I feel like I kinda cheated my way through the tournament with simple random luck.
24 participants were split into 6 groups of 4. There were 12 dans, half, so two dans per group. But division was random (which somewhat makes sense since ranks are from different servers and it’s toroidal). I ended up in a division with 6k, 15k and 16k. But that’s not all. 16k didn’t show up because they mixed up timezones. 6k also missed the tournament. So I only needed to win against 15k.
They misread and pulled out this ladder. Read through it, good practice.
And that’s it, I’m in play-offs. When other kyus had to play TelegraphGo and le_4TC to get through, for example.
But that’s not all. Surely in quarterfinals I’ll play dans now and drop out. Top places in groups go to play-offs, all dans except me. And two wildcards go to play-offs from second places in groups, and randomly it was our OGS-er wurf and another 7 kyu player. And guess what, randomly I got to play that another kyu player. Which is harder than 15k but I’m not that bad at go yet. A little bit of murdering and I’m in semifinals.
Surely now I’ll be playing some serious players. And yeah, it’s le_4TC. But they’re probably tired already, and I’m fresh, I also get to play black. Variant go server
I used my first move advantage as well as I could. A little like handicap game. I prefer fast and loose opening rather than slow and steady.
I got favorable position early on, white the situation is still simple. There’s only a few things to keep track of. And later on in the game the quality of my play dropped significantly, I think. In later stages of the game there’re a lot of stones and a lot of different things can interact with each other, that’s the part where the strength difference is showing the most. But looks like it was too late for le_4TC, and they were lowish on time. I gave away some advantage, but still won 7.5 points.
In the final game I played against Yaka. I was tired from le_4TC’s game, but maybe my opponent was even more tired. I got white unfortunately: Variant go server
But the game was going pretty well. I managed to net black stones, and then run out from under attack with my top 6 stones there.
But then situation actually became complicated enough for the strength difference to matter. Black set out a nice moyo. I tried to get in. But Yaka nailed my coffin with this nice tesuji. If I were a better player I would’ve seen this before choosing this var, it wasn’t particularly hard.
After this it’s all over.
So this is how I stumbled my way into being a runner-up. It’s not that sad since it’s a casual tournament. But feels a little cheaty.