Doing better, but just barely :)

Okay, I had to take a break on DGS. It's not actually the Go that's getting to me, but a bunch of things in my life that I have to manage. Until I get some free time, I just put myself on vacation. C'est la vie.

Damn it.

But I did manage to log on to KGS to play my first two games in the Western Go Ladder. I won the first one, which was a nice surprise, and then I lost me second.

But I shouldn't have!

See, we were battling. Battling all over, sprawling all over the board. He was winning, and then I saw a tesuji which would allow me to squeeze his corner group down to one eye and then come out one liberty ahead in the capturing race, and really, it would have been the end of the game.

So what did I do? Well, I played the tesuji, squeezed him down to where I had a choice of allowing him to make one false eye or one real eye. In the heat of battle, under pressure, what do you think I did?

Yep. That's right. I played the move that gave him one REAL eye, and ended up one liberty short and lost the game. Although I'm disappointed, of course, that I made the wrong move, the mere fact that I saw the tesuji and that it would have worked has I played correctly is deeply satisfying. It tells me that no matter what my ranking shows, I know I am improving, because I could never have read something like that out, or even have seen it, a few months ago.