Sorry I have let the blog slide… just been kind of busy… been working close to 20 hours a week which for teaching is a full time load.
On the gaming front though I have gotten really into go again. I started by beginning a correspondence game on OGS. But pretty quickly I moved into a variety of activities. I have been playing over games from the book Invincible. This a real classic of the English language go world. It is a compilation of commentaries by Japanese pros on the games of Shusaku. Shusaku is one of the best players of the old times (he lived in the 1800s). He is often described as a go saint. This is due to a combination of his extreme skill but also for his behavior. He was modest and actually died because he got sick after nursing the other students of his go family during a cholera outbreak. This was despite the fact that his teacher urged him not to do it. He stands in stark contrast to the scheming and double crossing of Jowa who used to be known as a go saint also but despite his strength has fallen out of favor.
I also have been reading my Yuan Zhou books again. Yuan Zhou is a very strong amateur. He is Chinese and had some training as a candidate to become a pro or something similar but emigrated to the US. He is an electrical engineer by trade but also writes go books and gives lessons and plays in tournaments in the US. The thing I like about his books is that they are really good at conveying the story of each game. He is really able to communicate a narrative of the game that includes the players preferred styles and the flow of the game. He doesn’t really go super deep in the variations but I appreciate that. He gives just enough of those to give you a feeling of the thought processes. Sometimes I feel like (based on my experience with a lot of game commentaries) he is kind of superficial and probably his narratives are too clear and hide a lot of complications. But I don’t really care. I really enjoy reading his books.
The first Yuan Zhou book I read (this time around) was The New Territorial Style. I read this one before but didn’t remember much about it. As usual his books inspire me and make me want to get better at that style. But of course, I already lean toward the territorial style. So you might wonder what it means to have terrritorial style since go is a game of territory. Well in go there are some different styles just like in chess. There is a rough division between territorial players and players who prefer influence or thickness. Obviously, the thickness players have to convert to territory later on. So what is thickness? This is building strong positions that can be used for fighting or to force the opponent to make concessions. It’s just a different emphasis. But really there are different styles. The territorial style is one that prefers to take solid territory from early in the game.
The Yuan Zhou book I am going through now is about Park Junghwan’s games with Ke Jie. Park was the top Korean player and in fact world number 1 for awhile. Ke Jie is Chinese and was also world number one for a while. So their games were pretty great. Sometimes it makes me sad how quickly things change at the top but that is just sports for you.
I have also been doing a good number of tesuji problems and life and death problems. Life and death problems are ones where you have to find a way to make a group live (get two eyes) even when it is closely surrounded by the enemy. These are kind of the classic problem style. Tesujis are special moves that are usually a bit counter-intuitive but are extra effective. These can involve more general sorts of situations as there can be tesujis for a wide variety of circumstances.
I also own some Chinese language go books. I have tried translating these by hand but the process is pretty painful since my Chinese is not really great. But AI makes the process much easier. So I have long felt that go books might be a way for me to sustain my interest in learning Chinese if I could find a method of engaging with them that was satisfying. So, AI is cool because it can do a good job with translation but it can also construct lessons based on the pages it is translating… so I can learn Chinese through go books!
