Today marks the start of the 16th season of American Yunguseng Dojang (AYD). It feels like the first day of school! So far I’ve been very impressed with how smoothly AYD is run. All the rounds have been scheduled and we received the emails of every member in our respective leagues so that we can reschedule as, of course, life often demands. I’m in fact playing my first round tomorrow at 6pm instead of Thursday because I’m traveling for work.

The first lecture is this evening at 9pm CST, but I accidentally watched the same lecture given to the European Yunguseng Dojang this afternoon as I happened to be logged into KGS. As expected, the lecture was great. In-seong Hwang’s style is to focus on only a very few concepts each lecture and drill the idea home with many, many examples from professional games, his own games, and Yunguseng games. His laser focus on fundamentals reminds me a lot of what I enjoyed about the pro reviews at the US Go Congress. I look forward to In-seong’s reviews of round one on Thursday with great anticipation.

Perhaps precisely because I’ve joined AYD, I’ve started playing a lot more often on KGS. Unfortunately I’ve been on a bit of a losing streak. It happens to everyone and I don’t feel particularly discouraged by it or anything like that, in fact quite the opposite. When reviewing the losses it’s surprising how many of the critical errors made are incredibly simple reading problems - nothing complicated. Live games can really cloud your judgment and I just don’t play enough of them. I’m also probably at the 7 kyu hump and my book-ish approach to Go is finally catching up with me. Which isn’t to say I’m going to stop hitting the books, it’s just that now it’s clear there’s an imbalance.

So for me the month of September is going to be one of focusing on the fundamentals and playing many more live games - at least a couple of KGS medium speed games a week in addition to my AYD League games and my games at Mostly Go when I can fit it in. If I get to the other side of September with a less foggy head while playing my live matches and fewer obvious mistakes (at my level anyway) then I’ll be quite pleased.