PWTyler

Tag: Tak

  • Beginners Tournament IV: SevMoun

    Well, we got to the last match, I lost both, and… I never recorded or posted my self-review in ptn.ninja. At the time Simmon streamed live commentary on Twitch, however, and now the video has made it to YouTube. I figured I’d add it to my collection here to complete the set, even if I don’t have the embedded self-commentary.

  • Beginners Tournament IV: Gioqw

    My last matching of the round-robin group, and we split wins as white.

    Game One

    Game one was excellent (I lost), I flagged a number of key mistakes in my review (too many!), and Gio held onto their cap for some time to cause me trouble when it finally came down.

    Game Two

    Game two was over quickly to an early missed threat. Not a whole lot of notes to it, but I liked the position I’d built for myself as quickly as I had. Black was a bit scattered, and I think I could have kept pushing the momentum on through the mid game if we’d not ended as quickly as we did.

  • Beginners Tournament IV: Skyward

    Another pair of matches from our round-robin group, this time with Skyward.

    Match 1

    The first match had a lot of back and forth and some trading of Tak threats— Skyward got his cap out somewhat later, but in an excellent position, and it took me a few more rounds to get it neutralized. Our group of capstones and walls (nobles, to steal a term from Bill) around move 23 was interesting, because before that, the white cap was not “pinned” in the sense we saw in my previous games this week, but then once it had to block the “drawbridge” (More Bill vocabulary from Mastering Tak) moving off e3, it was.

    Game 2

    Shorter game than the first, and opening with adjacent stones during the initial swap, AKA “the hug”. I feel like any time I’m placed off a corner in the opening move throws me more than it should, because it’s so different from the norm, but it shouldn’t change the game especially (and is arguably a stronger start, though some disagree). The last time I recall this was during the Blitz tournament last year against Reid. Two high points of this second game for me were when I was able to isolate the black cap out of play at move 8, and black’s threat at 13 I almost missed.

  • Beginners Tournament IV: Millsmess

    Second matching of the beginners tournament, and we split white wins. Not much more meta-commentary for this pair of matches.

    Game 1

    A road win as white, with our caps up against each other for most of the fight. As with game 1 previously, pinning the black cap with a road under it kept options limited, and this time, ultimately gave me the road I needed when it moved.

    Game 2

    I was worried in the first half, and too confident in the second. That extra-large citadel (fortress?) was tough to work against, limiting my options, and in getting greedy, missed the obvious road threat.

  • Beginners Tournament IV: Evoshen

    Another year, another tournament, and only gotten a bit better. With a new member of the family last year I missed the July beginner tournament, and had to drop from the ’21 Open (I did get to play GenCon Online though!), but am excited to give it another shot this year. My first of the round-robin pairings was with Evoshen, with a long and brutal first game that went to flats, and a shorter Tinue on round two. Games were 15 minutes + 10 second increment, no komi.

    Game 1

    First round, I played black and ultimately won on flats. I missed two Tinue wins throughout (at moves 26 and 29), but was only able to find 26 at first. had to reach out to Simmon to get a hint. I think I got a bit focused on the flat endgame even around that 26 Tinue, and didn’t think through the cap throw, preferring to keep placing. View on PTN Ninja for a better interface for the alternate threads. Missing from the playback is the time controls— by the end, Evoshen was under thirty seconds (although a good player can keep that momentum going on the increment for a while).

    Game 2

    We took a few minutes before this second game to let the heart rates settle a bit. Second win was a Tinue as white that I’d like to be a bit more proud of, but I was doubting the direction I was headed just a move or two before.

  • Gen Con Online Tak Tournament, 2021

    With the state of the world such as it is (not to mention the arrival of my son), I was sad to miss Gen Con in Indianapolis this fall, but happy to be able to claim participation in Gen Con Online once again this year, this time in the form of another USTA Tak Tournament.

    As it turned out, signups were quite light, and only three of us were on the bracket for the event— and one no-showed. So it was up to PlutoTheBrave and I to duke it out for first and second place.

    The matches were short and brutal (I’d played my opponent a couple times before, and knew I had a tough game ahead of me, even without having been absent from playing since early summer). I won’t be going through the effort of embedding commentary, only remarking that for the first, I’ve still not figured out how to make the “Knight Opening” work for me, and I ended up unable to do much over-committed to another 6×6 edge crawl. In the second, 4. d4 was a terrible play and shortly after, I’d realized I had no place for my capstone, who sure enough ended up isolated out of the game by the end, doing me no favors out there.

    Still, my losses secured me that coveted second place in the Tournament, and I received this lovely board from USTA made by Bill, the organizer. I’m looking forward to playing a few rounds on here, and more importantly, hope we get to do this again over a table in Indianapolis next year.

    The board is red oak, the grid filled with tinted resin. Caps are the USTA 2019 capstones.

  • Beginner’s Tournament II: Match 5 vs KorokBean

    Once again getting to posting/reviewing these games later than I’d like so, the notes are sparse. My last game of the round-robin games, leaving me at three match wins and two draws, or 8/10 games. With that, I have a chance of moving forward to the next round, but that depends on the outcome of Doomsbeard‘s games— He could take the group if he wins all four remaining games, or we could be tied (which would go to a blitz runoff) if he draws either match.

    Game 1

    Don’t have a whole lot to say about this one. I had a fun Tinüe at the end, although didn’t quite play it out, it was getting there. With some slight variation, it looks like I had possible wins a little faster, but took the slightly longer approach to Tinüe.

    Game 2

    A “Knight” opening served me well, although I worried about taking my cap out of play by spreading it to the edge in that early play, I eventually got it back in the middle after a scenic trip around the board.

  • Beginner’s Tournament II: Match 4 vs Joagwa (BeerPoet)

    My second split win. We played across two days, and each took the win as White.

    Game One

    This one might have been my favorite of the tournament (so far?). I also actually reviewed right away as opposed to days/weeks later, so I got better notes into the playback.

    Game Two

    Twenty-four hours later, we played game two, and BeerPoet had me on the ropes pretty much the entire game. I’m fairly sure it would have ended up with a Tinüe in those bottom two rows anyway.

  • Beginner’s Tournament II: Match 3 vs DoomsBeard

    Split wins as white, both solid games, both of us lost to missed threats. Also the first game I got to watch back with full commentary which is always a blessing and a curse— there is plenty to learn from the commentary on a game, plenty painful to hear all the thoughts you could have had without the pressure of clock and tunnel vision being in the middle of a game brings.

    Game 1

    Game 2

    A bit harder to step through in the embedded view, but this one has a few more branches explored if we had been better about catching the threats we missed.

    Commentary from Nitzel & Ineria

    Ineria intended to capture from the beginning, but due to technical difficulties, they picked up on Nitzel’s stream about halfway through the first game. You can watch the whole video from Twitch. Always lovely to hear the commentator’s confused voices with such classics as “Why did he do that?” and “How do I pronounce pwhaug?”.

  • Beginner’s Tournament II: Match 2 vs Sky

    Game 1

    The hard cap next to that back wall was a nice position to hold to keep those road threats going and forcing the black capstone to keep vacuuming up pieces for a few rounds.

    Game 2

    I felt very clever about my wall-smashing road at the end of this one, until post-game, Sky pointed out I had a solid Tinue halfway through the game I flat out ignored multiple times, hyper-focused on the horizontal threat. Reviewing the game with ptn.ninja it seems impossible to me that I would miss it, yet there it is.