"Eyeless in a sea of black stones"

Strange revelations in my game. I finally admitted to myself that I'm not a 22 kyu, despite my ranking on the Kiseido Go Server. Some time ago a 22 Kyu resigned very early on in a game (he was playing dreadfully), and as a result I suddenly jumped six stones. Following on from that I stopped playing ranking games for a while, disheartened at losing to Dan all the time. But because of the way the match system works on Kiseido, I could only get to play people who were genuinely 22 kyu, meaning I was getting trounced to the point of absurdity. Following some sage yet obvious advice on the KGS chatroom, I played a ranking game against a 22 kyu and lost, which immediately bounced me down to a 28 again. I'm not sure if my losing made the 22 kyu jump up by eight stones. I hope not, as he'll now be in the same position I was in. Thinking of all the players on the server, I can easily imagine these strange chains of communication made up of wrongfully advancing players. Presumably this bottoms out eventually - Dan matches tend to come down to a one or two stone lead.

My next match was against a 29 kyu, and I played much more effectively, and following black's resignation I rose a stone. My opponent said he "had to go" but I was giving him a hard time, so suspect he was saving face. Suddenly KGS is a nice place to be again!

And on the Dan front I've won three consecutive games, which we both agree is only partly down to an improvement in my own game. Dan's a little out of practice. On Monday I beat him by about eighty points, and would have beaten him by even more had I not mucked up a delightful little corner tesuji (I put myself into atari as a crooked four instead of a square, letting him live, which served me right for being so cocky). I gifted Dan with a snapshot of the Sensei Library - a wonderful and only marginally annoying wikipedia on the game, and a copy of the KGS client server, whose tree diagram approach to variation exploration is second to none. Hopefully Dan's going to be online at some point soon, which means he won't be restricted to playing TurboGo and myself.

And my set's black stones stain the fingers. I'm trying to decide whether to remedy this with some nail-varnish or not. Another benefit of playing online! Those interested in any of this can check out my slow and eratic progress here.