Intense Go game

I just wrapped up a rather intense game of Go. I made some serious mistakes, certainly more than I can identify myself..but my opponent made more! I was playing black with a 2 stone handicap against my opponent who is 8kyu.

Moves 1 - 36: I felt pretty good about these moves. I made life in the corner and had my opponent separated. The problem is that he had a live group on the bottom and his group on the right side was under no real threat.

Moves 37 - 39: I knew these moves would be coming very soon, wasn’t surprised white jumped right in and did it.

Moves 40 - 55: Move 43 was not what I expected white to do but it makes sense now. If white had jumped to M6, I could have followed and squeezed his group a little more with K5.. his line has me squished against the bottom of the board and fighting for life.

Moves 55 - 71: Move 56 was something I thought about for about 30 seconds.. this is a long time for me to consider a move. I need to slow down my play but it seems like I spend less than 30 seconds on most moves. The problem with this is that it takes me a little while to read out a few possible (and what I think is most probable) variations to decide if I like the line. As I play out variations I’m finding a lot more power in this move than I thought it would have. Follow this line through to Move 71 and it’s going well for me I think. I was expecting white to invade at the san-san point and was glad to see it.

Move 115 : I wasn’t expecting this move and it made me immediately concerned about the upper right.

Move 116 : I just dove into the corner. I figured that white just about had the lower left corner taken from me so I better get something out of the upper left. I know a few joseki for this position and they all seemed like they would give me a good result.

Move 122 : It was a joseki until this move, I’ve seen in the past how white could be cut if he didn’t defend against my move. Plus this move provides a little strength for the K16 stone. I ended up sacrificing some stones in this area but I think they served a noble purpose. :)

Move 147 : I was too excited about killing a good portion of the upper left corner. I didn’t want my opponent to have a KO fight there but didn’t realize I would end up endangering my entire bottom side group. It turns out I was utterly surrounded and had to get serious.

Up to Move 204 : A lot of this is mad fighting, trying to make something happen..sad really. Then it occurred to me, if I could somehow get lucky and capture whites group on D10, then my bottom group would live and I would surely win.

Move 208 : My opponent missed this moves intent.. truth be told, we were playing a little fast at this point and he may have just got too much into the rythm of the game. I was making some good in-roads to surrounding his entire upper group which may have offset the loss of my lower group that was dead.. until now. This move assured me that I could save my bottom group which was worth a score swing of about 40 points. I am really lucky here, my goals in Go are to not have to resort to making something happen and ‘getting lucky’, so this is definitely a good lesson.

The rest of the game is some late middle game fighting and end game moves. Before my opponent resigned, the score result was me ahead by like 30 points. This tells me that all things being equal, if I had lost my bottom group but had killed the top group it would have been a very close game.

If you’re a Go player, here’s a link to the game file for your review. If you have any thoughts on the game and care to email them to me I would be grateful!

http://kgs.kiseido.com/games/2006/1/27/badplayera-halo5.sgf

Some updates..

I’ve gotten a few (two) requests in the past asking for my email address to be available from the blog and I read somewhere that a personal picture on a blog makes the experience.. well.. more personal. So, over lunch I made some updates:

1. Added a picture of myself and a link to my email address, this is a placeholder for adding more personal information if/when the time comes.

2. Reorganized the left column so that links were closer to the top and the archive list wasn’t double-spaced.

3. Lessened the margins between the left column and body, and expanded the body of the post a bit so that I’m making better use of my browser realestate. I also increased the font size a little bit so my mom could read the page a little better, possibly even without her glasses on.

Just some simple updates to make the blog a little more friendly.. now if I can track down the reports I’ve got of vanishing comments.

Shoobie Watercolor

This morning I spent a couple of hours fiddling with watercolor again.. I painted a picture of our dog shoobie, this is based off a photo from our refrigerator.. Watercolor is hard! (and fun!)

Click for bigger picture

Brew #4 : Zen Chocolate Imperial Stout

Wendie and I brewed a high gravity (should finish around 8.8% alcohol) beer this morning. The weather was really calm and we had a good time. Zen Chocolate Imperial Stout should be a nice robust stout with a little sweetness and a chocolate flavor to hide the high alcohol content.

Zen Chocolate Imperial Stout

1. Bring 6ga. water to 150F and steep the following grains for 30 minutes:
16oz. Chocolate Barley
10oz. Roasted Barley
8oz. US60 Crystal Barley
8oz. Special B Barley
2oz. Black Patent
2tsp. Gypsum

2. Rinse grains with 1.5quarts of 150F water.

3. Remove steeping grains and bring pot to a boil. Turn off heat and add:
3lbs. Extra Light Dry Malt Extract
7lbs. Light Liquid Malt Extract
2oz. Cascade hops
Turn on heat, boil wort for 25minutes.

4. Add 1oz. Cascade hops, boil for 15minutes.

5. Add 1oz. Cascade hops, 1tsp. Irish Moss, boil for 15minutes.

6. Add 1oz. Hallertau hops, 0.5oz. Licorice root, boil for 15minutes.

7. Chill wort to under 80F. I strained out a few scoops of hops to make the transfer to primary easier.

8. Poured wort through funnel to primary making sure to get good aeration of the wort. We pitched the yeast on top of the wort using a quart of the yeast cake from the Freakin Oaty Stout brew. Since this is a high gravity beer, it really helps to pitch a big colony of strong yeast to get things going quickly. Let’s see how it turns out!

9. Measured Original Gravity as 1.082! This is our first big beer, I hope the yeast can handle all of the sugars! We did our best to make the wort, now it is out of our hands. :)

The end of step #1, we get the color and extra flavor from these grains.

This is the first addition of hops, 2oz. Cascade, just before they got fully soaked and boiled into the wort. I love the smell of these hops while the wort is boiling.

1/16 Edit: I had to put a blow-off tube on the brew last night because it looked like it was going to be an active fermentation.. Thank goodness I did, this thing has been blowing off yeast and brew foam all night and hasn’t slowed yet!

1/30 edit : Melted 10oz of bakers cocoa powder into about 2c. of boiling water and poured this into the bottom of the 5ga. secondary carboy. Measured the SG at 1.025, the brew tasted very alcoholic. I think if this flavor mixes well with the cocoa and the alcoholic flavor settles down this should be a good brew.

2/2 edit : The bakers cocoa seems to be bubbling up a bit.. looks kinda neat and gross at the same time. mmm I can’t wait. :)