Estes Park

Three and a half years since the last post! Due to the global pandemic, there just hasn’t been much to report since over the board pretty much came to a grinding halt. At least I’ve been in AYD this whole time and in the last couple of seasons, I’ve made some visible improvement again after a fairly long stagnation. In-seong’s primary advice to me now is to stop studying (!) and mostly play fast, near blitz games (!!!). An atypical recommendation, but I think perfect for my biggest weaknesses - overthinking and using too much time.

I arrived today (Wednesday) at US Go Congress 2022 in Estes Park, Colorado. After registering, a quick lunch, and a brief decompress, I headed to the main playing area to participate in the Die Hard at my last reported rank - 6 kyu. You can, if you feel that you’ve improved 3 stones or more, declare a rank reset. But in previous years tournament directors recommended against rank resets as more often than not people overestimate their improvement. Instead just play as many ranked games as possible during the Congress and fight your way up. From what I’ve heard the AGA ranking algorithm accounts for such cases of significant improvement and people that lose to you aren’t penalized much if you end up having a long winning streak.

I sat down with my first opponent, and I found my hands were a bit shaky when placing the stones. I didn’t a keep a game record as the pace of the game was relatively quick. I definitely made some bad moves, but my opponent missed a chance to punish and I was able to take a lot of profit early on. My opponent tried to make something in the center as a last resort but I calmly reduced and increased the gap.

After a short break, the second die hard round had a similar story - my opponent misjudged a life & death ko situation and I got a very large amount of profit early on in the game and smoothly held on while avoiding complications. I felt quite a bit calmer this time around and I’m glad I got the big jitteriness out before my first US Open round tommorrow.

Afterwards I drove down the road for a yummy dinner. Unsurprisingly I ran into another Congress attendee and we chatted for a bit. Then I came back to briefly watch the self-paired games.

My biggest goal for the remainder of the week is to play a bunch of games. I have the 3 open rounds of course, but I’m considering prioritizing self-pair games over other activities like lectures and reviews as that would be more in the spirit of In-seong’s guidance. That said, I’ll likely catch at least one In-seong lecture as there’ll probably be a fairly large AYD contingent and it will be nice to talk to fellow students in real life.