Update 17

 Been kind of quiet on the blog front. Part of that has been some major upheaval in my personal life and part of it has been some uncertainty about what direction I am going in or what I would like to write about.

The biggest news is that I am returning to the US. Hopefully this will mean more in person events for the big three of chess, go, and magic, but also for other types of games. I am also interested in pursuing some kind of career in the games industry. One line is to do a masters with C Thi Nguyen at the University of Utah in the philosophy of games. I have a BA in philosophy and he seems to be doing a style of philosophy of games that I can relate to. I was aware of him before and had a copy of his previous book but my wife passed me a link to a podcast where he was the guest talking about his new book. Here it is! I really like a lot of the things he had to say. I really have no idea how realistic an idea it is to get admitted there for that purpose but it is something I want to investigate.

Following the intuition about chess being important I rejoined the dojo and got into an open classical tournament. This is a tournament where you arrange to meet your opponent at a specific time online and play a slow game. I won my first game but have been on a losing streak since then. Did a couple of reviews for games I had played but then kind of got lazy. I made significant progress rereading Chernev’s Logical Chess but other than that haven’t been doing a whole lot of work on my chess.

Still playing over go games trying to finish the supplemental games in Invincible but the pace has definitely been much slacker than it was a few months ago. 

Still playing my daily games of chess and go and have avoided timeouts.

My interest in Magic has been picking up again after a lull. Mostly this has expressed itself in terms of watching Nick Button videos on youtube. Nick plays best of three pioneer which is a format that I feel pretty drawn to now that I have been playing Magic long enough that a lot of my cards have rotated out of standard. But I did try brewing up a mono-blue tempo deck based on a standard deck I had played before and liked but the experiment didn’t work out all that well. Other than that this weekend I played a pre-release event at Growlife. I wasn’t super interested in this set but I kind of just wanted to play one more event there before leaving Taiwan. We played in a new space that the owner has rented a couple of blocks away from the main store. It was quite nice. I had a good conversation with someone who has been a significant part of my experience of Magic here who is also moving back to the US soon. But in terms of the gameplay, time management was a big issue. When I first started playing these sealed prereleases I tended to try to read more of my cards and really try to settle on some kind of strategy. However this often resulted in me rushing to finish my deck at the end of the time limit and sometimes delaying the start of the first match. The result is that I have overcorrected and I finished building my deck this time well before the time limit was up but this was because I didn’t put much thought into it. I looked at the rares I had pulled. Decided I liked the blue and geen ones the best, so I just jammed all the creatures I had in those colors and picked a few spells to round out the deck and just said ok. The result was that I went 1-2. And I feel like the victory was kind of lucky because it was against a really good player and he kind of had trouble with his draws and I got lucky with some of mine. Don’t get me wrong, it felt great to beat him, but I am not reading too much into it. Against the other two players my deck looked quite weak. But I guess that is one thing I am kind of hoping about moving back to the US. It seems the people playing these events in Taiwan are pretty good. Part of me is hoping that when I play in the US there will be more of a range of player skill levels so I am not always at the bottom.

Politics and Games

 One of things that I like about games is that they are a refuge from politics. I think in general people should try to get along and put aside their differences to play. This seems like an important practice. So I hesitate to bring politics into this blog. Generally I think it is wrong for Iranians to say that they musn’t play Israelis. But it gets more difficult at times. I know that Duda (a very strong Polish grandmaster) refused to shake hands before a game with a Russian chess player who was very vocal in his support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So it can be difficult to separate politics and sport when things get very heated.

On the other hand, I am an American living in Taiwan. So I don’t really have a lot of avenues to express political opinions or to try to take action. This blog obviously doesn’t have a large readership at all but I have made some attempts to publicize it in various places and that has brought in more people. Facebook seems like a giant morass that feels impossible to engage with.

So, I guess I just use this as my soapbox so to speak and say that I think the situation in the US is wildly out of control and Trump is wildly out of control and ICE is wildly out of control. It’s really hard to imagine that things could get this bad. I have family in Minneapolis and definitely worry about the situation there. I also grew up in a pretty multi-cultural college town and was close with a lot of people who were immigrants.

Basically, I knew Trump 2.0 would be bad (see my post after the election) but the way things have played out really seems unbelievable. (There is definitely part of me that thinks it is not real). It’s just really amazing that the whole system of checks and balances could fail so totally.

Part of me sometimes thinks I should leave my family and return home and join protesters on the streets. But I am not sure I have the mental fortitude to put myself in that position. So for right now I will have to be satisfied with saying something here.

I would just like to urge people to try to be careful and try to stay safe but at the same time to do their best to resist tyranny in their own country as much as possible.

Update 16

 Well, I seem to have let a lot of time slip by… been thinking about a lot of stuff… also doing some gaming…

For awhile the main game was go. I have read or reread a bunch of go books over the last few months. I finished “Get Strong at the Opening”, “The 1971 Honinbo Tournament”, then I reread “Final Summit” and “9-Dan Showdown”, then I read “Five Star Kita Fumiko”, and “Ogawa Doteki: Go Prodigy”. All of these I ready by playing over the moves on my physical board as I read the commentary. My next go book is that I decided I wanted to finish “Invincible” to the 100% degree mark. I have already played over all the commented games that make up the bulk of the book but there are a bunch of uncommented or very lightly commented games in the book also and I want to play over those. I did start “Get Strong at Joseki 1” but kind of stalled with it. I guess my main complaint is just that the positions seem very random and there doesn’t seem to be that much of a chance of me figuring out the correct answers. So, I have kind of shelved it although maybe I will go back to it. I also started on Robert Jasiek’s book “Joseki 1” I have actually skimmed through the whole book but I am trying to go back and reread more carefully now.

I have also continued to play my daily games on two go servers. I would like to say I was taking them super seriously but for the most part it has been fairly casual. I do feel I am learning though.

On the video game front I have kind of let Baldur’s Gate 3 slide. I was pretty into it but for some reason put it down and haven’t picked it back up again. I have been playing a good amount of Age of Wonders 4 though. This is a strategy game, similar in basic concept to the Civilization games but with many things that are different. I have been enjoying this game. I also have watched some Potato McWhiskey youtube vids about the game. He is primarily a Civilization creator but has gotten kind of hooked on Age of Wonders 4 and made some videos about it a couple of years back. They have really helped me get a handle on the complexity of the game. There is still a lot of stuff that I gloss over when playing but I am definitely making progress and improving with each playthrough.

Other than that I have kind of been getting interested in gettting back into chess. This was a result of some deep reflection where I realized that in a lot of ways even though I had been away from it a lot in the last few years that chess is still pretty much my number one game. It is the game I have really invested the most time, money, and effort into. I have really gone to a lot more effort to play chess seriously than any other game. So anyways. I started some daily games again on Game Knot and just joined a slow time control tournament organized through the Chess Dojo club. It’s online but is the best I can do for slow time control chess vs other real humans. I would like to get back to playing OTB but most of the OTB tournaments in Taiwan are rapid time controls.

As far as Magic goes I haven’t really played in a while but would like to get back to it. In some way I really see chess, go, and magic as the big three of games for me. These are the games I like the best and feel the most interest in and have the most desire to take seriously. There was a prerelease last weekend but although I was interested I decided to skip it for a variety of reasons. I guess one big issue is just the whole Universes Beyond thing. This is a developement that took place in which Magic’s parent company after decades of exploring its own lore decided to start licensing other IPs and making whole sets of cards themed on other IPs. It started with some Warhammer 40K commander decks or the Lord of the Rings set but it was just a huge hit money-wise so the company has just totally gone hogwild with it and now there are more Universes beyond sets than actual Magic the Gathering lore sets. In some ways I guess I am part of the problem because I did buy the Warhammer 40K commander decks and the Doctor Who commander decks. But in my opinion they have just gone way overboard with it and I feel I am losing interest in the game because it. That said there are a lot of things I still really like about magic and I definitely see myself playing more. I have stockpiled some resources on Arena so I can play there whenever I want but have in some ways like I mentioned I have been in a period of deep reflection and while I realized I really do value Magic I am trying to be cautious right now and not overextend.

Something else that I have been thinking about is the mental game. What I mean by this is the psychology of playing. I feel like there are two main issues here. One is somehow managing the competitive fire. I think competitive fire is really essential if you want to take games seriously but it can be really challenging to keep that fire at a good level. In some ways it is easy for me to kind of let it slow down and go out. Sometimes I just take a kind of long view of the game but then my desire to win gets too attenuated and I lose motivation. But on the other hand, if you let it get too high then you will take losses too seriously and basically will burn out. So, somehow this competitive fire needs to be managed and that is something I am not super good at. On the flip side is something that came up in some writing I was doing about leaving my ego and insecurities at the door. This is tough thing. In many ways I am able to do this but then somehow they will come back in. Basically I think it is necessary to leave that stuff at the door and be relaxed but attentive when you play. This is a tricky mentality to get into. Obviously this is really important for being able to play and have fun. However, in some ways it is a bit opposed to the competitive fire thing. So it is really tricky to navigate this dichotomy successfully. I feel like sometimes I am too good at leaving the ego and insecurities at the door and what happens is that I start to play like it doesn’t matter… and I make dumb mistakes because I am not taking it seriously enough. I also don’t want to actively work on my game when I am in those places. So, it is necessary to have a balance but I am unsure how exactly to find that balance.

