Migrated from Blogger to own domain

As you can see on the title, this blog has been moved to my own domain and it is based on another blogging engine.
The new site will feature more things and the navigation speed has increased too.

I hope you enjoy it at: http://www.alejostenuki.com/blog
See you there!!!

Moving from blogger

It is very probable that I'm moving from blogger on the next days. I'll leave a link, and say it on several places, so that everyone is aware of it.

Blogger, though it allows users to post easily, is very limited and, sometimes, illogical, this is: modifing an uploaded photo which occupies 6k to 140k is unreasonable... and several other things which follow the same pattern.

As you'll see, the new one will offer more services and I'll try to move all the content from here to the new one.

Go's pendrive

Recently I decided to buy a new pendrive to carry job stuff more easily. But, since there was a special price for a 2 Gb Kingston unit, there is plenty of space for other things and, of course, for Go.

My super-mobile study equipment is formed by:
-Gnugo 3.6
-Ggo, on a simple java version on a single file, which performs nicely all the basic desirably features. It doesn't need to be installed and can run directly from the external unit.
-Bruce Wilcox Go dojo.
-Books (not gonna tell you which ones).
-My games.
-A couple of hundreds of games from go teaching ladder.

I'm thinking of adding kombilo... but I don't know on which computers I'll find myself and I don't really know if it can be played directly from the external unit.

The only requirements here are: java, windows system (or wine installed on unix systems) and acrobat reader (just for the books).


Kisei 2007: 4th game

On 22nd February started the game, there is a nice battle going on the middle of the board. It'll continue tomorrow.
Check it on: Kisei 2007 - 361points

Bruce Wilcox's Go Dojo

Due to the commentaries on this game I read at GoDiscussions, I decided to purchase it just before leaving to London.

Now that I'm back, I've started on the second section of the program and guess what I find: "Mind the gap. Prefer the connectable side."
"mind the gap"... I wonder how many times I've heard this during the past week, it is the repeatedly said on London's underground, and I just couldn't stop laughing when I found it on this go program.

I'm not going to make a review of it since it isn't freely distributed.

I just finished a game against a 10k and I won, so it seems that my strength hasn't lowered too much during my holidays.


Blog's speed

I've been analysing my blog through some websites, and I've found that it takes around one minute to load on a 56k connections. The consecuence of this is that the page fails to load. From now on, I'll try to use smaller images, with low quality and see if I can make it a little bit more comfortable for users without broad-band internet connection.
The number of posts of the homepage of the site has also been reduced from 10 to 4. The archive has been enabled in order to keep it easy to find the articles on the site.

Q: How many 30-kyus does it take to change a light bulb?
A: They can't do it, because they don't see the ladder.

Q: How many 2-dans does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Their positions are so light, that they don't need light bulbs.

Q: How many 9-dans does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Their positions are so influential that other people change the bulbs for them

L shapes

Last friday was a profitable intensive Go session: once again, after black ignoring my double-side approach to his 4-4 stone, I was given a familiar situation while playing as white..

There was something pumping in my head: ... this 6 space on the corner... he has to make two eyes... hey... that's familiar... I've seen this somewhere else... where?... there was something wrong with it...

... Black dies!!! The L shape dies!!!!

So you can guess the continuation. As you can see, this is a sort of L shape on the corner, and, by definition, the L shape is dead. There isn't a way to save it if white player plays properly. Here I let you try, there are only some black moves added and their respective white answers, in all cases black dies.
If it stops on "loading" it's because of the hosting service













These are some of the basic shapes which players have to learn to recognise, you'll find a deeper study and other shapes on the respective Sensei's section: Life and Death on Corner shapes. They appear from time to time on games, so it's better to recognise them and know the continuations to avoid what happened to me: I lost a couple of minutes reading the problem and re-reading it just-in-case I was mistaken.


Heading to London

On Wednesday 14th and for the first time in my life, I'll take a plane to London. I always wanted to go to England's main city, visit the British museum, lose myself in the Soho streets, Camdentown's market, speak with English-natives...
Where do you recommend me to go, related to Go? Go clubs?

Meanwhile don't expect me to post here, I hope you understand it, but I'll leave the comments "open" for anyone, so that you can post what you want. I'll delete what I dislike when I come back (spam and such things).

The comeback will be on Sunday evening, wait for my return!!

Vital points

This friday a friend of mine came home and we spent the whole afternoon playing go, we used and abused of the clock, we killed groups, saved "unsaveable" groups and laughed a lot. But, above all, I put into the real world the concept of "vital point" and its value.

