You sit down to your computer and fire up good ol' kgs. Instinctively you guide your mouse to the automatch button. This time kgs assigned your color as black. You decide on 4,4 as usual. 'Woops' misclick now your on 4,3 'oh well it's all the same'. White responds with 4,4 in the opposite corner. You respond thoughtlessly a 4,4 accross from your own stone. Black approaches your first corner stone at 6,3. You play your joseki. He responds in an unuasual manner. At this point you feel the need to punish him for his originality, so you play the first move that comes to mind. The next 8 moves you do the same thing. Suddenly it dawns on you that you are in a complicated fight. The rest of the game hangs in the balance of this fight.
If you end up losing you feel upset, angry, confused and hurt. You immediately decide to jump into another automatch to win and nurse your wounded feelings. If you end up losing you feel your opponant was pretty blockheaded and decide your rank isn't nearly good enough for you (after all you won by 30+), so you play another automatch to get your rank to were it 'ought' to be. This creates a vicious addicting cycle.
If you or a loved one suffer from this condition, please do not dispair. Now that you have defined your condition you can overcome it! However, if you are unable to best this deplorable disease, you could read part 2 right here
I know this feeling all too well. I consider it "being on tilt" (a poker reference to players who fall into an emotional depravity where their play becomes reckless). Here are some of my findings.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bengozen.com/going-on-tilt/
Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
Thanks Ben, I'm glad to see this phenomenon covered by other Go writers as well.
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