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The European Youth Championship took place in Brno last weekend. Just in case you are wondering, I did very badly, losing games I could have as well won, if I wasn't as weak as I am, and not winning games that I could not have won.

Btw, the EYGC 2012 has no host yet. This is a good opportunity if you feel like
supporting European youth!


Just two days after the tournament, Czech Republic faced Germany in the Pandanet European Team Go Championship. Since I missed the last train hanging around in a tea house (which was totally worth it, see below), I considered staying one more night to help the local commentator comment the games (who got sick in the end and couldn't come). Thus it was decided that I stay one more night to help him comment the games.

This brings me to the topic I have been pondering about ever since.

Instead of commenting just the first board (which seemed like a pretty one-sided game), I switched between the four boards to check the situation and explain a bit what had happened. The second board was a fighting game which involved a lot of reading, exchanges and finally also dead groups.
Third board was pretty one-sided as well, but in the end the unfavoured party managed to cheat spectacularly, spotting a mental weakness of his opponent who was probably like come on, resign already (which I would have been thinking too).
On the fouth board the local Brno hero played in the Czech team, he was particularly stressed about the game. After some kind of investive fuseki where he gave his opponent many points, Germany started to get too hooked on a ko and finally had to spend 4 moves there. In the meanwhile, Czech dude had mapped out his own piece of territory and cut off a group. Unfortunately he didn't manage to attack the group in a cool manner and was behind after the fight. This resulted in the first loss of Czech Republic.
Luckily for that guy, it remained the only loss. One by one, result windows popped up saying that one of the players had resigned or so, and finally we could confirm the result of Czech Republic beating Germany 3:1!

just imagine me standing there, holding the wine glass and blathering

This was exactly the way I commented the games. I didn't get much into detail, but explained the games in a way that the audience could follow who was ahead and stuff like that. It was not quite educative, but probably easy to follow and we could kind of watch all games. My question of this week, what makes you a good game commentator? And subsequently, what makes you a good Go teacher?
For starters, I think that a good teacher doesn't need to be a good Go player. (Of course it would be preferable if he wasn't a bad one.) I've heard that someone who couldn't swim had produced medal winners (in swimming). Nevertheless, this doesn't work with e.g. English language teachers.
I think that Go is something inbetween which required skills of both directions.
Consequently, if a Go player is strong, he is not necessarily a good teacher.
I don't know yet what we can conclude from this.

And thus ended my weekend on Wednesday.


Places worth visiting (cont.)

Brno

Brno is a city where very cool people live and thus a cool place to hang around. I was particularly impressed by the tea houses. It seems that the Go players meet there regularly to play Go and drink tea. And to eat wasabi nuts, which I totally recommend, and smoke waterpipe. (And I won at Settlers of Catan while the last train home left without me:D)


Another reason to go to Brno is that the beer costs less than 1 € in clubs. (compare with 8€ in a Swiss club)



(I particularly liked the kids' disappointed gaze when it was pointed out to them by the opening ceremony dude that Brno and the South Moravian region were known for the wine, but unfortunately they were too underage for that.)

Cha no ma (Vienna)

The one thing the tea houses in Brno didn't have was Matcha. I cannot explain its taste, it's just delicious and Cha no ma (it roughly means house of tea) is a totally Japanese place to hang around.





Targu Mures/Romania

It seems a lot of cool people are going to Shusaku Cup next week.

http://www.shusaku.ro/ecupa2011.html

Linz

The tournament in Linz, which is one of the top 5 Austrian tournaments, will be held on 2-3 April. Linz is where I go to university and I have to admit that the people are nicer than in Vienna.
This time there will be a seperate 13x13 tournament for there are many beginners who don't trust 19x19 yet.
Don't hesitate to join even if you are one of them!

http://linz.goverband.at/


Japan

The recent catastrophy has made me think that humanity is doomed to extinguish itself one day. The industry just wants to get money so badly, it neglects dangerous stuff like this. Let's take genetically manipulated food as an example (or air pollution, it's not as if there hasn't been any technologic stuff invented to make emissions of factories less harmful, it's just that it costs). Food is adjusted on a genetic basis to make them more lucrative for the people who do that. Nobody knows what might happen to people in the future who eat that food. Or to their children. The best and hopefully most likely scenario is that nothing will happen. Though thinking of worse cases doesn't require a great amount of imagination.
However, the situation is already quite *beep*ed up if the best thing that can happen is that nothing happens.

(Don't get brainwashed by me)

ZzzzZZZZzzzzzzz...

I sincerly apologize for slacking off and not writing much in near past. I am really demotivated to do anything besides sleeping. I am not even motivated to go to university (I planned this term really awesomely and I am supposed to like the courses I have).
My KGS-mom told me that this is a symptom of sleeping too much. :O Now I am supposed to cut my sleeping time and do weird things as jogging and doing the laundry in the morning.
I've always seen sleeping as a kind of honte. Honte is a move that you just can't do without or without which you are extremely limited in your possibilities. A honte improves the further developement and although seemingly slow, it is worth spending the ressources of one move for it.
So too much honte is no good either. Or so it seems. I'll try getting up earlier tomorrow. But not jogging in the morning or anything alike:) Let's see if it helps.

Neuer Post

A lot has happened since I last posted...

-I realized that Tygem kibitz is worse then KGS. Imagine the content of your junk mail folder posted during a game and everybody (even 9d) trolling without admins. (All in Chinese.)

-Won Seong-Jin spectacularly defeats Lee Changho in the Fujitsu Cup:

Lee Changho resigned while he was winning. The game would be decided by a pretty huge semeai, when Won played the winning move: tenuki! (my favourite move btw) It mislead Lee into misreading the semeai and believing he would lose it when in fact he could have won if he had continued playing. Nice trick, huh?

See the game commented by An Younggil 8p: http://gogameguru.com/commentary-lee-changho-won-seongjin-fujitsu-cup/


-places you should visit:

Erding, 5-6 Feb 2011, was a great tournament as it has always been. Located in the South of Germany, it attracted 112 players for the main tournament (including 12 Austrians if my count is correct) and an unknown number of kids for the 13x13 tournament.

Do join those excited participants of Erding next year!


The Ishi Go Club organized a tournament in Lausanne 19-20 Feb. Even though there were not as many participants as Erding because the organizers were stupid and chose the same date as another huge tournament (last year too -__-), I played exciting games nevertheless.



Lausanne is a beautiful city in the left of Switzerland and definitely worth visiting even if there is no Go tournament!

KGS kibitz

Just when I should be studying for upcoming exams in foreseeable future, I have been mooching around on KGS and kibitzing.

I noticed that a shift in the habit of kibitzers has been taking place over the last few units of time. The random shoutings of "KO!" and "seki" have decreased. Now it is words like "semedori" and "aji" which make you sound smart.

Secondly the use of words coined by KGS such as "stong", "farl" and "qnert" seem to have declined.

And due to the influenza of MilanMilan, there are a handful KGS 9d who actually speak, contrary to the former situation.

*Kibitzing is the art of commenting an ongoing game. Common techniques involve talking about the players, ranks, Chuck Norris and your mom.

Get Strong at Kibitz!

Merikurisumasu

Don't become addictively hooked on Mahjong!

How do I study Go?

I have been asked this question frequently. Here I shall explain to everybody how I study Go.




For that purpose, let me slightly modify the question. How Do I study Go?

A Japanese top pro player (if you know who it was, I'd appreciate it if you told me) once said that ordinary people cannot understand how he studies Go. When asked about details, he answered "I study Go by watching the trees blossom."

The thing is, nowadays I am sort of lazy to open the book and place stones on my awesome home-stuck Go board (in the picture below).