I have also been thinking some more about philosophy and games. One idea I had was to analyze games from the point of view of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms. I am unsure if I will ever get to this but it seemed like an interesting thread to follow up on.

Another thread that came up just today is going back to this idea of being the King of Value. This is a playing style of knowing the value of the pieces and moves you are making. I feel like it is much more multi-dimensional than just being an attacker or a control player or territorial or whatever style. I also feel like it really works as a life strategy also to focus on trying to get value out of your own experience and knowledge and basically the things I have invested in in life.

The Gu Li vs Lee Sedol Ten Game Match

"The 2014 Ten-Game Match between Gu Li and Lee Sedol" volume 1 by Rob van Zeijst, volume 2 by Rob van Zeijst and Michael Redmond, published by Kiseido Publishing Company 

The story of who is on top of the go world is continuously evolving. In the time since I started following the professional scene (about 2003) things have evolved quite a bit. At that time the main scene was still Japan but Korea had begun to take ascendency in international titles. Lee Chang Ho (the Korean superstar) had already been on the scene for some time. The Koreans as a whole continued to rise and have produced many more #1 players. Although Lee Chang Ho himself had a placid, endgame oriented style, the wave of top notch pros who came after him were known for being ultra-aggressive fighters. Koreans and later mainland Chinese players were also comfortable with much shorter time controls than the Japanese players were used to.

As time wore on the mainland Chinese also emerged as a powerhouse in these international tournaments. Also in that time the Taiwanese professional scene has grown and now Taiwanese talents are more likely to stay in Taiwan as opposed to being sent as children to live and study in Japan. In fact a homegrown player recently won an international tournament defeating several of the top players in a row on his way up.

Furthermore, the rise of AI has further revolutionized the game overturning old ideas and forcing players to adapt.

All of this is just to say that in some ways the go world has been moving fast in the last 20 years and a match from 2014 is already in some ways old news. At the time both players were at the peak but have since disappeared from top level play. In fact Lee Sedol himself retired after an extremely publicized defeat in a series of game against Alpha Go, although amazingly Lee managed to take one game from the machine. Lee simply felt there was no point in continuing if he couldn’t be the best go player in the world anymore.

Gu Li is a mainland Chinese player who is much less famous but his lifetime record against Lee Sedol is almost exatly evenly split. 

As in the Genjo and Chitoku games, Gu and Lee have contrasting styles though not quite as polarized as Genjo and Chitoku. Both of them are terrific fighters but Gu is definitely superior in the opening and often emerged into the middle game with an advantage. Lee on the other hand excelled at the endgame and could often save games where he emerged from the opening with an unfavorable position.

Unfortunately, one fact that dampens enthusiasm for this match is that despite the almost exact equality of their lifetime records, this match was rather one sided and ended early because Lee had already won 6 games. Various reasons have been put forward for this result. One is that Lee was experiencing his absolute peak during this match. This may be true but it should also be noted that Lee lost two games to Gu in tournaments outside the match while the match was going on. (The match was played at the rate of one game a month.) Another theory is that the match was sponsored by a Chinese company and the games were played in China. This put a large psychological burden on Gu to perform well for fans and sponsors and perhaps even government officials. This may have negatively impacted his ability to play these games well. There were also some questionable venue choices. Two games were played in Tibet at very high altitudes and this seemed to impact Gu more than Lee.

As for the books themselves, I would say they are well made. They were written by a Dutch player who has achieved professional status or studied with professionals in several Asian countries and who has notched some nice wins in professional tournaments. His highest rank was professional 3 dan which is not all that high but it should be remembered that the only Westerner to achieve the rank of 9 dan was Michael Redmond in Japan. And even he is clearly not as strong as the cream of that rank. van Zeijst has synthesized and translated commentary about the games from top flight professionals. Of course all of the commentary is pre-AI. This can either be an attraction or problem depending on your views on AI. For myself, while I am not anti-AI by any means, I find human commentary is better and when commentators use AI they are unable to restrain themselves and simply end up giving lots of computerized variations that less than meaningful to most amateur players. The second volume has the assistance of Redmond although it is unclear how much this impacted the actual content. (There seems to be a tradition of top pros lending their names to books with varying degrees of involvment in the actual substance of the book.) Stylistically there is no difference between the first volume and the second volume. One thing that is worthy of note, is that to fill out the second volume and perhaps to give a more balanced view of the rivalry, those two games that Gu won during the period of the match but in other tournaments are also given with the same degree of commentary.

