I’ve been cautiously working a fighting style back into my play. When integrating your teacher’s feedback, you often find your judgment oscillating a bit as you try to reach a new equilibrium. By focusing so strongly on making stable games I think my overall game has weakened a bit, but that’s to be expected.

I’m still playing fast games on Fox Go Server and quite few of these tend to have a fighting flavor. But my account there is still only 7 kyu so I tend to win most of my games. So my Foxy account is more for “reinforcement” learning than it is for pushing my ability.

Fight!

My other active account is IGS, and those games are generally like my Yunguseng games, slower and more thoughtful. IGS players aren’t afraid to fight, but I would say the style overall is balanced.

So where to go for a solid fighting game? Recently I started breathing life into my 8 kyu WBaduk account. So far the skill level at 8 kyu feels considerably stronger than 8 kyu Foxy. The games have an aggressive and active quality but the flow of the games seem more principled than Foxy and simple reading blunders less frequent. I suspect WBaduk may become my goto fighting account.

I played a really fun WBaduk game today that I feel like in the past would have confused me. But I was able to come up with a plan, stick to it, and win the game even though it got off to a pretty bad start.

While I don’t feel any of these activities are necessarily going to push me way past KGS 5 kyu I can feel my game evolving. It’s taking me far less time to come up with an idea and my ideas tend be more flexible. My current goal is to push my IGS account to 6 kyu and then come back to KGS to see if that’s enough to take me to KGS 4 kyu.

We shall see!

Useful Software

Playing so many games across so many different servers means I’ve made a couple additions to my Go software repertoire:

MultiGo

WBaduk uses a different game record file format .gib. So I went looking for a something to do the conversion to .sgf and I came across MultiGo. Works great!

Leela

While I don’t find Leela all that interesting for deeper game analysis I really love using it for the move predictor. When reviewing critical points in games it’s interesting to see if Leela considered it a highly probable move. It’s even more interesting when Leela finds some other move more probable - it’s a neat way to find your blindspots.