Singularity on the Plane

To improve at something, I usually set a measurable goal. Some examples are “finish chapter 2 of my Calculus textbook” and “memorize all grade 2 kanji”.

In the case of go, my first goal was “reach the same level as my brother” (I got beaten badly by him when I first tried go). However, since I live far from my brother, I couldn’t play with him anytime. Thus I changed my goal to “beat igowin without handicap”, something that I could easily benchmark.

To reach the goal, I did all sorts of practices such as doing tsumego, reading go articles, and of course playing go and reviewing my games. It was a long and tough journey, but finally I finished the goal I set. By doing so I improved from someone who put stones randomly to someone who is a match for his brother.

Well, that was quite a long time ago. After that my go study routine stopped and I just played go casually.

However, around September I decided to improve again. The goal I set was reaching 15k on KGS by the end of 2005. On September I hit 19k and on October I reached 18k. However, mid semester holiday made me absent from KGS (and more generally from all go related studies). By the end of November my rank downgraded to 18k? (the question mark means that not enough games are played recently).

So, I’ve only got less than one month to fulfill my target. Although I’ve wasted so much time on holidays, I thought that I should still try my best. So, starting some days ago, I made a schedule to play on KGS daily. It would consist of 1 hour of free blitz game in the morning (when there are no classes), and 1 hour of rated game in the night. Of course I also scheduled all other sorts of go study activities like those mentioned before.

How did it went? I don’t know whether I was just lucky, but after just 2 days back on KGS my rank is now 16k? :). That means I only have to level up 1 more rank, and get rid of the annoying question mark of course. It seems that there is still some hope afterall…

Well, time for evening game…

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 10th, 2005 at 8:11 pm by Agro Rachmatullah and is filed under Go, Study. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.