US Go Congress Day 4 / 2026 Jul 28
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Lost to Kim Ji Sup 3K today. Was winning by a few points but the game
went quite long and my concentration faded towards the end. A good
reminder to never let your guard down - believe that every move your
opponent makes has a meaning, even in the endgame. One positive thing
about losses is that they fire me up much more than wins. Wins make
me feel good about myself, but only losses really push me to improve.

As usual Logan and I reviewed our Open games together. Even without AI
it's a super useful thing to do with someone else! We then attended
Yeonwoo Cho's lecture on Sharpening Your Go. Great general advice at
the start as well as some cool history on how her YouTube channel came
to be. The main part of the lecture were some truly exceptional
tesuji problems. They were cool enough for me to ask her to reserve
her two books of tesuji problems for me and I'll get them signed.

After the lovely talk, we chilled out with drinks and food at the
bar. It was a long day, I needed a bourbon.

I returned into the tournament hall and had a self-pair match with
Raymond 5K. I think I played kind of badly, but I did play relatively
quickly (good practice for Die Hard tomorrow). I was able to win by
1.5 points. All self pair games are rated as a separate tournament event
from the Open.

Then we attended the Michael Redmond 9P lecture on the Alpha Zero
games. He picked a particularly spectacular one in which the game
climaxed into a terrific battle that resulted in resignation rather
than some tiny point advantage.

The game was too sophisticated to really follow along, but you could
could feel the alien power of the moves. After the presentation
Michael Redmond took a bunch of questions from the audience. One thing
that came up was how that now with AI, people don't do group study
session as frequently as they did in the past, and when they do it's
less a direct exchange of ideas / difference of opinions, and more an
attempt to decipher the meaning behind AI moves and sequences. This
seems to reflect the broader decline in conviviality due to growing
dependence on AI technology.

Logan took off and I once again returned to the main hall to observe
some of the Crazy Go games. I'd never really looked closely at this
format before and there was some really awesome variants - blind go, 4
color go, toroid go (no edges to the board), quantum go, and much
more!

I was about to leave when Keith Arnold 3D ask if I wanted to play a
game. He gave me 7 stones and started by attaching to tengen. That
made me smile - the game immediately launched into a complex game of
cutting in all directions. I was able to keep control of the game and
kill a very large group. That was following by a ko where I was
compensated by giving another large group little room to live. But I
was too amped up by all the fighting to see that I didn't really need
to kill it.

Keith was able start a very large capturing race where he was ahead by
at least 4 moves. I lost badly, but who cares, I had a great time.

Die Hard starts tomorrow at 9:30am. 4 rounds - we'll see how I do.