People who advocate memorizing joseki and complicated life-and-death shapes are on the wrong track. To learn go you have to find out for yourself whay various moves are good and others are not. The best way to do this is to play serious games where you think about every move. Then when the game is over go back and analyse what happened. Most of us don't have the time to do this with every game but still it is valuable to go over as many of your games as you can. If you keep on playing gradually you will learn what good shape is and what balance is. Then you won't need to memorize joseki because you'll be able to think out what most good move sequences are. As for life-and-death shapes, it helps to learn some of the most basic ones but you can also just try to analyse them in your games when they occur. You need to develop reading ability anyhow so practice by doing in real games. By the way there are many ostensibly strong players who can solve life-and-death problems in a book but are much worse at it in a game situation; you have to practice in real games in any case.PeterPeter wrote:I can relate to this, having played/studied the game for a couple of months, got to around 15 kyu maybe, and then just lost interest in it.Phoenix wrote:The problem is when you get to the nitty gritty of Go. I'm referring to that period where you are faced with a large 361-point board and have no idea what you're doing. Worse, you play as hard as you can and things never line up. You want to win and learn but you're just not getting it.
In short, the part of learning Go when you have to push through the tunnel until you see the light.
The beginning is fresh and new and exciting, and the journey towards new strength and enjoyment is breathtaking, but there's a part of the whole experience that's simply frustrating. This is where your love of Go is tested. This is where players are won or lost.
I think that at that level, you understand well all the rules of the game, and have some basic tactics and strategy. You know some simple shapes, and whether they are generally good or bad. You can follow another game quite well, and understand the flow of the game, who is winning, and you can see reasons for most of the moves. So, you are quite pleased with yourself for having got that far.
Then your progress slows right down, and realise that to get any further is going to take an awful lot of hard work. You learn about the idea of josekis, and that the more of them you know, the better, but there are thousands of them, so where do you start? Life-and-death problems look impenetrable. You need to know the status of loads of corner shapes - Ls and Js and boxes and all their subtle variations, but again there are so many of them, and it is tedious trying to remember them. It all seems very dry and abstract.
No-one that I know knows anything at all about the game, and the nearest club is struggling along with a handful of members that meet in the corner of a bar if enough people agree beforehand to go that week. It is just not part of our culture, and could therefore be seen as irrelevant. Proudly announce to 1000 random people that you are a 5-kyu Go player, and it will mean nothing to 999 of them. With so little encouragement, it is easy to lose interest.
You get so much conflicting advice, you do not know what to believe. The answer to most questions is usually “It depends...”, followed by a specific example that is never going to come up again. It can be frustrating never getting a simple answer. As an early beginner, your questions can often be given simple answers, and as a sdk you can work a lot out for yourself, but for me at least there is a difficult area between these 2 stages. You cannot even ask a computer to tell you the best move or assess a particular move, like you can in chess.
Having said that, I am grateful for the advice I received from the other forum members, and appreciate that it was the best help that could be offered given the nature of the game.
I hope this doesn’t come across as moaning or criticism of the game, as I can see that it is a wonderful game, especially if you are introduced to it as a child, and you live in the Far East! Instead, please take it as a list of the issues that you may want to think about in your own situation.
I will probably return to the game at some point, if something triggers my interest again. In the meantime, living in the UK and in my advanced years, chess seems to be a better option.
As for choosing to play chess because you don't have to memorize so much, I think that's a delusion. To get good at chess (say Elo 1900 or better) most people have to spend A LOT OF TIME studying openings and endgame technique.
There is another option: just play for fun and don't worry about whether you know this or that particular thing. Places where we get frustrated with go are in investing self-worth in playing well and in having unreasonable expectations. We all play go because we enjoy it. Focus on what you enjoy about it.
P.S. Years ago there was a 15k player (now deceased) who came to all the US Go Congresses and had been playing for decades, and he wasn't discouraged because he hadn't gotten out of ddk range.
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. Was it the fact that there are openings with names that you picked up on, or the use of "simply", "attacking", "stylish"?
