友谊对局 (still in progress, move 108 onwards but confident White left dragon is dead).
Update: My ranking was about to stabilise at 20 kyu, but seven wins in a row (including one timeout and three early resignations) pushed me up to 17 kyu. That feels too high; I think I am still playing like a TPK rather than a DDK and am trying to figure out my true level to choose suitable study material. One very close and entertaining game was Kachuk vs. springyboard which teaches to never take life for granted!
Ranks above 15k are notoriously unstable because of wildly varying individual skillsets. Some have memorized fuseki/joseki and will get an edge in the opening, others will have slightly better reading and will score successes by deviating from joseki,… so I think whether you give or take a few stones handicap to/from anyone around your rank wouldn’t really affect the outcome more than one player’s (perhaps unfounded) confidence in their play.
Always assume that your opponent just made a mistake, always check if you can take advantage of his last move. If you doubt your own play, you’re likely to play puppy go, that is, play too submissively to win.
My main reason for wanting to know my true strength is to identify suitable books (explaining concepts, game commentaries and especially tsumego).
An inaccurate rank may also hinder game reviews and teaching games (for instance, a 23 kyu may ask me for a teaching game or an SDK reviewing my games may assume I know things that I do not actually know).
Ranks are hardly comparable between populations. Japanese club players’ ratings are notoriously inflated, for example, because they usually only play very few other players. Online ranks are already much more difficult to attain (unless you play Tygem/Fox/WBaduk) than ranks mentioned in classic Go books. I think your best shot is to ask players who read a lot of go books. I also think by the time you’re done with the freely available Shape Up!, you should have absorbed most of the material covered in beginners books.
I think your opponent probably could’ve invaded you and won. I also think you’re looking at your moyos wrong. Your approach to your opponent reducing them is to attach to your opponent everywhere and try to stop them from getting anything. This gives you lots of weak groups, which make defending difficult. You should be solidifying blocks of territory, not just pushing back on whatever your opponent does. Play a few spaces back, and just surround the territory you want to defend.
You’re also still playing lots of small moves. You tend to connect your walls all the way to the edge of the board, for example. In this game, I think your opponent responded to most of those moves, so they didn’t really hurt you, but I’d recommend reviewing those moves and trying to figure out what the biggest tenuki was that your opponent had available. Figure that allowing a monkey jump is about 10 points, and allowing someone to push under at the first line is 5 points. If there’s a tenuki that’s bigger than that, extending the wall and responding to the extension were both bad moves. In this game, there were multiple corner invasions, which are worth about 30 points. Unless you’re playing a move that’s worth 30 points, or which your opponent will lose more than 30 points from if they ignore, it’s a small move until the corner is settled.
I may soon be ready to move past the “lose your first fifty to hundred games against humans” stage and do some serious studying. Among my more interesting games that may warrant a review:
https://online-go.com/game/12179097
Black, won by resignation against 16 kyu, 163 moves
Taking advice from ckersch88, I did two corner invasions (first trying to neutralise White’s outside influence) and killed an invading group at the top, followed by another just below. However, I am not convinced that I was winning at the point where White resigned. I do not see how I could invade (or at least reduce) the bottom and right sides.
https://online-go.com/game/12138030
Black, lost by 8.5 against 16 kyu, 233 moves
I started badly, losing a five-stone group and making a group very heavy in order to secure life, but caught up with a well-timed invasion on the right and stopped White from invading my top-left. An elementary reading error on move 223 (I saw A2 but thought my own bottom-left group was in danger) threw away a potential comeback upset.
https://online-go.com/game/12179104
White, lost by 7.5 against 18 kyu, 228 moves
In the opening, I tried to tenuki (as opposed to making small moves) whenever I felt my big group was safe. Unfortunately, securing life for the big group made it very heavy and I did not make enough territory elsewhere, despite stopping an endgame invasion.
https://online-go.com/game/12138035
Black, lost by 23.5 against 14 kyu, 228 moves
An intense game with almost every part of the board (except the bottom-right) hotly contested. I think my invasion on move 115 was objectively unsound (only did it because I was behind) and did not expect to actually kill a five-stone group. My move 151 was also a serious error that allowed White to successfully invade on top. On move 188, I had (and did not take) the chance to start my first-ever ko fight.