4 months ago, I made 5k on OGS primarily by playing live games based on what Clossius teaches: “just dont lose… play defense”… then I started playing all sorts of blitz games and a whole lot of blitz games and I dropped to as low as 8k. In my return to 5k I have only played 4 or 5 live games. So over 90% of my games have been correspondence.
I only play people of my rank and weaker
In addition to only playing slow games, my match settings are to play people of my rank or 2-3 stones weaker. During my plummet in rank, I was playing a lot of tournament games and getting my head bashed in by people 5 to 9 stones stronger than me in even games and not really learning much either.
I dont feel like a 5k
I mean 4k and 3k are right around the bend and I certainly dont feel I am in that league. Although I did beat a 3k once where I simply kept slapping stones on the board, without any concern for outcome because I was certain I was going to lose. In all fairness, he joined the tournament game late and had less time than he would’ve had if he had started whenever it was his turn to play.
I won 2 games that I should’ve lost
I recently won 2 games by 0.5 points that I deserved to lose:
- I deserved to lose in my recent game against Benji
- my latest game against tenvsl was also a loss, but he kept playing stones. I kept looking at the score estimate and only playing 1 stone to his every 3 or 4. This is one of the things than Yoonyoung Kim teaches: as you go higher and higher, counting points becomes more and more important.
I did manage to find 2 good kills
I keep a list of all the large/significant kills in a different post. The latest two entries in that post detail 2 interesting kills: “The “bye-bye 2 eyes” murder” and “It only took me 100 moves to leverage the cut that AI saw on move 93”.
What’s next?
As far as I am concerned Clossius is the best teacher for SDK players. He has a very simple method that he sticks to and he doesnt have much to say other than what he has coded in his method. I was gifted a sub to him and the reviews helped immensely. I will probably keep subscribing or maybe do the league membership.
The Bruce Wilcox material has also been very useful at learning how to reduce, invade and protect sectors. And of course the Wilcox material does an excellent job of explaining how to handle contact fights.
More fighting in the opening
I have experimented with openings and recently fell in love with the points-lover opening. But Clossius says that is good only up to 5k… so now I am moving towards a fighting style based on this comment in a recent question I had: