The cat is back!

Hello everyone! The (imaginary) cat is back from hopping around Southern and East Africa! I haven’t played in a while, mostly due to work; and here I want to also apologise to all those who were in game with me on OGS and DGS… timeouts were the order of the last few months…

But I started playing again, I’ve got a few game running on OGS and DGS, and this time I’ll make sure to finish them! Also I’ve played two games over the board tonight at the monthly club evening in Cape Town. I forgot the take a picture of the second one, but let me start with the first one:

W+17.5; 6.5 deom [덤, komi]

I took black in an even game with 6.5 deom [덤, komi] against a new player at the club. He’s 12k on IGS, and mostly has played online, so we were a bit unsure about the rank difference, but it should have been between 3-4 stones roughly. In any case, since it wasn’t a ranked game we decided to just play even and see what happens. My aim was to lose by less than 6 points. Overall my first opening moves were good, then I plunged into a grave that was digging myself… Basically all the black stones in the middle of the board should have been dead; until my opponent made one small error and allowed a pae [패, ko] fight to start, which I won… thus the amount of dead black stones was significantly reduced… I lost by 17.5, which isn’t too bad… I wish I could more easily capture these games in sgf files, so to comment on them…

The second game I played was again a 2d, at 9 stones handicap, and I lost by about 37.5 points… Also not bad, and while my opening sucked, I managed to kill off one group of his. I made a few reading mistakes that, upon review, would have given me a loss by only 10-ish points. Still I was proud of this achievement at 9 stones against someone who is at least 20 stones stronger than me.

I’ve played a few more games online, and slowly will start posting them… But for now, all I can say is: my cat is back :p