I’m writing this post from an airport in Finland. As it turns out In-seong didn’t cover my game in the G,H,I League group review on Thursday but he made an additional video of the two games he wasn’t able to get to. This is the fantastic thing about In-seong’s school, life gets in the way but all the reviews get recorded and you can go back and watch the reviews when you have time. I’ve watched my review three times already and I now feel very, very lucky that I made it into American Yunguseng Dojang. I’m pretty certain that I’ll be sticking with it for at least a year.

In-seong’s reviews really embody what I loved about the US Go Congress professional reviews. Like Feng Yun, he is very direct - when you make a mistake he simply calls it out without sugar coating. It’s the combination of slow games and critical reviews that enable you to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. In-seong often checks how long you took to make a move and he consistently calls out mistakes where the response was made in under ten seconds and better alternatives were not considered. While I made many, many errors of judgment, I’m happy that he didn’t get the opportunity to criticize how little time I spent on a move.

As I suspected In-seong agreed that other than the weak lower left black formation, black had far better prospects in the game due to the upper framework. My opponent clearly had more Go experience and consistently demonstrated better instincts about direction of play as well as responses to typical situations.

In the lower left I had an opportunity to split black by defending at the 3-3. I’ve read about this many times in Yilun Yang’s Fundamental Principles of Go. But it’s one thing to read about a concept in a Go book and another thing entirely to actually apply it in your games. Having a teacher point out the missed opportunity is a pretty good way to incentivize looking for it next time. Another mistake was my splitting move on the right side. It would have been better as a knight’s approach to exploit the weakness of the two fourth line stones. On the way to Helsinki I was re-reading Yilun Yang’s chapter on reductions and invasions and I now knew the correct answer to a similar situation because of In-seong’s review. I was hoping that AYD might round out my approach to studying Go but I didn’t expect to have pretty convincing evidence within the very first week!

Tonight is the next lecture and my next AYD game will be on Wednesday. I’ll continue to post about my AYD experience when it seems appropriate but I can say with conviction that it’s worth the cost. In-seong’s thoughtful and individualized teaching style combined with the scheduling flexibility of an online school makes the whole thing feel like an incredible deal not an expense.