Game One (May 18th 2019) - Loss

I had my first online game against a live (and practised opponent - by practised I mean someone who knows the rules and can play as opposed to groping round in the dark like me and my immediate family). What I wanted is to get a feel of an actual game, learning something would be nice but initially just breaking out of the, sometimes, self imposed fear of committing to playing is useful. That might seem strange but I know plenty of people who don't want to play any game (or other activity) until they know they are competent enough to perform well. This can actually prevent play and improvement. Though playing (and getting smacked about) can also be negative the experience can help improve allowing it is approached in the correct way.

Let's provide a practical example with a different game. Aeons ago I purchased the 2nd Games Workshop edition (there has been a Citadel paper one prior to this if I remember correctly) of their new Fantasy American Football Bloodbowl game along with my elder brother with us splitting costs. He chose the Ork team as 'his' and I had the Human team. We then proceeded to paint the pieces. Mine resembled muppets facially with a weird black and gold uniform (I inappropriately called them the 'Fighting Falcons'). My older brother spent a lot longer painting up his Orks (and did a great job for someone without much painting experience - he also picked a cooler name the 'Malevolent Angels').

Early Blood Bowl, perhaps not GWs best sculpts

Anyway while he was painting I started playing against myself with lots of test games. After my brother exhaustively painted his team and was finally ready to play he stated that he did not want his team to lose its first game and as I had been 'practising' I would have an advantage. Therefore he wanted me to play his first game against him with Goblins - these are very weak and very hard to win with). I just wanted to play and accepted and 'just' managed to beat his vaunted Orks with the weak Goblins in their first game. Now that was embarrassing and he soon after decided he didn’t want to play any more and moved to other things. The key lesson for me was that practical knowledge and experience trump theoretical knowledge and getting disheartened early can cause loss of interest.

Not the most effective players but highly embarrassing to lose against

Now ok my 'play' here was essentially 'goldfishbowling' (playing against yourself and trying to deliberately forget what the other side is doing. Hence the gold fish 5 second memory reference) but in this sort of game it equates well to actual play which it would not do with 'Go'.

So that has tended to colour my methods of approaching new stuff ever since. If everyone I played was 'new' then I would play a lot. I expect everyone I play in this to be better, and not necessarily new, so I will play less while I try and improve but still play to get used to it.

I lost the game badly as expected and to be honest was utterly lost by the end due to the sheer complication. The end result also confused as I did not see how white was granted everything it was granted but that is to be expected. My opponent  hung around to give some advise post game and the primary point made was that I seemed to waste lots of move reinforcing groups that did not need reinforcing. True, but this is more due to me not knowing what is safe and what is not and equally since I don’t know this any group is not safe even if it is…because I don't know how to defend. I plan on working on this (and the start and mid games) with the second book of my beginners series this week which takes the wonderful methodology of saying, 'this is a good move!" (and sometimes 'this is a bad move) and then showing 'why' it is through extensive examples along the lines of - 'say white does this it can be responded to by B,C and D' and so on through the obvious variations. If I can absorb some of this then I should at least have a better understanding of the groups moving forward. The next game should also be against a weaker opponent as my rating utterly dived. More on that in my next post at the end of this week.

Here is the positions at the end which hopefully means more to you than me..