Final Four

Well, well, well. My picks are doing better than I expected. Going into the Final Four, I'm in the 92nd percentile on the Yahoo! picks. My high water mark was actually after Saturday's games, when I was in the 95th percentile. Going into Sunday's games, I had teams alive in both games -- the favorites, in fact. Oh, well. I'm probably only going to fall further unless GMU beats UCLA in the title game. But I feel pretty good, overall. I'll have to check from Germany to see what happens, though...my flight takes off about 20 minutes before tip-off. Maybe the captain will put the game on Channel 9.

Watching the Wheels

My father has a letter to the editor in today's Arizona Daily Star.

Cherry Bomb

All the time I've lived in this area, I had never been to the Cherry Blossom Festival...until Saturday. I still haven't gone to see the cherry blossoms, however. As mentioned previously, I signed up for a go tournament -- the Cherry Blossom Tournament.

After discussions with players at the local club, I entered as a 15 kyu. This seemed a little bit ambitious, as I am only a 21 kyu online. Nevertheless, it seemed better to enter at a better ranking than I deserved, and lose all my games than enter at too weak of a rating and consequently take home a prize.

Well, good thing I felt that way, because I ended the day 0-4. 15 kyu was too ambitious, but not incredibly so. In fact, it looked like I won the last game by 2 points until I reminded my opponent that she got 7.5 points komi (compensation), so she won by 5.5. If I had entered as a 16 kyu, she would have only gotten 0.5 komi, so I would have won by 1.5. So 16 kyu would have had me as 1-3, and 17 kyu would have given me multi-stone handicaps against the same players (or no handicap against weaker players)...

My understanding of the ratings is that I will be bumped down from 15 kyu to something worse...17? I don't know. So I may enter a tournament in May at that level and try to bring my rating back up again. I figure eventually I'll find my level, then each game should be at least an even proposition...better than that if I'm improving. So I guess I'll just wait a week or two for the results to post and see where my ranking ends up.