Working As Intended

As I was watching the 2nd Go lecture in Guo Juan’s latest series, “Invasions for Kyu Players” one of the examples surprised me. It dawned on me that I was looking at one of my own games.

From earlier this term in her online group class, one of my classmates and I spent quite a while reviewing this position. During class Guo Juan talked about it quite a bit, and then it silently made its way into this lecture.

In the game, I’m playing black. White got himself into big trouble with 3. I won’t spoil the analysis, but this particular exercise revolves around the 1-2 exchange prior to the invasion. While we spent a lot of time between ourselves discussing 3, the pro backed us up two moves and explained what was really going on.

At 8 kyu, I’m finding most of the questions in this series to be on the easy side. However, it’s driving home some fundamental points about invasions that have made it worth watching. Direction of play is one of my major leaks, so this type of basic instruction is perfect for me right now.

I’ve defended my 9 kyu rank on KGS, so I’m declaring success in my personal goal to reach single-digit-kyu by the end of 2009. The defense happened a while ago, but I waited to see if KGS dropped me back to 10k or if I’m solid in my new rank.

I put in a lot of time reading, studying, and drilling this year — more than ever before. I also greatly increased the number of games that I played, both online and with my good friend Josh 5k. So, even though “kyu” still means that I’m terrible, I’m proud of the advancement.

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Dave Peck runs a very slick email driven Go service. It lets you create a game, supplying only the name and email address of both players.

Here is what you see when you first arrive at the site.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Simple and clean, like the game itself.

After you “Get Going” you have to supply a few pieces of information, setting up your game. At first, I didn’t notice that the list on the right was clickable. You can change the board size, handicap, and swap colors by clicking on the option that you wish to change.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

You don’t have to log in, nor can you. You receive an email when it is your turn, with a “secret” URL that contains a token for your game. When you click on the link, you are taken directly into your game. Place your stone, click “make this move” and you’re done.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

The source code for the site is also open source in case you’d like to help out or run your own server.

I squeaked over the line into 10k-land on KGS during the last week. Still played my live games on Sunday at 6 handicap against Josh 5k. I won both, so maybe if that continues I’ll move up to 5 stones against him soon.

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Bask in the ineptitude of my latest Go game. Poor decisions early, plus getting into 30 second byoyomi by move 127 made for a painful experience on my end.

Sensei Mathews 5k has kindly provided comments on this game.

If you had JavaScript enabled, you’d see the EidoGo SGF viewer here.

You can download the SGF file anyway.

I’m playing black, going by the name Bray on KGS.

I played Goa last night with a couple of people who were newish to that game, but experienced gamers all around. It reminded me that not everyone understands the huge effect that opportunity cost has in that game.

Bidding is a once-around affair, where each player has a turn to offer up a new tile. The offerer hears the others’ bids, and then either accepts the high bid (taking the cash from the bidder) or outbids everyone else and pays his money to the bank. This means that buying your own auctions costs you more than double what the high bidder was willing you pay you.

For example, let’s say you offer a double-ginger plantation and the high bid is 6. If you pay the bank 7, you really just paid 13 (7 real ducats + 6 ducats you passed on). Not only that, but you’ve taken money out of the game economy, inflating the value of the money that’s left in circulation. Since it was your money being siphoned off, that’s probably not a great thing for you.

Bidding on the flag is interesting, because later in the game, not everyone’s actions are worth the same amount of money. If you buy the flag for 5, and you can perform the money action for 6, then at the very worst you can use the free action to make a profit. However, if you put the flag up for auction and the person to your right bid 4, then buying it for 5 in this situation would be a money loser. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t buy the flag, but you need to have a very good reason to justify its cost.