After having read the rules these were my first games of breakthrough. I fully understand that winning fourth league isn’t much of an accomplishment, but I am happy nevertheless. I really enjoy breakthrough, the rules are very simple yet the strategy seems quite complicated.
Looking forward to playing more breakthrough… :hearteyes:
I never really liked videos or movies, for some reason I always prefered still images.
I began to slowly change my point of view after spending some time looking around youtube. There are many interesting things, such as the story of gamer granny, interview with extreme skier Jamie Pierre, kabaret dno’s freestyler mixing pop songs into a story, karaoke for the deaf with a wonderful mime, all crazy videos of Brookers, or highly educational powers of ten (which displays someone having a lunch on a grass and zooms out to galaxies and then zooms in to quarks).
Feel free to post links to interesting videos in the comments. 
On Thursday I went by train to Tesin to meet the Pocsai family with Ondrej Silt. They were two and half hours late due to some complications with finding the right way but we managed to reach Warsaw (and find our accomodation) before midnight. On Friday we’ve done some sightseeing (primarily the Old town) and were the first to come to the playing place.
In the first round I played with Radek and lost by a few points after not really punishing his deep invasion. Second round with Roman Pszonka was a difficult game since I let him make a lot of influence all over the board. However, I managed to reduce rather succesfully and made a super strong group in the middle, then one overplay by him and he had to resign. Third round with Ondrej Silt, I made a good start and captured a few of his stones, but then he made some pretty good invasions and my “influence” turned into a weak group and I got toasted. Fourth round was nasty, I got Wojciech Wieczorek and the game went terribly wrong. He cut my good shape and it worked for him, I almost died. The rest of the game was under his control, and despite me getting a few points here and there I was still 10 points short. I could have let him lose on time though, because his time run out, but I thought it would be unfair because the ing clocks weren’t talking at all (maybe I should have let him lose though, he didn’t show much appreciation for me allowing him to continue (but maybe that’s just my feeling)). Fifth round with Fisz (aka Kamil Chwedyna), he made a lot of influence, I made two dead groups. There was a lot of fighting… to make the long story short, part of his “influence” died in the end. Sixth round with Leszek Soldan started with a fight, which I managed quite well in the beginning but collapsed later when I let him attack me too much.
The tournament was very nicely organized except of one thing – pairing. The pairing was done as bad as possible: in the first round, two strongest players played with each other (which is a very serious mistake) and Tibor Pocsai played with Rita Pocsai (that would be easy to avoid, at least in the first round). Some people were paired up several times (and never down), someone said it was according to sos but I don’t really believe that. 
And the last round’s pairing was the worst possible for me (although that was only bad luck, no bad pairing), like the only one that enabled me to fall down to 9th place… which I did, by the way.
BIG thanks to vertigo for the chinese fan he brought me and for organizing the great tournament, to Krzystof Giedrojc for giving me the book “graj jak shodan” (”play like a shodan”) to improve my Polish (juz to jest lepsze? 
), to Venca Kijonka for letting me stay at his home when I couldn’t get back home, to Tibor Pocsai for driving me safely, to mama Pocsai for taking care about me as if I was her son, to Ondrej Silt and Rita Pocsai for being such a perfect couple (and to Ondrej for helping me to arrange everything and enlightening me with stories (not only) from Japan), to kotasia and all the others who persuaded me to go to Polish Summer Go School.
I used to think that sudoku was stupid. But lately I’ve seen someone solving it and was explained why there is much more to it than I’d originally thought.
And recentlky I found Sudoku Combat. It rocks. 
The best thing is ability to easily challenge your friends with whom you can compete in real time. Just challenge me! (errr, I mean… when I get back from Warsaw, which will be in 4 days or so (yeah, I know, my poor blog isn’t recieving much attention from me…)).
There are 20 different board games on littlegolem. Some idiot thought it would be a neat idea to make a tournament involving all the games for the title “Monster of Little Golem”. He gathered with other similarly thinking retards in the forum and we (did I really say “we”?) decided to play in four groups of 7 people, each pair playing each game twice (with each player moving first in one of the two games). This makes a grand total of 20 (games) * 2 (each game played twice) * 6 (opponents) = 240 games. And you know what? The “reward” for being succesful (in first two of the group in number of won games) is ticket to the grand final, 8 people who will each have to play 280 extra games (I decided to spare you the math now).