One thing sets this book apart though and that is the number of variations that are given. There are only 10 games but they span two volumes (although neither volume is terribly thick). So there are many variation diagrams and many specific situations have multiple variation diagrams explaining why certain plausible alternatives don’t work or showing what might have been a better way to play. Some of these variations are quite lengthy.

I approached the games by playing the main games over on a physical board. Because it is not convenient to play out variations on a physical board because things quickly get messy and stones become misplaced I mostly just browsed the variation diagrams. This raises some interesting differences with chess books and particularly how I read chess vs go books. In chess books moves are given in a notation, so a variation is given as long sequence of notation. Usually diagrams are reserved for the main game but certain critical positions in the variations might receive a diagram. For this reason you either have to be able to visualize the board clearly while reading the variation or you have to play it out somehow. For myself, I have improved my visualization somewhat and in some circumstances can follow along without a board, in general that is not really feasible for me. So usually with chess books I play the moves out on a computer with the engine switched off. The software allows me to record the variations and furthermore my own analyses of positions without losing the main thread which it is easy to return to. Go variations are presented in a very different way. This is primarily because the stones don’t really move so moves are given in diagrams that have many moves recorded on them but with the move numbers on the stones that are played in that diagram. For this reason it is generally much easier to follow variations without actually having to visualize or to play them out somehow. There seems to also be a preference for variations because the symetry of the board presents issues and also the board is much larger so the notation quickly becomes cumbersome and there is not a whole lot of standardization. So, I will admit to generally skimming some of the longer variations… as some say in the chess world “Long variation, wrong variation.”

So overall, my assessment of the books is that they are excellent, particularly if you are looking for careful human analysis of a pre-AI battle between the two top players of the time. There is very little of this kind of in depth commentary available in western languages. I myself zipped through them in maybe two or three weeks.

I will say though that in spite of them being excellent, I did have some feeling that they left me a bit cold. I am unclear exactly what to attribute this to. Probably it is more of a personal thing rather than anything really wrong with the books. Perhaps part of it was the one sided nature of the match which drained some of the drama out of it. Perhaps my go mood had already begun to pass. Perhaps I just have a preference for much older games like the Genjo and Chitoku or Shusaku books that I also finished recently. Regardless of this sort of subtle point, I definitely recommend these books. I think they are well worth the price.

The Way of Games

Today I was thinking some about what I want. And in a way I feel like I want to win at the game of life. So what does it mean to win at the game of life. The idea I had today is that one wins by finding a Way that gives them some modicum of satisfaction.

So, naturally I want to find a Way of Games. But I think for a Way to be truly satisfying it has to be a personal way. That is, it has to be tailored to the individual. There are many Ways but each person has to find their own. But this is not easy.

Fortunately, it is not a totally blank canvas. I know games are important to me. I also have certain spiritual principles that I abide by to the best of my ability.

So, what does this personal “Way of Games” look like?

I think it is crucially important to find a balance between respecting games and enjoying them. What does this mean? I want to say that respecting games is tied to some concept of appreciating their difficulty and making some effort to learn how to play the game. Obviously this partly refers to learning the rules but more so, it is about learning what it takes to play well and making some attempt to actually learn those lessons and apply them. This involves some degree of effort. But it is no fun if it is all discipline and hard work. So somehow there has to be a balance between these two. So enjoyment to some extent means playing loose and just doing what you feel like.

I also think there is the third side of the triangle (I believe I have talked about that before). The creativity side. It is really important that there is some degree of creativity in games. There are a lot of different ways this can express itself.

I think there also needs to be some balance between being a player and being reflective. I think being a player means some desire to commit to the game and like seeking out opportunities to take the game seriously by playing in events. But I also think an important part of what I want out of a way of games is to be reflective and able to detach and be an observer to some extent.

I think one of the most difficult things though is this problem of variety vs devotion. I find it pretty hard to find the right balance in this regard. Sometimes I want to be exclusively devoted to one game and sometimes I want to bounce around. But it is really difficult to accept this divergence. I think in some ways this is the aspect that causes me the most trouble. There is one part of me that is passionate about wanting to find one game to devote myself to and feels bewildered by variety and feels frustrated when I jump around. But equally there is part of me that really passionately dislikes being constrained.

