Go tournament success

This last weekend was the fourth quarter 2006 SA Internet Go tournament, and I was involved in some serious ass-whippin'! I won group 2 in the last tournament, which qualified me to participate in group 1 this tourney, and with Victor Chow, 6-dan, and his wife, Aki Zhou, 5-dan, entering, the field was always going to be tough. I was the weakest player in the group at 2k, with Andrew Davies second weakest at 1k. Ben Gale, 3-dan, was the only other non-shodan in the group. Of course, Round 1, I met up with Aki (playing as JuliusPunk). I was determined to at least lose with style, and went at her with a refusal to back down. This meant I got a fairly decent result in the first complicated corner fight, but then my tenacious tenuki'ing became painful, when my misreads left one of her groups living, while I had to take gote, conceding a ponnuki elsewhere on the board. From there it was mostly one-way traffic, with me taking chances to try reduce the deficit. In the end, I lost 3 corner invasions, of which 1 was distinctly savable, but was lost due to bad reading, and another of which I should have been able to save some of in a ko fight. In the process of (not) "saving" my corner invasions, I destroyed my top side, and damaged my central moyo, and ended up losing by an immense 111.5 points. I know I can do better if I don't try to win, though. One of those strange Go paradoxes. Well, now with nothing to lose, I faced Tristen (overdone) in Round 2, who I have a decent record against in social play. In the end, I overplayed a bit, but managed to weasel life on both sides of his one corner enclosure, not leaving him with much. Then I got into trouble trying to attack him, and was lucky to get away. Once I got out, I launched an attack on one of his groups inside my ex-moyo, and it died, giving me a win vs a 1-dan, and some good index points. Last Round I was up against Chris Visser (ChrisVis), also supposedly a 1-dan. His recent performances overseas and his win against Konrad earlier in the day make me suspect whether he's not a little underranked, but I decided to give it a bash. In the end I was forced down a path I couldn't read out, and made an error defending a corner rather than some cutting stones. This was followed by an invasion, and I was far behind. He followed this up with a large moyo, and was far ahead. However, he continued being aggressive, and opening a larger lead. Eventually a counter attack allowed me to use some aji toat least get one of my dead groups to live (perhaps). He defended in the wrong place, and my aji came to life, leaving him with 3 new dead groups, and saving 2 of my dead groups. A turn-around which I just had to safely steer to a roughly 30-point victory. Undeserved, probably, but I fought hard for it. Another 1-dan win leaves me well in the promotion zone of 2-kyu, and more importantly, 2 wins on the day left me tied for 2nd in the tournament with Ben Gale and Aki Zhou, beating all the 1-dans. And it may give me some nice placing points as well, not that I'm really in the running for a national representation. But maybe one day... If you want to check out the games, you can find them in my game archive on KGS, where the tournament was held. Link: http://www.gokgs.com/gameArchives.jsp?user=thekro. And in-between the games, we popped in at Dalene's uncle's house in Dalsig, where Dalene's dad's family was having their Christmas get-together. Great food and lazing around chatting, but I don't know the people so well, so I felt a bit awkward. Marleen and JC were there at about our age, and the rest of the children were considerably younger (understandable, since Radi's sisters are all much younger than Radi and Oom Johan). There were also a couple of Christmas gifts dished out, so we're looking forward to find out what we've gotten. We had to leave the party before the Springbok rugby started, because Dalene had to go to Sharnelle's stork tea in Bellville. They apparently had a good time, while I returned for game 3 of the tournament. After the game, I found Robert and Andries and Adrian in the Spur, who had just watched us actually not lose a Springbok rugby game we'd been leading at half time. We decided to take out a movie (the Rundown, my recommendation), and went to watch it at Robert,s place, when Dalene joined us there. On the way to his place, we bought some ice-cream, and at his place, he brought me up to date with the newest Weird Al album, which he'd bought on Amazon. Features one particularly humorous video, "White and Nerdy". Check it out, if you can find it. Monday night, we watched a DVD at our cell group, about the size and wonder of the universe, and how it conveys the size, power and majesty of God. This led to a quickly-stalled discussion about life on other planets, and what people think of it, and how it would affect one's religion. Otherwise, we've just been packing, and preparing for our move on Thursday. As of now, the people moving out have still not got a confirmed time for inspection, and their phones (all 3 guys') are off. So, we may well just have to put things in the garage at the beginning, if we can move in at all.