Masochistic. :wacko:
It’s crazy, I recieve aproximately 10 spam comments every hour. 
It used to be like one or two spam comments a day, but not anymore…
So of course I had to take some countermeasures, the first one is: the author must have a previously approved comment for the new one to appear instantly. If it isn’t enough, I will continue to make it harder for spammers… you will have to have an approved account, for example. But I’d really hate to do that as it would stop most of already rare genuine comments. 
I just found out that there are tournaments in rock, paper, scissors. Not only that, they have various official organizations and arrange tournaments (there’s also some not small prize money), there are many strategies, some of which I find incredibly funny (please read the descriptions of the gambits carefully, I almost fell of my chair 
).
There is also a computer rock, paper, scissors championship, which is much more interesting, but I feel waaay too tired now :yawn: so I leave the rest to curious readers (yeah, my readers are actually more lazy than curious, but whatever…)
Yeah baby! :thumbup1:
Well, I didn’t exactly win, and it was only third league, but I am satisfied. I finished second in hex.ch.13.3.3, which means advancing to second league.
The key game was against Jose Ma Grau Ribas. (in case you still don’t know, in hex each player tries to connect his sides of the board – very simple) I started horribly, it almost couldn’t hve been worse. I was seriously thinking about resigning around moves 12 and 20 :crying:(you can click on the numbers to see the moves). Move nr 22 was just desperate, but it somehow turned out well. Then my opponent made a serious mistake in move 31 (yah, he thought he was being clever :smartass:), then I am happy about my move 32, although it looks stupid, it covers several threats simultaneously. I don’t know when I first realised that I was going to win the game, 32 felt good but it was all unsure back then. I was sure of my win when playing 42. The sequence to 59 is one of the very few totally forced sequences that there were – all leading to safe connection. Had I lost this game, I’d stay in third league, winning enabled me to advance and I also gained some cool rating points (now I have 1800, which is rather neat). Omg this was a long paragraph… I just really wonder whether anyone will actually go through the game… (as I said, rules of hex are easy (and it’s a very cool game)).
One thing worth mentioning is that this championship was “consistent”, eg. if you look at the results, you can see all the wins are above the diagonal and all the losses below it. This is probably rather rare, for example current twixt.ch.12.1.1 (yeah, I’m in the first league ) is all messed up (it’s partly because of me, as I’ve beaten Klaus ‘TwixT god’ Hussmans (it was a fast game, like most games with Klaus… but this one had different result than most 
) as well as NieWiesz (Polish prodigy) and lost most other games against relatively weaker players (not necessarily weaker than me, but weaker than Klaus).
Geez, I start writing about hex championship, then longishly analyze one hex game and then switch to bragging about beating Klaus… 
Hi there, :flowers: I finally took time to change the phpbb default smileys (that I didn’t really like :unsure:) to these new wonderful ones. :woot:
It was really easy, thanks to more smilies plugin :thumbup:
The smileys used are from free smileys collections. :hearteyes: Anyone knows where these are originally from? :confused:
Well, that’s it, :smartass: enjoy the new smileys. :licknose:
PS: They are available in comments too, :shifty: so you should try them out :sorcerer: (I really don’t know what else to do (except trolling, that’s sure & easy way ) to persuade you to write comments. :rolleyes:
I am afraid my fear is almost chronical by now. It developed during past months. I irrationally fear almost everything. One of my more understandable fears is fear of heights, but then there are many fears so irrational I’d be ashamed to write about them here, let’s just say they are utterly ridiculous.
The thing that is really weird about all this is that I am kind of addicted to fear, I just can’t help but fear when I have the option (I know it sounds weird, but I don’t have to fear when I have something to do, I voluntarily choose it (well, the voluntarity is questionable, but I am kind of obsessed, something like people who are obsessed with hurting themselves (awww, it’s difficult to explain, maybe I should just visit a psychologist/psychiatrist )).
But I guess that I still have time to get rid of that obsession… and if I’m not succesful, I should probably seek professional help.
PS: Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they are NOT out to get you.”