improving is not as clear-cut as it is with some other sports/hobbies/passions. One of them added, in response to the notion of a "personal potential cap", that there are two kinds of Go players: those whose mind is just not configured in the kind of way that yields them the prerequisites to having the affinity for Go to climb the Dan ranks or even the stronger Kyu ranks, and those who have it and have no limit to their potential and could without a doubt, by virtue of that "type 2" designation, reach professional strength. But my mind thinks about things in a complicated and deep way because I believe that everything about life and the universe is extremely convoluted. To me, it's hard to believe that it could be so black and white. I think there has to be a grey area. Even if the grey area exists only within a short range around the two polar extremes, I believe it must exist at least that much. For example, if two people are both that aforementioned "type 2" with great potential, since everyone's mind is very different and people are not made equally (I strongly believe this, and by this I really just mean that despite the many different kinds of intelligence there are, one person could still very well be "more intelligent", ie have a stronger mind, than another person, or that one person's mind is better at the faculties used for playing Go than another person's). If we assigned a number to the max potential of Person A, calling it "90", then I think even if Person is B fall within that "potentially strong Go player" sort of category, his potential might be 85 or 95 or maybe even 68.

Not to sound either conceited or condescending, but the fact that players as strong as my friend can be so strong and yet see the world through such a simplifying paradigm kind of cheers me up for some reason, because it makes me feel a little more like I should be able to reach that level, if and when I ever have the time and strong interest again to study Go seriously. (actually, it seems most of the people around me see everything a lot more simply. I guess that makes life easier?)

Well, another friend from the club who is about as strong as he is (these guys are among the very best in all of Canada!) approved of teaching me, so I will challenge him to more games from now on, since every time I played him before was really fruitful for me after his post-game (post-Armageddon) review. Because of this, the fact that most of my move criticisms on a game played later that night received his agreement, and other things, I pretty much came to the conclusion last night that the way I am thinking about the situation regarding my future Go improvement is correct. That is, due to my fair 5d+ reading level and vast experience since reaching "5-Dan" level a few years ago, I am probably correct in thinking that minimal study on my own time and merely playing and reviewing with him nearly every Friday (and reviewing a second time when I get home) is actually probably enough to help me make some big improvement. This is precisely the question I'd wanted answered when I begun to involve others in all those deep ideas at dinner. I would be very interested in studying Go improvement and strength from a research standpoint (sociologically, psychologically etc.).

And to support the conclusion I reached last night about my improvement, let me just further add that I improved relatively quickly after I began to play go in 2006, and I never hit any walls I couldn't break past all the way until I reached the relatively high level of 5-Dan. After high school, and after spending time writing, working, and doing what I wanted, I went to S. Korea and joined an international Go training facility by the name of "King's Baduk" in 2009. More on this in another post some time, but basically I returned to Canada as a 5-Dan player. After that, I spent around half a year training myself in Go, as I didn't have the money for lessons. I played lots and lots of games, solved problems, studied pro games, reviewed all of my games in-depth, but after all that time I didn't make any significant improvement. I entered university after that. I mention this anecdote because it supports my assertion that at this time, having much stronger players play and teach me is likely my best means of improving.

By the way, I plan to add over time a great deal of Go content, as well as information and stories about my own Go experiences. Eventually, the Go section will contain as much learning content (in addition to all other kinds of Go content) as would another website that focuses completely on helping site visitors with their Go improvement; while this is a mere blogspot page, I will probably never close it even if I get myself a real mad-from-scratch website going (the more traffic and networking the better, right?).

Stay tuned for all that! I'll also talk a lot more about the Go club, its members, Go in Toronto etc~!


Lastly,
let me just add...


First, snow and ice everywhere, severe power outages, and -37 weather,

and now, horrible downpours of rain flooding the streets and working together with the large, roadside snowbanks to form large and consistently-placed super-puddles!?

On my way home from post-Go club post-dinner late-night Go playing, I blocked off the rain with my hood and continuously and continuously dodged the giant puddles everywhere via the narrow bits of wet, icy sidewalk left on the far edges of the pavement tiles, but just when I was almost home, I activated someone's trap card and got owned. I stepped off the sidewalk to cross the street, onto the sheet of ice coating the first bit of road before me, only to realize I'd become the victim of a dreadful little optical illusion...
The "sheet of ice" turned out to be a giant, shin-deep, freezing cold ocean of a puddle that happened to be very reflective under the street lamp, and somewhat ice-tinted.

Well, good thing it's not really in my personality to get emo about something like that~  :)


~Yukigami