On wine, baduk, and a bit of shogi

W+11.5; 9H & 0.5 deom [덤, komi]

I learned a new lesson, don’t play baduk after going to a series of wine farms and consuming wine under the guise of tasting… Basically, it is a recipe for defeat. I played this game at a Korean restaurant (aptly named “Soju”… for my favourite poison when I lived in Seoul) with 10k Master; the game was the end of a day filled with wine and food. To be honest, I didn’t do half bad; I was a head by around 15-20 jib [집, moku] for most of the middle game, until I made a fatal mistake. If you look at the enclosed space of 10 jib in the middle of the bottom side, that was a capture, after 10k Master skillfully distracted me by playing in one liberty at a time while we were messing about elsewhere. The 9 white stones intruding into my territory ended up there, after my very alive group went suicidal… Or, which is a better way of putting it, I accidentally threw it under the bus… A snap back was set up, and I failed to see it in time… The shift was 29 jib, and suddenly my lead was far gone. As it was at the end of the middle game, there wasn’t much opportunity to make a come back, and I lost by 11.5 jib. The picture here was take after we removed dead stones, I forgot to do it immediately, so it isn’t that accurate a reflection of the end position…

The loss cost me about 600 rating points on the SAGA system, which took away all my advancement from the previous games I had played; I’m still 3 losses or so away from demotion, but it means I have to get a win in the next few games to stay at 19k.

The point of no return (also known as the point where I got checkmated by my traitor of a pawn… it even got promoted to general by the enemy)

Off topic, I did enjoy a try at shogi during the day; one of 10k Master’s friends is a shogi player (probably the only one in South Africa) and is proselytising severely. Shogi is probably the most complex chess variant there is, and has a steep learning curve, steeper than Western chess or janggi [장기, Korean chess]. Basically, every piece can promote, and every piece captured can be dropped back on the board as one of your own… Those two added components make it as alien from Western chess as Stratego, which by the way is probably my second favourite strategy board game. Western chess used to take third place, but I think I love the complexity of shogi, it makes Western chess feel so simple and bland. I might try it out online a bit when I have the time (someday… someday).