Making friends (and rivals?)...

I visited the club again today and was given another warm welcome. As soon as I walked in the door they began waving and calling me over. The manager set me up with a player I hadn't seen yesterday. I walked around, checking out the game of the 1 geup I played the day before. He earnestly offered me a game, but I begrudgingly had to turn him down as I had a previous arrangement with the other player.

As I sat down, the manager told my opponent, Adam, to put down four stones. I was a bit surprised; I didn't want them overestimating my actual ability. Nevertheless, I won the first game by nine points. The second game finished much sooner, as he made a very elementary mistake that allowed me to kill his group (or how 95% of my games end up; my opponent making a mistake).

I felt great having won two games, but that natural high wouldn't last long. Without even being able to stand up and stretch, the manager sat down and told me to put down four stones! I wasn't sure exactly what strength he was, but seeing as to how I was given four stones, I'd venture to guess he's a 2 geup. All I knew about him from the other players was that he was an attacker; but then again, what Korean isn't?

Maybe it was my previous games that gave me an air of confidence, but I played very aggressively against the manager, something I don't tend to do against strong players. Unfortunately, he lived up to his style and easily destroyed me in the first game. However, I hunkered down and cleared my head as he went to have a smoke. The second game started a few minutes later.

I continued attacking him as strong as I could, and the game remained relatively even entering the early stages of the middle game. Then came what I could proudly say was my finest hour. All six of the players at the salon at the time huddled around our table. He started a ko in the lower right corner of the board and was using the boundless threats he had in the lower left to try and kill my large group in the bottom of the board.

However, I used the ko to my advantage. With the threats, I cut off a large group of his (the one he was trying to kill me with) in exchange for giving up the left corner. When I made the exchange, the crowd responded positively in my favor, with one of them saying, "nice job!"

Indeed I felt good until the scoring phase. It was then I found out I had lost by a single point. A soul-crushing point that I could have easily overturned had I not made one slack move amongst the twenty good yose moves. Alas, that is baduk...