I usually play Go over the board with Vox weekly, but with the Covid-19 virus, we’re staying isolated. Fortunately, we can play online. There are a number of Go servers available, and in fact there are a lot of players who rarely play with actual stones and a board.

Usually, we’re pretty close, but I had a particularly good night last night, winning most of the games.

In this game, Vox (he played the black stones) had a group of floating stones in the centre. There were several stones in the group and lots of liberties, but only one eye for sure. He didn’t take the time to secure a second eye, and I don’t think he realized what danger his stones were really in. I made an eye-stealing move while there was still a good deal of space and things started looking ugly for him immediately. Running wasn’t going to work because I had stones in all directions. He groped around for a while to see if there was some way he could complicate things and kill something but it was futile.

I prefer getting together with Vox and playing in person over the board, but still it’s great we can play online when we need to. I’ve been doing life and death problems (tsumego) daily lately. I don’t know if that is starting to help my game or if Vox just had an off night. I suspect he will have his revenge soon.