Hero's comeback

Hey!, I'm back.

It's been a while since I last posted in my blog, but nevertheless it's nice to start again. I was having some break from Go. It was probably very good since I managed to get some great inspiration from other hobbies and more importantly finnish my high-school!

Enough with the chit-chat let's start...

I started playing again less than 2 weeks ago and ofcourse I had to start from a bit lower since I was rusty. So I played on kgs a while as 5d and now I'm back to 6dan - more or less my old strenght, probably still not quite.




 I was at the Go-club the other day and some strong dude just wooped my ass!!!(btw, he was being an asshole)
I remembered while pondering about that match afterwords that before my break I was at a point where I should start working on improving my Go-style.
I don't know how to explain it, if you've read my older posts I might've mentioned how I can't realease my moyo-magistic style often. In other words I play very boring and so not like my style. My openings are dry and unnecessarily passive. I need some more bouncy action more suitable for my natural style. Another problem with my old style (finnish championship games) was that inorder for my opening to work, I needed enough 4th line stones + opponent must not have many strong groups - I fooled Tenba 6d pretty good with that strategy at first, but after all against weaker or smart players the style is somewhat barren.

If you have read Tenba's blog and remember his metaphor about him having the sword and me the gun, that description is probably pretty close. But that damn gun aint working!!!  It doesn't work if I give my opponent time to play hide and seek.

I usually play simple openings which give me mediocore positions, but often avoid complications way too much, giving my opponents unnecessary advantage which I later have to overcome with great difficulty.






I've come to the conclusion that my road to becoming a strong player was still at a great developing stage after coming from S.korea. The most important thing I still lacked was attitude and speciality. I've copied the wrong elements from korean professional games for my style. My basics are too firmly rooted at the moment (my natural style is being dulled by amateur baduk), so I intend to think outside the box from now on and instead of playing "best moves" I'll look for some Awesome moves!!! I'm gonna flip every stone on the go board to find what I want!!!!
Take a look at this next guy, he is not going to play hide and seek with his pray, he is just there to kill the animal and go back home with his pray! That's what my Go-style is going to look like soon!!!





Inorder for this 1st operation of "Assu's Crazy Go School" to work out I've been looking at some pro games with intense area swapping in the opening and use of thickness in action in  the middle game.
My most viewed players at the moment are:

Kang yutaek
Lee Changho
Lee Yonggu
Kim Jiseok
Heo yongho
Hong Seongji
Peng Quan
Chen yaoye
+ others

from the kgs-scene I've chosen Artem92 as my muse. His style is somewhat similar to mine, though ofcourse he already has mastered his style, and has not earned his egf 7dan for being a joke.

Please support me by cheering me! thanks for reading my blog!
Stay tuned for Go-lectures! coming soon!

Results EGC 2010

Dear readers

The EGC is over for this year. The EGC 2010 in tampere was probably one of the most memorable congresses for many people. Incase you don't already know Ilya Shiksin 7d and Artem Kachanovskyj 6d got the 1st and 2nd places, which is pretty amazing for european Go since they are leading the new generation of european top-players.
17-year-old Ali Jabarin was the strongest 5 dan and ended up in 10th place beating a Korean 7dan and Ondrej Silt 6dan.

Artem's chance for winning the whole tournament slipped by his hands as he lost from a winning position to Kim Jung-hyeop 7d by 0,5 points. I estimated that Artem lost a couple of thousand euros there :), nevertheless he smiled a little bit at the prize giving ceremony.
Ilya Shiksin's last game against Dinerstein was very long and there was a rumour going on that Dinerstein had said the night before that he would lose on purpose to Ilya, incase Artem lost. There is actually a high chance that this rumour is true.. russians...

My tournament didn't go well, but I had a great time at EGC 2010 tampere. I made some new friends and got to know better some people. I had some achievements at EGC though,

• EGC Team-tournament 1st place (Gimbap Power!)
• EGC Bonus tournament 1st place (I heard I got more applause than the EGC winner)
• Winning Cornel Burzo in rapid :)



To End this post I'd like to tell a funny story about my good friend "Pikku-Jussi" 7dan (4th place), who told me that he quite often sleeps during his games.
He was living at our playboy mansion and slept usually ~2-6 hours per day and even gave his own bed to our random guests (some of these guests showed no appreciation whatsoever and left the place messy) and slept on the sofa o.0. Once he slept outside because he didn't have the keys to our appartment ><.



On our way back to Helsinki on sunday evening (We cleaned up EGC -place whole sunday) our train was badly late. We were killing time in the bar of the train station and we noticed there was a karaoke!!! Oh boy we had such a great time in korean karaokes, so ofcourse I wanted to challenge Little-Yoshi (pikku-jussi) to sing together with me. The variety of songs in the karaoke was very low and crappy, but finally we decided to sing Celine Dion - My Hear Will Go On :D
Our performance was already somewhat legendary with the two of us. Then all of a sudden Ilya Shiksin 7dan appeared out of nowhere and sang the rest of the song with all his heart. I ofcourse laughed my ass off. After our song some girls showed thumbs up for us :)
We managed to get our whole performance on video. Unfortunately Little-Yoshi threatened to kill me if I leaked the video to the internet and he even gave me some painful demonstrations of what he would do to me x).
I guess I will publish the video here later =)

Thx everyone for the great congress!!!