Now you might think that I’m just slacking off, but actually it is not so…

I spent a busy week in Bratislava, playing two go tournaments.

The first tournament was European Team Go Championship, where the Czech team placed second, just behind the ultrastrong Romanians. Third place was taken by Hungarians, who were about same strength as us, but we got lucky and won against them. Other teams weren’t really even competing about placing in top three…

The weekend tournament was quite big (more than 100 players), my results are not so great, but I somehow got the best 4dan prize, which was definitely a neat surprise.

Concerning my games… it was just strange – I won many games that I should have lost and I failed to win some games that I should have won, but I guess that in the end it’s more or less fair anyway. :-)

As a side note, I won 500svk (~13eur) in the casino (did I mention that the tournament is played in beautiful Reduta Casino and that each participant gets a 100svk chip. You can’t cash it, you have to play it, of course. So I put it on 1/6 to win (you have to use more valuable chips for betting on more probable things like 1/3 and 1/2), exactly 31-36… and… voila… 31 fell. So I took the money and cashed it out. But they were looking a bit strangely at me cashing out this ridiculous amount of money… :P

I thought it would be fun to try to find polish words that have funny meaning for czechs. I started with writing it by hand, asking people and it took me at least an hour to find out that lists like this one already do exist and that such words are called “false friends”. Nevertheless, I think this list contains some words that no other (easily findable) false friends lists contain (at least nozki, nozyczki, plywac and prawie).

A few remarks concerning polish pronunciation ((mainly) for czech people): ć and cz – č, ó – u, ł - english w.

