Something I have been able to do remarkably well for last couple of years (roughly since I became 2d, but that is probably a coincidence) is to have a feel for who is leading and approximately by how much, without actually doing any counting. I'm talking about the late middle game stage and onwards. I don't understand how I can intuitively know this, and I don't have figures for how often I'm right or wrong. I'm certainly prepared to accept that I might be experiencing some kind of confirmation bias (i.e. discounting the times I'm wrong) but I don't think so.

To be more precise, I can at an arbitrary point decide, OK, what's going on, and without really thinking at all, say to myself, I'm about 10-20 ahead (or behind, or whatever), and then actually counting will confirm this, and if neither player takes drastic action, the final score will be more or less correct. Usually if I am wrong it's because I have misjudged the life or death of some stones. Am I kidding myself? Do any other players have a similar intuition? Is this in fact common? Can anyone explain it?

Hi quantumf,

Part of the reason probably has to do with your current level or
understanding -- if you feel both sides have made reasonable moves,
with no obvious big mistakes (to you) so far, your assess the current board
even.

The "easier" case: if either side has made a biggish mistake, then you
also have a feeling who is ahead, and by how much.

The more difficult cases include both sides with mistakes of various sizes;
or, very messy fights -- these cases can make it difficult to
assess the situation, sometimes even for pros.

This is much like in many other fields: as beginners we have no clue
what is happening. Then as we get better, our sense of the situation
also improves, and becomes more and more accurate.

Is this true for all games you play, or just for serious games? In a serious game you have been thinking about every move and what its impact on the game will be. As a dan player you have a decent understaning of the game and so that thought automatically translates to a fairly accurate assessment of the score. This is how I am in serious games.

However, in a fast game on a server, where the amount of thought is much reduced, I find I still have a good idea of the score most games but there are some, especially complicated ones, where I am way off. In other words, for a dan player I believe that success in sensing the score will be proportional to how seriously you take each game.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

That sounds plausible, although my ability to recognize mistakes and the value of those mistakes is, I'm sure, terrible or non-existent. If I'm playing players at my level, I'm unlikely to find their moves mistakes, but I can still sense after enough moves are played who is ahead or behind and roughly by how much. Still, your explanation is much more plausible than me having some kind of ability to visually know this. I'm pretty sure (although I have not really tried) I can't do it for arbitrary games by strangers.

I would say more so for serious games, possibly much more. In casual or fast games, I still have a sense, but I don't really verify it (then or later), either because I can't be bothered, or I don't have time..

While I agree with you, I'm curious what mechanism allows an "understanding" of the game to translate into a feeling for the score situation.

I don't know that it is a mechanism as much as an inate feeling learned from years of experience. Much like an experienced driver just knows the safe speed to go based on conditions but most teenager's, without that experience, cause a disproportiate number of wrecks because they have not yet developed that feeling.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Could it be that you've finely tuned your sense of relative scoring? I'm 14 kyu and I'm already getting decent at simply comparing my points to my opponents without actually counting. I would imagine that as a dan player, this must come quite easy.

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Thinking like a go player during a game of chess is like bringing a knife to a gun-fight. Thinking like a chess player during a game of go feels like getting knifed while you're holding a gun...

I have this sense, and although it is influenced by how ahead or behind the current position statically "looks" to me, I suspect that what my brain is doing is in larger part something close to summing across each fight or exchange my evaluation of how good I think that exchange was for me in retrospect, or how much I achieved what I wanted.

Some things I've observed that make me suspect this:
* It's much more accurate when I actually evaluate positions and perform this judgment, as opposed to simply playing fast and pattern matching.
* My sense of who's ahead or behind is very weak when I look at other players' games. When weaker players ask me to give reviews, I often have a hard time telling who is ahead or behind.
* In a handicap game, if I get a lot of good activity in the opening and make small gains in the early fights, my sense is that things are "good" for me even if I'm objectively far behind still, and even if I've only caught up the expected amount I should in order to be even by the end of the game. That is, my feeling for how well I'm doing on the board seems to be more related to how well I feel I came out of the last several exchanges rather than anything objective about the current position.