I think those are the main axes, but perhaps I will discover more.

 

Genjo and Chitoku

 I recently finished playing over the games in John Fairbairn’s big book “Genjo and Chitoku” and I have to say, it is pretty great. That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise though.

Honinbo Genjo and Yasui Chitoku were a pair of go players during a period from the late 1700s to the early 1800s. They started playing each other when they were both young and continued for much of their life (although they did stop for some reason well before they had both retired). They were both extraordinary talents and so were natural rivals but they were also friends and held each other in high esteem. At that time, the highest honor in the go world was the title of Meijin but only one person could be Meijin at a time. Neither of them tried to claim this title (although both of them were strong enough) out of respect for the other. Another interesting thing about them is that they had contrasting styles. Chitoku had a more territorial style and Genjo had a thicker more attacking style. For this reason their games are very interesting to study.

This book contains 86 of their games against each other. These are all the games that are known (although of course there are records of their games against others such as in the Castle Games). As is normal for him, Fairbairn’s commentaries are a synthesis of commentaries by strong pros in Japanese that he has digested and presented in English. These comments are in most cases not direct translations although sometimes he does indicate whose opinion he is giving.

One thing to note is that Fairbairn intended this to be a study tool so the remarkable thing is that there are no variation diagrams at all. The variations that are given are usually fairly short and are indicate by marked points on the actual game figures. He will however sometimes indicate that some local result can be achieved. The point of all of this is that reader is meant to analyze and find the variations themselves when he tells them what to look for. I personally didn’t find the lack of variations disturbing. The commentary is sufficiently meaty without them. But admittedly I didn’t do much analysis or variation calculating myself.

The front part of the book contains a preface where Fairbairn explains some of his theories about how to study. He also gives as much info as there is on the biographies of the two players.

One further component of the book that is very noteworthy is a section that he calls Go Wisdom. This is part glossary and part index. Many important terms are explained at significantly greater length than is usual for a glossary though. And each term is indexed to games and even moves that exemplify the concepts. Again, this is representative of Fairbairn’s scholarship. He is synthesizing many years of studying pro commentaries and writings and giving the benefit of that to English speakers. For example, he explains many subtleties of the term “thickness” and its various uses. This is more sophisticated than the usual glossary of Japanese go terms that very briefly define some very simple words such as atari and hane. Fairbairns terms are strategic concepts and ways of talking about what happens on the go board that are available in Japanese but not in English.

As far as negatives go, there were two that stand out to me. The first is a fairly minor complaint and it is that the book is self-published and so there are some spots where editing or proofreading would have improved the text. But I do want to stress that this is a minor complaint. I have seen many books about chess or go that were far worse.

The second complaint is that I was a little underwhelmed by the commentary on the two player’s styles. That is one of the big attractions of this matchup and I feel Fairbairn underplayed this topic some. I really value the idea of style in games as one aspect of the artistic element and was hoping for more on this front. Of course I am sure that the opposite point can be made. Namely that they are top notch pros so they are necessarily well-rounded players whose styles are not exaggerated caricatures. To be fair, Fairbairn does discuss this topic a bit in the preface and does point out moves that are representative of the players’ styles. Perhaps he felt it would be easy to overhype this aspect. But personally I felt a bit of a lack in this department.

Overall, I feel this is a great display of go knowledge and quality commentary that is well worth the price.

Scope creep

 One thing I have noticed about my projects is that a lot of times they suffer from two problems that are related. They are overly ambitious and they have a lot of scope creep. What I mean is that I will start by saying something like “I want to read this book” or “I want to play that game”. That quickly will morph into, “I should read all books / play all games of that type.” and pretty soon that will morph into, “I should be a universal genius who knows everything.”

This is a recurring problem. It also might have something to do with the whole problem of switching obsessions all the time. So right now I am kind of wanting go to be the focus but I am trying to keep that project really low key in a way. I have been reading some go books and playing some daily games but I am trying to steer clear of big goals like “I need to become a 9 dan professional go player.”

I have also gotten interested in reading sci-fi again. So I have read a few of those lately. But it has been pretty casual and I am just kind of reading when I feel like it and not stressing out too much. I am kind of interested in reading some classics / award winners but I am not making a big project.

I have also felt my interest for video games come back some. So I have decided to play Baldur’s Gate 3 which is a super popular and critical success. So, again, trying not to make a big project or whatever but just playing the game and seeing how I feel about it.