World Mind Sports Games – More Stories and Pics

During the tournaments, I have learnt in more depth on especially three aspects of the games from the games that I lost. These are:

1. When you reach dan level, you need to know joseki. Memorise them if you have to, by hook or by crook, you need to know joseki. It is best if one can understand joseki and like Yang Yilun said in one of his lectures, treat complicated joseki as if it is a fighting sequence to gain supremacy, but to only look at the variations during actual games do take too much time and is just too mistake prone. Wrong joseki sequences (not selection) will lead to a serious disadvantage early on and it is very hard to recover if your opponent is worth his salt. In some cases, wrong joseki moves will lead to a complete breakdown of the game very early. This lesson is learnt from my game with the Slovak player where a wrong joseki sequence led me to so much misery early on, and then resulted in me having to make a risky deep invasion where my invading troops was finally captured and the game lost.

2. When one has an opportunity to fight, one has to fight and do not give up stones too easily. I thought I know this and I have always, in the past few months, tried as hard as I could to brush up my fighting skills. However, it seems that I am still missing some things and misreading the status of groups. I let my cutting stones die too easily, in a position where I should have split. A wrong judgement on the status of groups is one key reason why I didn’t run away my cutting stones. This happened in my game against Yamashita Keigo sensei. He showed me how I should have continued the attack on his group.

3. Know how to sacrifice stones. Again I thought I knew this already but it seems like I still need to work on this. In my game against my opponent from the Czech Republic, there is an opportunity for me to squeeze his corner and gain quite a significant advantage with a wall facing the center of the board early on. This is a result of one of his mistakes quite early on. The problem with me is I knew I could squeeze but somehow, I chose to start a ko to try to capture all his stones. This mistake is probably more related to greed rather than to know how to sacrifice stones. I was greedy. I wanted to capture everything, which if successful, will give me a huge corner and a very big advantage. However, the ko was too heavy, I needed too many ko threats and hurt my other positions on the board too much. At the end, I lost that game badly.

Okay, some photos:

Photo of our team with Hane Naoki sensei. He is such a wonderful person.

Our first opponent was the team from Chile. They are really nice people and I even get a nice little key chain souvenir from my opponent. I also owe one of the member of the Chile team one great thanks for his advice when I was about to play my last opponent from Azerbaijan.

My game against Yamashita Keigo sensei. What a dream come true to be able to play with the Japanese team. Being able to play with them made our trip that much more amazing.

This is a scene from the living room of our apartment hostel. Go Go Go and Go every single opportunity. We play Go like crazy people. So much fun.

We visited a very famous Go club in town. It is located near the Tian Tan temple. The club looks good and there are some good players there. We met two ladies from Bulgaria who also took part in the WMSG there. The little kid girl is quite strong and played with an old man.

Team photo at Wanfujing. We have such a great team, each one a great personality. Am so happy to know them. We went out a lot at night, and walked a lot.