Last night was Go night – Vox and I play most Friday evenings. Go, for those who don’t know is that Asian game played on a 19 X 19 line grid with black and white stones. Vox and I have been playing since sometime in the 80s.

I’ve been studying some, watching some real-time games on a Go server, and watching some annotated games on You Tube, in an effort to up my level of play. Last week I won 4/6 games and was pleased with my play overall.

During the week, I decided I would try to record our games, so I could replay them after the fact and think about what I did well and what I might have done better. To accomplish this, I grabbed some go notation sheets online. These sheets are built of circles around the intersections on a game diagram, and the idea is that you record the number of each move, with back in one colour pen and red in another, so you build the game on a game diagram.

I abandoned my effort at recording about a third of the way through the first game. I found it very distracting to keep my mind on the flow of the game and at the same time, remember what move number we were on, and locate the spot to record each move. I think the idea of recording the game is good, but the only way I’ll ever accomplish it is to have a third person there to do that recording, and I’m sure a third person would be a distraction as well.

Vox did very well last night, taking 4/6 games. There were few kills and he did very well converting large moyos into real territory. Perhaps I was playing too mildly, as I was unable for the most part to destabilize his groups, with the exception of one decent kill. Of course, had I been successful in recording out games I could go back and do some analysis and consider how I might have made Vox’s groups heavy and attackable.