Yeah, I am. You can check by clicking on the reply tag, can’t you?
Alright, I have to stop here.
The guesses were:
@Vsotvep - 18k
@GreenAsJade - 19k
@kickaha - 4k / 1d
@Senffarbe - 7k
@AdamR - 1d
@GOkyle - 1k
@S_Alexander - 3k
@dachen11 - 9k
@shinuito - 11k
@mekriff - 7k
Mekriff and Senffarbe won! It was a 7k game!
Especially congrats to Mekriff! The one who played black 2 days after the game did move up to 5k (me).
1 Like
Let me list some of my thoughts as we move chronologically through the game. I’m going to hide it in spoilers since it got pretty long.
Summary
Move 4: In my experience it’s a little rare for ddks to use anything but 4-4s and 3-4s. Then again, the dans these days like vanilla openings as well, so the mud-wrestling is largely left to us sdks.
Moves 7 – 17: Black’s move, move 7, kicks off this non-joseki sequence. I think Black ends with the better result, being solid and having follow-up moves at D9 and C3 whereas White is rather flimsy with a cut at E6. White might have been better to cut at C8 on move 16 and then play for the inside, though the variation is a little sloppy with Black able to run out.
Moves 21 – 25: Black treats the taisha quite passively, just looking to live in the corner respectably. For a long time looking through this game, I had the impression that Black was a strong territorial player at least one stone stronger than White (though I couldn’t keep that opinion.)
Move 30: This seems like it squanders White’s potential on the bottom side a lot. O5 looks interesting instead, or perhaps something less direct.
Move 40: Looks quite crude, White is not really attacking Black as Black still has miai of living and running out so White is just playing a slow semi-gote move. It was here that I started suspecting White was not actually very strong.
Moves 43 – 53: Black started off saying he wants the outside, then he takes the inside, and the result looks a fair bit worse than if he had just hane’d inside to started with. Then Black finishes with the Random Shoulderhit, that trademark of ddk play. So here, I figured that Black isn’t very strong either.
Move 83: Black starts this contact fight but it seems to favour White, making him strengthening the moyo.
Moves 86 – 90: To me this looks like White is showing a poor understanding of shape, making lots of cuts in his stones trying to do too much at once. Probably best is a simple full triangle at J12 on move 86.
Moves 105 – 129: Seems very shortsighted for Black to run out these stones, severely hurting his chance of life in the moyo.
Move 158: I’m pretty sure White can connect at J11 and kill, I don’t see how Black refutes it. Looks like a pretty basic misread for a correspondence game.
Nothing much to say about the endgame except that they both seem to underrate the monkey jump to J1.
In conclusion, I reckon these players were in the stronger half of ddk. They show some pretty basic mistakes relating to shape, reading, and position judgement. Let’s say 12k.
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Just happy White found the tactic on move 194… I would have cheering in chat. I agree with Vsotvep, probably 18k.
That was a really short day 
Honestly, once mekriff got 7k and figured out that the one who played black moved up to 5k in a few days, I decided to end it there. It felt like he was knew it was my game
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Or he could have made an excellent guess 
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Tbh I was surprised I got it right. It just happens that w has a similar (but less mature) style to me
Next round. I’ve got three games, all players have the same rank, but the time limit differs: one game lasted 10 minutes, another lasted 45 minutes, and one lasted several months. So you can both guess the rank of these games and guess which game has which time setting:
Game 1:
Game 2:
Game 3:
3 Likes
Nice idea 
Took me quite long to find games that are at least a little bit similar…
Rank: 5d
Game 1: months
Game 2: 45 min
Game 3: 10 min
Let’s see. I believe game 3 has the most obvious mistakes, so it’s probably the fastest time setting, with 2 being in the middle, and 1 being the longest
Considering in game 3 there are no pro games that feature this variation that white played, and all the pro games where black plays this variation, it is much later in the game (not to mention a few other weird things), it’s not likely to be a dan game, and certainly isn’t high dan.
That being said, there are a lot of tesuji-looking moves, so I can’t imagine this is TPK or DDK, especially in blitz
That puts it squarely in the SDK-ish region
And I’m kind of wondering in game 1 why white believed that allowing R9 to take D10 was a good idea, not to mention C13 and C16 are questionable in that they don’t seem properly read out (impatience if this is the longest game) O5 in game 2 is similar in that regard.
So these people seem on the verge of high SDK/dan-ness, but aren’t reading things out the whole way, which sounds familiar as a mid/high SDK.
That’s about the extent of my logical reasoning, so I’m just going to take a guess within that range
3k
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Game 3 looks absolutely terrible.
I’ll go ahead and agree with mekriff:
- long
- middle
- blitz
I’m thinking in game 1 these players may be unfamiliar with theory. Moves don’t look very theoretical. Hm. And assuming they were actually thinking about the moves, they don’t look that strong. Let’s bet 7k.
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Based on the given info, I think the games are 6k and
games =
- months
- 45 min.
- 10 min.
I think we’ve agreed on the game times.
They looked “rather more powerful than me”.
How about 1k
(Aren’t we supposed to spoiler-protect our answers?)
We didn’t do that in earlier rounds, but it would eliminate some bias
Anymore takers? If not I’ll reveal the answers tomorrow.
So I forgot about this, but here are the results:
You all unanimously picked game 2 as the “live” game, and game 3 as the “blitz” game, but in fact this is the other way around! So zero points for that.
Game 1 is indeed the correspondence game. I tried to find a game with a sprawling fight in the early game, but apparently those are very rare in correspondence.
As for the rank, here is what you guessed:
| @gamesorry | 5d |
| @GreenAsJade | 1k |
| @m_kr_ff | 3k |
| @dachen11 | 6k |
| @S_Alexander | 7k |
And the answer is
3k!
Once again mekriff got it on the nose, how is it possible?!
Game 1:
Game 2:
Game 3:
5 Likes
Not a single DDK game yet?