But don't take this as an excuse for not studying. I was very studious when I was still young and promising. In every spare moment, I would solve tesuji problems, replay pro games, study joseki, compete with my rivals and so forth. I was also blessed with the presence of Kobayashi Chizu 5p sensei who taught and spread Go in Vienna for one and a half years. It was also due to her ambition that a few Master Courses with top Japanese pros such as Takemiya Masaki 9p and Aoki Shinichi 9p had been organized.



Of course I also attended (and still attend) a lot of Go tournaments and met a lot of cool people.

This all helped me to improve and solidify my knowledge and feeling for Go.
I would still like to improve, but I am either too lazy or too busy or both nowadays.

Even though I do not study Go as frequently as before, I have found a lot of similarities between Go and other things, say, other games, language, music, nature, also in real life. Imho everyone should find their own enlightenment, so I'll save emy breath, or ink, or whatever, for telling you how I study Go nowadays.

Like the pro studies Go by watching trees, I found that I got stronger at Go by watching anime.
Below you can see my personal heroes:

Akagi Shigeru, the genius who descended into darkness

Tokuchi Toua, a clone of Akagi

(thanks to Namii who introduced them to me:D)
They are really ugly, but both of them are masters at their field (Mahjong and baseball repectively) and have not lost a single game.

They cannot teach me Go moves, but there is a lot more involved in a game than just the moves. I have even been defeated at the first move by those factors beyond the goban. If you are one of those people who don't care for such things, then I will have a hard time beating you too:P


Last weekend at Kranich tournament I had to play my little Finnish rival. Imo I successfully turned his unusual opening into a disadvantage for him, then I messed up big in the middle game, and after a byoyomi-flawed endgame it turned out to be a 2 points victory for me.
I think that I wouldn't have won it if I hadn't watched One Outs the week before and listened to Tokuchi Toua's teachings. On the other hand, if my opponent had done that too, I would have lost the game (probably by time or resignation).

I hope I could answer some of your questions and don't forget to study this site to get stronger:)

Oh, and this one is awesome too. Of course everything is for free! (But you are still welcome to donate!)

Spielefest 2010

Yet again the Austrian Go Federation infiltrated the Games Festival to promulgate (lol what a word) Go to the world.


Contrary to the Sports Festival, where Go was relatively complicated compared to the other sports, it had the simplest rules among all board and card games this time. Only some games involving hitting a ball somewhere and the spinning wheel of fortune could outrule this suspicious looking game in terms of simplicity. (I won a t-shirt, two puddings and a drawing set spinning the wheel:) ).



Although I was there only on one of the three days this event took place, I was kinda overwhelmed by the number of visitors. Estimations score up to 10.000 visitors.



This time quite a few people got stuck to this game and they wouldn't stop playing it. Out of the people I took care of, there was a cool couple who had a peaceful and consensual playing style, and a father and his son who discovered the very depth of this game's complexity well concealed behind its seemingly simple rules. (Well, they are simple, but there are experts who would rather make them look complicated, too.)

They were all very talented and I am looking forward to meeting them again.



They also took part in the simultaneous games where they had to face Li Ting 1p (whom I have beaten once out of countless encounters in my life at Go in an even game:D, I also beat her at 3-dimensional TicTacToe at the games festival) who was imported from Japan just for this occasion. With anonymous help eventually one person managed to beat her in their simultaneous game! Very talented, and the anonymous dude too^^



Last, but not least, I shall mention the head guy and head woman of Kasu, an organisation with the aim of speading Japanese games, best known for playing Riichi Mahjong. Somehow they also got dragged into the flow and became fascinated of Go.



Btw you might have noticed that the pictures are kind of blurry. That is because my camera is not working properly anymore. I cannot change the settings nor see the pictures it takes until I copy them to the computer. If you want to see better quality pictures, feel free to donate for a new camera:D
(donations so far: 0.20€)