On the first game we played there was a situation like the following: Where is the vital point of this formation? what would you do as the black player?



My friend decided to go for the margin of the board, to expand himself a little bit assuming that his group would live. I had to chase him and finally stopped him from making more eyespace. He made a monkey jump elsewhere on the board, but he didn't fill the of this group. A monkey jump is up to 10 points, killing a group like this is much more valuable, so where is the vital point?

A vital point is a place to put the stone that makes you live unconditionally, it automatically creates two eyes and the group lives. Otherwise, if your enemy plays there, your group dies.

So here is the vital point:


For those who solved it and know the reason, the following explanation might be useless. There is another "problem" at the bottom of this post.

Why is that the vital point? Because it stops black from creating two eyes. There are some patterns you should see as soon as possible, as well as their vital points (they tend to be life-or-death problems, which can turn into win-or-lose). They are really worth it because they appear frequently on games and the one who finds it first will play it.

There are several patterns you'll find, like the L formation and so on (I'll make a post about that someday) but the easiest ones are these where you have to check the "eyespace shape" to see if it fits on one of these know patterns.

As you can see on the adjacent image, this are the forms you have to be familiar with, and their respective vital point.

How do I kill if I placed on the vital point?
You need to surround the enemy group, and once it's surrounded, start filling the eyespace with your stones in such a way that it always leads to one of the mentioned forms.
Once the enemy kills your stones (the ones inside his eyespace) play on the new vital point, re-fill and once he kills you, place on vital point... his eyespace will reduce to a 2 space eye, which you can kill with a snap-back.

As you can see on the situation above, we can assume that there is a semi-cross shape (in the adjacent column, the forth shape).

Here is another sample I found while watching some "Go teaching ladder" games. It was at the Iwamoto Tournament, in a game that involved Zwom (w) 12 kyu vs. Sylviainc (b) 8 kyu.
Try finding the vital point of the black group around D9. In this case there are two of them, due to "empty triangle" weakness of black.


You can enjoy the full problem interactive at Goproblems.com: Zwom vs. Sylviainc

Dual purpose: Make territory while attacking

We all have heard something like: "try doing double purpose moves". And, sometimes, we wonder how to do it. Dual purpose moves are made in such a way that they achieve 2 purposes (obviously), the most obvious one is to make territory or strengthen yourself while attacking a weak group from the opponent.

Yesterday I saw an interesting game on KGS between a 10k and a 11k, there was an interesting fighting early in the game which went to the center and involved one big group of each player.
All of a sudden, when the black player realises that his E9 group is alive, he decides to play from the other side. This is the result, starting at move 71:


As you can see, black managed to build a nice wall on the N column just by attacking and trying to close white. The marked wall is incredibly valuable in terms of points, though it doesn't turn everything into territory (invasion around R5 is still possible) it makes a huge influence on the marked spots.

And, minutes later black player did almost the same on the upper left corner:


As you can see, white started on R14, black pincered, white went for the corner and the following movements are more-or-less traditional response for 3-3 invasion. So, as a result, black got another wall facing his moyo (huge now) which works perfectly with his R12 stone.

If you haven't yet checked, try invading black's moyo. There isn't any obvious available invading point, as they both deffended for invasions on E17 (first white) and R5 (then Black), which surprised me quite considerably, because I expected white to invade on R5 before letting black deffend.

Here is the game if you are interested on it. There are mistakes from both players (some of them are big ones), so don't study it, but I wanted to show you this nice sample of "dual purpose" moves.











By the way, one of them asked me not to say his name, so that's why I changed the usernames.

Go titles (I)

This is the first part of an introduction to the professional go world.

Those days you'll hear about Kisei 2007, for those who don't know about it and in order to make it clearer, I'll explain some of the biggest championships that are going on in the professional world.
Those of you who have seen "Hikaru no Go" might have some knowledge about professional Go titles.


Part of this is extracted from the Sensei's Library:

International Tournaments:

1. Ing Cup: this is the one with the biggest prize, and it takes place once every 4 years. It is based on a knockout tournament, with 24 players and played to the best of three matches on the semifinals and best of five at the final.
2. Toyota & Denso Cup: Takes place once every 2 years. 32-player knockout tournament, leading up to a best of three final match.
3. LG Cup: 32-player knockout tournament, a best of five final match.
4. Samsung Cup: Takes place every year, 32-player knockout tournament, leading up to best of three semifinals and finals.
5. Chunlan Cup: 32-player knockout tournament, a best of three match.
6. Fujitsu Cup: First World Go tournament, 32-player knockout. Even the final is disputed on a single game.


Japanese domestic tournaments:

Most traditional Japanese tournaments work in a different way than the previous. The champion of the last edition plays against a challenger, selected from a league made between preliminary tournaments.

1. Kisei: one of the most important titles (with the biggest prize), along with the two following ones. The final of this title is currently being played.
2. Meijin.
3. Honinbo: the oldest Go tournament and, though it isn't the one with the biggest prize, it retains most of the prestige of the past, so some players regard it as the most important one.
4. NEC Cup: single knockout tournament of fast games with sixteen participants. The sixteen players invited include the seven big Japanese title holders (Kisei, Meijin, Honinbo, Judan, Tengen, Oza, and Gosei), the NHK Cup and JAL Fast Game champions, NEC Cup New Pro champion, and top finishers in the previous year's NEC Cup.
5. Judan: This is where you can get the famous 10-dan category, though it is only a title and you are considered a 9 dan player. This one is based on a double knockout tournament instead of the robin league. At the end, the winner of the winners and the winner of the losers play against each other to see who will challenge the title holder.
6. Tengen.
7. Oza.
8. Gosei.

If you are interested on viewing Kisei games on real time, there are several options available:
-Cyberoro server
-Nihon Ki in client

If you are interested on the past games and comments about them, they can be found here: Kisei 2007 at 361points

SunXi Go screensaver review

SunXi Go screensaver is a wonderful screensaver for your Windows computer. It offers really good 3D graphics as well as the possibility to add your own games to be replayed, you can set the wood style, the visual effects...

There are a couple of things I forgot to mention on the review:
-This program is only available for Windows.
-Take a look at the "screenshots" from the program to get an idea of program graphics. The video has very low quality, so you won't appreciate 3d graphics much in there.

I had planned to do this review on forecoming weeks, but as it was asked by an individual user, I decided to change my plans and review my favourite screensaver today.

So, here it is: SunXi Go screensaver



There seems to be a maintenance problem on the file hosting service, so the file will be temporary available on Filefactory (look for Download with Filefactory Basic). Whenever the traditional service recovers, the file will be available here: Alejo's Reviews. It occupies 41MB.

Enjoy it and let me know your opinion

Go aggregator

Go aggregator is a site which offers 5 different feed sources, each of them shows a different part of the news in the Go world. This is a list of them:

1. GA Professional Go News: Keep up with professional go news from around the web. With this you can keep track of the major Go events from your preferred feeds reader.

2. GA Go Games and Problems: Follow recent professional game records and reviewed amateur games.

3. GA's Best Go Blogs: Follow the best English language Go blogs on the Internet. Though it doesn't include my blog, it is a list of the topics covered on other Go blogs of a high-level quality.

4. GA Go Chatter: Follow the informal and often lively discussions in go related news groups, wikis, and the like. Keeps track of the modifications on the Sensei's Library as well as the Rec.games.go group (which latelly receives lot of spam). It doesn't include the Godiscussions forum.

5. The Works: Here are the 20 most recent items from all sources tracked by GA.

If you are interested on Go blogs, there is another option available with a bigger amount of blogs feeding, it is PlanetGo.
As you can see, the feeds are extracted from 10 different English Go Blogs, 
so I guess this is what you need to stay uptodate with GoBlogs

By the way, I just modified the way that ZGo is called, in such a way that it loads automatically once you enter this site. I hope you enjoy it and let me know your opinion!!

Panda-glGo review

I just finished uploading the panda glGo review. As most of you know, it is an interface for playing on IGS, studying your games or playing against GnuGo.

The version you see here is capped, so it doesn't content the last part (player manager section). So you have to go to the download link to get the high quality and full review.




There are some controls I forgot to explain on the review:
Crtl + mouse movement: rotates board
Alt + "+" : zoom in
Alt + "-": zoom out
Shift + mouse movement: move board


So here is the high quality video: Download (61MB)

I hope you enjoy it, and let me know your comments on this!!!

Tsumego 4

In this tsumego, a 3d player punished me for making a mistake, so I had to admit I was guilty of playing without reading at all. Now that you are placed into situation, I'll explain it: on this board you see, he played a16 and I played a17 and, after his next move (you have to guess it), I killed that a16 stone. Your mission is to find the way to punishment assuming black will play correctly on the next moves...

I guess that my next games will be quite long...

White player must punish black: I hope you enjoy this tsumego, which can be easily adopted into real games, and, please, let me know your opinion about the java applet...