Introduction

This week marks the reboot of the Monday Go Meditation (MGM) series! In the spirit of continuous improvement, I felt it was time to give this series an upgrade in order to continue striving for the perfect weekly column for my game reviews. Here are some enhancements that I have made:

All MGM’s will now include the game summary table. After doing the Thursday Go Tygem series for a bit, it seemed that the table was a popular aspect of it since it allowed me to provide a broad overview of the game in the event you don’t have time to go through the entire game. As a result, I felt it would be a great addition to MGM. All games featured here will be 2 weeks old at the most. One thing I noticed is that the games being posted were starting to be a few weeks if not a month old, which is not good since it does not reflect my current progress as a player. Though this makes it a little harder for me since I can’t prepare as many game reviews in advance, I am confident this change will make this weekly column much more viable. The commentary will also be taking on a more “stream of consciousness” type narrative in order to provide more context in terms of how I was feeling throughout the game and the emotions and thoughts I wrestled with. As a result, the game reviews will not be heavily focused on explaining things in depth or showing numerous variations since that is more of a teaching-oriented type review (which I do plan on featuring here in the future, but don’t feel it’s appropriate for MGM).

So in light of all that, this week’s game features an even game against a 3k that I played last week before going on my losing streak. Haha. It’s a great game that illustrates how emotions can really cloud your judgment when it comes to the actual board position and how you’re really doing.

As always, it would be greatly appreciated if you could let me know what you think about these new changes. Hope you enjoy the review!



Please enable JavaScript to view this game. Download SGF

[download label=”Download Kifu”]http://bengozen.com//wp-content/uploads/2014/06/2014.06.23-MGM-61.sgf[/download]

One Point Lesson

Using emotions to judge whether you are ahead or behind is typically a recipe for poor decision making.

Game Summary

[table colwidth=”50|140|375|375″ colalign=”center|center|center|center”] no,Category,Good,Bad1,Opening,This move really gave me a nice advantage in the opening. See game commentary for a more in-depth explanations.,I’m not sure that I handled Black’s response here correctly. Perhaps the tenuki was a mistake.2,Attack and Defense,This diagonal jump was a new move I tried that seemed to do a great job keeping pressure on Black.,This move was too defensive and failed to keep pressure on Black.3,Shape, Nothing worth mentioning.,Not connecting and letting Black push through to connect his groups together was a travesty.~~The hane was bad and left too many cutting points for me to worry about later.4,Strategy,Leaving the cutting point to play continue my expansion of the top seemed to work out well overall.,The push and cut was a risky play since Black had a number of forcing moves to counter the strategy.5,Overall Reading, Nothing to brag about since most sequences I read out usually had one fatal flaw that was luckily overlooked by my opponent.,This sequence was shameful since it was a result of wishful thinking and only made things worse.6,Endgame,Ignoring Black’s move to start my own endgame sequence was a proud moment for me.,This jump may not be as big as I thought. Perhaps blocking at M2 would have been better.[/table]