Feel free to write more in the comments. :-)

~~~

A side story:

Finding out how “edit html source” window in wordpress behaves
Will pressing escape close the window?
Nah, probably not…
Well, let’s try it to make sure…
@%#$^&{€¶ŧ→ø@#°’&ĐŁ

One line corresponds to aproximately one second of thinking. Of course, the table with all the words was gone. I couldn’t even believe I did something this stupid for no real reason.

It all started the previous night. I thought I should go to sleep early so I had a shower before midnight. Then I thought I’d read just a few pages of Small Gods by Terry Pratchett (thanks Merlijn :-)) and suddenly it was one o’clock. Well, time to sleep. But somehow my body didn’t agree, so I stayed awake untill half past two (that’s the last time I remember taking a peak at the clock).

Waking at six, five hours earlier than I am used to, and after only three and half hours of sleep, sucked hard. But I managed to get to the math lecture in time (2km walking, 10min tram, almost 1km walking). After the lecture I learned from the bulletin board that my next lecture started in 15 minutes and was in a place reachable in no less than 30 minutes (unless I’d have a car). I came half an hour late, but it didn’t really matter. The english teacher Ken is from Canada and he seems to be a very friendly and always happy person. I like happy people.

After this lecture I have to get back where the math lecture been… of course, I have 15 minutes for that (I’m getting used to it already). My impression from other lectures is that there are way too many windows machines and no other ones, but I always manage to break windows very quickly so I am not really afraid that much.

I took a walk back home, it’s slightly less than 6km long (at least judging from 55 minutes it took me) and it’s nice (add one point for every tree and substract one for every car, this one has positive value on almost any interval you choose).

Tomorrow I’ve got to be there at seven again. o_O

Set is a wonderful game. Read the official rules, then download TatSet (it’s Dutch, but you’ll get used to it).

I got only 1800 so far (just a very few games, didn’t have much time yet), I am sure you can beat it (feel free to brag in the commentaries :licknose:).

PS: I forgot to mention: it runs flawlessly under WINE.

When I was returning from the Mikulov tournament, I followed a bike path for last fifth of my travel. The path is about 3 meters wide and made of asphalt.

It was sunday afternoon, so the path was crowded. There were basically three types of people – walkers, roller-skaters and bikers. Bikers moving around 20-30km/h, roller-skaters 10-20km/h, and walkers 0-5km/h. The path is wide enough for 4 walkers next to each other, for 3 bikers and for 2 roller-skaters. It is used in both directions simultaneously, I guess that you can imagine the mess.

The worst were roller-skaters, who really like to ride in pairs next to each other, one taking up half of the path, so there’s no space left for anyone else. The only positive thing about them was that 80% of roller-skating girls are really pretty (I don’t know whether it’s the cause or the effect). On the other hand that makes it even more difficult to concentrate on manoeuvering through the crowds…

Okay, this will be boring:

First there was Toyota Tour in Brno, where I scored 3/6 but only lost to 6dan players (and two of the games already looked rather good for me…), somehow ended up winning “best 4dan”.

After one day break there was ESGC (European Students’ Go Championship), a six round tournament where I started pretty well winning first four games (the only notable win is against Antoine Fenech, but I am not sure whether the game is notable too). After this, there were only two of us with four wins, but ex-insei Pal Balogh crushed me in his favourite moyo style game. In the last round I played Merlijn Kuin, it was basically a game for the second place (which means going to Japan). The game started by Merlijn making a mistake followed by about three of my mistakes. After having played endgame in the fuseki in such an important game I was angry with myself and started some wild invading. The group got quite big and it could have lived easily in many ways but I somehow managed to die. Painful…

Yep, they are all gone.

3, 3, 3, 11, 15, 15, 7, 6, 8, 8, 1, 1

That’s (approximately) the number of people staying at my place at a given day from 28.8. to 9.9.

We had no major problems and nothing too bad happened, which is definitely very nice. :-)

Nooooooooo…

How could have they done this? I mean, if you live somewhere, and someone you don’t even know just tells you that your home is not your anymore and that they already moved you to 85.71.208.20, how would you feel? Yeah, you wouldn’t even care. But I already got used to my good old 83.208.183.167 and now I miss it.

Sry, it’s still too early in the morning (ever noticed that it’s either too early or too late or I am tired for another reason?).

My name is David and you also may know as Master001. But now I am Sempai001 because I am goint to be superior over anyone who stands in my way until i get to a better level. I love go and if anyone ruins or disrespects the game they should be ashamed of themselves. Anyways I hope that I get to face all of you and I hope you find it a teaching and a fun experience because i am not weak anymore i am slowly getting up to a very high level so i hope this encourages you to play me, thank you for reading my profile notes and i look forward to playing you and showing why i am called Sempai001 because i will be very superior at go.

This is KGS info of a random player, the info of his other account mentions his ambitions to become a pro. While I find it all very entertaining for some reason (the reason might be that I just looked at the game he was playing and he played several non-working ladders and more than half of his stones were dead, a solid 30kyu), it also led me to some reflective thoughts. Ain’t I a bit like him? It’s the dangerous attitude: “hey look, I’m very high level”. Very high level 30kyu? What a joke. Very high level amateur 4dan? Pretty much the same…

The key to getting stronger is your ability to doubt. People who never doubt are never going to improve. When one very strong amateur (and I mean really strong, of professional strength) got asked why he was so strong, he replied: “I’m always surprised”. I think there’s something similar about it…

Yeah, I’ve been away for four weeks… o_O

I spent the first two weeks in Rome playing EGC2006. I almost missed my plane due to the train being late, but a taxi saved me. In the main tournament I was doing really well during the first week, my only loss was against Dragos Bajenaru (and it was because of coming late to the game because someone told us to change the train, which wasn’t a good idea, finally we had to take a taxi and arrived about two minutes too late… not saying that I’d win otherwise, just pointing it out ;-)). Our team called “Lordi” (Antti Tormanen, me, Antti Holappa and Ilkka Mattila) managed to get second place in team tournament, which gained me a really nice thing which is difficult for me to describe (it consists of metal and blue glass and is quite heavy). The second week was not so succesful, I only won one game out of five. I have a lame excuse that my opponents were strong, but I think I could have done better.

After returning I spent one week cycling and canoeing in south czechia and the other week at czech go camp near Polička.

Today I woke up with headache and fever. :cursing: