Rethinking "a review every game"

I think I have learned a lot from reviewing my own game and having it reviewed. I have some specific basics that I will share in a future post. Unfortunately there is a downside to this process - it takes a lot of time. Play, self-review, comment, share for review, get reviewers comments, post, and add learning details to the blog is pretty time consuming. It has been 8 days since Game 1 and I still don't feel I have studied and absorbed my reviewer's comments fully.

Maybe I should stay the course and stick with having every game reviewed. What is pushing me to change is that I need to play at least 4 rated games a month to gain a rating on KGS. If it takes 10 days per game I will only get in 3 games a month, so I won't get a rating. If I do that for all 100 games, that means 10 days per game x 100 games or 1000 days with no rating. That's almost 3 years! That doesn't seem like the right approach. Just for contrast, my opponent in Game 1 has already played 108 games since I played against him!

The proverb is "Lose your first 100 games as quickly as possible". This approach isn't quick. So, the bottom line is that I need a way to speed up my games played. I do want to look at them and see where I could have improved, but time between games needs to shrink to 2 or 3 days I think.

I could look to have occasional games reviewed. Maybe every 5th game or 10th game? Or another geeky thought - I could have my prime number games reviewed (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97, 101). By picking some reduced set of games I could balance speed with study better. I think there is value in being able to share my rating as I play games just to help set expectation, so I want to get a KGS rating at least.

Hopefully I will still be able to share any insights I have along the way. I am trying to remain conscious of all the thoughts I have around GO, and anything that seems useful should end up on these pages.

Typing this out makes me feel like it is a better approach, even if in truth it is just a justification for changing. So, I am going to switch to the prime number games get reviewed. Heh. This also gets a tiny skeleton out of the closet - I DID actually play 1 game of 19x19 on KGS before this first reviewed game. It was before I had decided to try to blog about GO. So, the previously noted "Game #1" will get retagged as Game #2 and be the first entry in my "Prime Games" on the sidebar.

Alrighty, back to the slightly modified agenda...