Virtual ascent to 1 dan

After a rather long struggle to get up to 1 dan on KGS I finally managed the other day. It might seem like a rather small step for mankind, but it felt quite big to me and merited a rather bouncy and ungraceful dance around the livingroom. As a chess coach I always recommend my students to annotate their games and I do – of course – follow my own advice as I try to improve my go skills. Here are two examples that I have tried to make less go-diary-like. The first involves a rather simple but effective tesuji that caught a number of my opponents stones. The second game started out very well, but ended with me being in contest for a possible “the … of the year” price. You will get what the “…” stands for.

The “…” was obviously for “failure”. 🙂

Posted in go

A hole in my preparation

In last months Elite Hotels Open, in Växjö, I played a decent tournament and in the last round I found myself facing the sympathetic Yuri Solodovnichenko, on board 2, with the Black colours. I have lately been working extensively on my repertoire with Black, but with only half an hour to prepare I did, for a moment, lose my confidence and decided to play something that “I know well”, ergo the Modern. I knew that Yuri has a favourite line that I wasn’t afraid of, so it seemed like a good idea. Instead of repeating the this line, my opponent played something that I had previously not even considered as critical. I followed my own recommendation, but after just a few moves my position started to deteriorate, fast, and it became a horrible game for me. It was a hard way to discover a flaw in my views on the Modern, but now I feel obliged to share it with other Modern afficionados: