Day 7 - 5 games (22), 24 kyu

Last night did not go very well for me; I lost four straight games before picking up a win in a game that wasn't quite over yet, and my rank deservedly got taken down a notch. Losing games hadn't bothered me until now, but sometimes it is the manner in which you lose that can lead to frustration.

In the first 13x13 game I was already a little thrown off by move #4. I felt like white was cutting me off, and maybe the two point jump (niken-tobi) was a bad response to white's play in the centre. By move #12 I think things were already looking bad, and the only thing I had going to me was the cut at F10:

After getting some territory on the upper side of the board things turned around slightly. Then came what I think was the critical point of the game:

White reinforces his group in the lower right and I probably need to kill it to have a chance in the game. At this point my thinking was that I couldn't let him connect at F1, so I had to play G2. This gave white one extra move inside my territory, and from there everything spiralled out of control. I could have played the hane at L3 instead; this would have let my opponent connect, but it would have contained him.

Looking at the situation now though, it occurs to me that the real mistake was my move after I played G2 and white responded at L4. If I had cut at L3 this could have played out in a few different ways:

All three let me capture his group, although the first two haven't stopped the invasion. The first one in particular probably lets him live inside my territory. Unfortunately I don't think I'm anywhere close to being able to read this out in the game though, so I'm not sure what to learn from it. I guess by connecting at J1 white doesn't gain any liberties, so there was really no rush to capture that stone.

The second game felt similar in a lot of ways, and during the opening I felt completely lost. Move #13 should most likely have been at H5, and that's where things started to go bad. White started invading my territory and I was completely powerless to stop him. He constantly made moves that I had to respond to, but my responses did nothing to better my position. I found this game quite frustrating to play and I went on tilt after it. I also find it hard to learn from. By move #20 my stones are cut off into three groups:

I was trying to keep them all connected, however at this point it was probably too late already and perhaps I should have focused on the top and bottom groups. With the size of the 13x13 board though I doubt that would have been enough.

My takeaways:
-I have no idea how to play the opening on the 13x13 board. The center is important, but the board feels too big to start there.
-I'm very bad at responding to invasions. I overcommit by trying to kill them, but I don't want to be too defensive and let them makes eyes for free either!