Day 10 - 2 games (33), 23 kyu

My losing streak continued in my first game of last night. I tried to be more safe and play the 3-3 opening. In the post game discussion, which my opponent was nice enough to stick around for, he told me that it's a bit too defensive, and he might be right. In this game however it had nothing to do with why I lost. That came down to this situation:

Do you know how to kill white's group on the right side?

I didn't. What I played was M5, a stone which was eventually killed and became the eye I wanted to prevent. Funnily enough, I thought that I had killed my opponent up until the very last moment of the game, in which OGS kindly informed me that the move to win the game was illegal! I didn't recognise that even though the two groups of my opponent were not in direct contact, they did both have two liberties. In my head I thought of them as two groups with one liberty each.

Immediately after the game I saw that a move I had contemplated playing would have killed white:

I am finding my self in these life and death situations seemingly every other game, and I can't read them properly, which tells me that I should start doing tsumego.

In the second game I finally scored a win. From my perspective I didn't make any mistakes, but I also don't think I was put in any tricky situations. Instead I won because my opponent made two blunders, namely playing this kind of diagonal shape, which is very weak (especially near the edge of the board):

This is the same shape I made in my first 13x13 game, and I too was punished for it. I'd like to win a game where neither I nor my opponent makes such glaring mistakes. My suspicion is that what I consider to be a "glaring mistake" will change as I get better, and most won games will in fact feel like this. Winning, after all, simply comes down to making fewer mistakes than your opponent.

My takeaway from today:
-Start doing tsumego!

(I will, soon)