Ien and I woke up around 7:00 AM, freshened up, and grabbed a quick breakfast at the hotel. We arrived at the Sadler Center about fifteen or twenty minutes before 9:00 AM when the second round of the Open would begin. Traditionally pairings would be printed and taped to a wall where you could find your table number, opponent, and color, but this year the Congress had its very own mobile app. Besides offering an active social feed and schedule (plus bookmarking), the app allowed you to see your pairings in the Open.

I quickly found my table and drank the remnants of my coffee while I waited for my opponent to arrive. Joshua Haney was a 6 kyu from Ohio, all smiles and sporting a Pikachu hat. The fuseki proceeded calmly with us claiming our respective areas until around move 25 when he capped. I tried to setup a base with 26, but Joshua persistently wanted to break it. I think move 31 was pretty questionable, I probably should have simply blocked at O16.

I cut off black’s escape but in the end I felt like I had gained little from all the trouble. I tried to restore the territorial balance with move 68 at D2. I blundered a bit with a misread at 77 and I was still pretty concerned about my weak group at the bottom. At this point I wasn’t feeling particularly confident about the outcome.

I managed to secure the bottom group and increase my territory on the right. Black came in pretty deep with 105 and the resulting push at white 122 was painful. Black controlled the damage with 125 but the white cut at N14 brightened my prospects.

At this point I was in byo-yomi and I didn’t manage to record the remainder of the game. In the end I was able to maintain a small lead and win by one and a half points. It was a tough game but mostly of my own doing due to my bad choice at move 31.

One problem was that I just used far too much time. I was in byo-yomi way before one hundred moves. Joshua ended up using more time as we approached the end so our game ended quite late.

In-seong gives a lecture

I caught up with Ien and inquired how his game went. Unfortunately he got paired with Tygem 2 kyu player whose AGA rank was lagging at 9 kyu. He was overpowered in this game, but his opponent was a particularly well-mannered and articulate kid and he felt better about the game after they reviewed.

Ien and I broke away from the Sadler Center to grab a quick sandwhich before In-seong’s 1:00 PM and 2:00 PM lectures, New Go Proverbs: Chapters 1 and 2. In-seong is a great speaker and these were well attended. As he often does in his lectures and in review, when describing about how to build real territory, he used the analogy of Monopoly - it’s important to buy the ground before building the hotel. Like many of In-seong’s insights, he provides a simple analogy that’s easy to recall in the heat of a game.

Go friends - Jonathan Hop & Ien Cheng

After the lecture Ien and I did the usual business of wandering around, observing games, and talking to all the other friendly Go lovers. I ran into quite a few AYD members, Shawn Moore (sartak), Dan Schmidt (dfan), as well as In-seong who had stopped by my board briefly during the round to observe. In-seong told me he’d asked my opponent about the outcome, but more importantly how much time I had used. Sadly his fear that I had used up all my main time far too early in the game was confirmed. I was sheepish as In-seong has been harping on this problem for nearly a year now. I definitely would try to harder to take his advice during the Open as well as Diehard.

Ien wanted to join the Lighting Go Tournament at 7:00 PM and I decided I would hang out for moral support. In-seong was also participating in the Facebook ELF OpenGo AI simul so I would have quite a few interesting things to watch.

The Lighting Go format was pretty intense. Six players of similar strength play each other round-robin at the same table and the winner proceeds to the next stage. These games are 10 minutes absolute time. With these time controls, stones literally are flying onto the board. Ien lost his first game, but won the next three. Ien had entered Congress as a 9 kyu (6 stones stronger than his 15 kyu rating in 2016), so it was impressive to watch him hold his own against other 9 and 10 kyus in a high speed game.

Review ELF vs. In-seong

I would periodically step away from the lightning games to take a look at In-seong’s ELF game. The game was in a stage that was way too complicated for me to understand. After Ien was knocked out of the Lightning Tournament, we both stuck around to see how In-seong’s game turned out with a bunch of other AYDers. It ended up going nearly four hours and In-seong lost by 1.5 points. Those familiar with Go AIs will know that the territorial score is not especially meaningful.

After the game, the Facebook folks did a quick analysis of the game and noted that In-seong had maintained a fairly even game through the early fuseki. However, at one point In-seong haned at the head of three stones and ELF cut. ELF’s confidence jumped to 80% and did not decline after that.

Afterwards everyone was pretty tired including In-seong, so we called it a night and headed back to the hotel.