Thanks Tami

How things are going Tami, have You ascended to 1 dan with your main account?

Hi Gorim! Thanks for asking about me.

I was getting close to promotion, but then I got frustrated over a loss and went on tilt quite badly for several days. That happened two or three weeks ago, and that has pushed my graph down considerably.

But it taught me a valuable lesson: you can't overcome fatigue or frustration with willpower, because they are neurochemical conditions, which need time and relaxation to recover from. So, since realising this, I have made myself take a break after every game, whether I win or lose.

I'm certainly getting stronger, but I have to be careful. And my progress is steady, rather than spectacular. After about six months, I have become about half a stone stronger in general, which doesn't sound like much, but it is solid. If it takes me ten years to reach high dan, then that's fine. It takes as long as it takes.

Also, I`m much clearer in my mind about how to go about improving. With the guitar, I went through a similar thing. It took about a year, even longer perhaps, to gain an idea of what to learn and how to do it. Eventually, though, I found a groove.

For improving at go, I study and I practice, and I try to practice more than I study. Study gives you the knowledge, shapes, principles and patterns that make good play, and practice (i.e., real games) helps you to turn them into things that you can do easily.

There's also the meta-go lessons: things like learning to take breaks (and why it's necessary), taking deep breaths to calm down, learning to silence ego, etc.

It could be that I am already close to my limit. I accept that it is a possibility. For sure I would like to be a really strong player, but if I cannot be, then there are worse fates. Go is a hobby, and my main dream is to succeed with my songwriting. In the end, it's not really about what you achieve so much as the fact that you are trying at all.

_________________
Pasta of Muppets, pulled into strings
Twisted fusilli, macaroni with cream,
Filled up with me you can`t taste a thing,
Just call the waiter, he`ll hear you scream.
Pasta, pasta, eat up your pasta!

I have no doubt that I could reach high dan in time, if I continued studying go apace. However, I am going to reduce my go activities to maintenance levels from now on.

The reason is that you cannot serve two masters.

I love go, but I love music even more, and now that I am 40 I have to focus on my songwriting and performing with all my force if I am to get anywhere with it.

I believe the 10000 hour rule is about right, and with music I am probably hovering about 5000 hours so far. My major shortfall is my limited ability as a practical musician, which I am tackling now (up to here I have studied composition and musicology intensively...in fact, you can call me Dr Jones if you wish!). There simply is not time in the day to chase this, work full-time, and put in sufficient effort to become a high-dan go player. Also, without wishing to denigrate go, I do think possibly music offers greater social, spiritual and monetary rewards across the various layers of possible attainment than does go.

Anyway, I will be here to cheer you all on! And by all means listen to my music when I am ready to release it

_________________
Pasta of Muppets, pulled into strings
Twisted fusilli, macaroni with cream,
Filled up with me you can`t taste a thing,
Just call the waiter, he`ll hear you scream.
Pasta, pasta, eat up your pasta!

I have great respect for your decision. I hope that your experience with go will in some way prove beneficial to your musical endeavors. Tell us about it, and good luck!

_________________
"When you are learning, it is not so important whether you are right or wrong." - Bill Spight

Hello journal,
Well, I`m not exactly returning to go hardcore as such but...I have started playing again, for fun and diversion. I cannot help wanting to become stronger, but my efforts are more in hope than expectation, and my musical work absolutely has to take priority. Go is what I do when my fingers are too sore to practice any more.

One thing I realise now is that with go, at any rate, I tend to be my own worst enemy when trying to improve. Maybe other people do the same thing, which is to attempt to learn too many different things at once, with the outcome that they forget everything.

So, here are my easy-to-take-in strategems:

1) Go through the Segoe Tesuji dictionary. Do each problem slowly and carefully, one at a time. This is to let the shapes and processes sink into my brain; if I do several problems one after another I tend to get confused and feel no benefit.

2) Study other people`s commentaries. Pro games are good, but it`s very revealing to hear what players in the strong amateur range think because I can more easily find similar situations in my own games. One thing, sadly negative, is that I am surprised and apalled at how little some people think of their opponents. Okay, I`m probably guilty of occasionally thinking the same way, but to record it and show it to the world is uncool.

3) Study one joseki at a time. Studying joseki is definitely good, but I see that I tended to memorise variations too much, and again crowded things out of my memory by attempting to learn too many joseki in one go. Actually, I find it is much better for me to play the target joseki over and over in practice games, because I tend to find out the crucial variations and the direction of play better from experience than by reading dictionaries.

In addition to this, I plan to read Yoda`s book on how professionals think. I`m waiting for my copy to arrive from Amazon. This is killing two birds with one stone, because it will improve my Japanese too. It will be particularly fascinating to compare Yoda`s way of thinking with the patterns of Amateur players.

It's a funny old game, isn`t it? Once you`re into go, you just cannot stop. I really hope I can one day have a firm dan ranking. I`d like to do it on kegs, just to show that I can do it in despite of the lake of molasses that separates one grade from another there, but I will settle for it on Kaya, which will undoubtedly become the dominant server among Westerners in due course.

And, I like the Kaya countdown voice English accents speaking English forcibly apply footwear to buttocks!

_________________
Pasta of Muppets, pulled into strings
Twisted fusilli, macaroni with cream,
Filled up with me you can`t taste a thing,
Just call the waiter, he`ll hear you scream.
Pasta, pasta, eat up your pasta!

Hello my dear! Welcome back. This devil's a bloody seductive one innit?

_________________

I have received my copy of Yoda`s プロ棋士の思考術 (Thinking Techniques of Professional Players). This does indeed look fascinating: Yoda lists many intriguing sub-categories in the preface, such as "読みとはイメージを広げること" ("Reading is about expanding your mental images") and "アンフエアについて" ("Concerning the unfair"). It promises to be about the inner mental workings of a top player, rather than the usual example-and-brief-explanation method of teaching used in most Japanese go books. As far as I can tell from a cursory inspection of the book, it seems Yoda uses his 2000 Meijin match with Cho as his main reference point.

Whether or not I will be able to learn anything useful for applying in my own go I don't know yet, but recently I have been greatly enjoying any kind of book in which somebody explains how he or she thinks. I just love getting inside somebody`s mind like that!

I`m also amazed at Amazon. I ordered my second-hand copy online, and paid for it on Friday evening at my local Lawson`s. It arrived on Sunday afternoon. It was only 250 yen and came in almost perfect new condition. If I ever succumb to Book-Buying Syndrome again, now I know I can keep the expense down by using Amazon.

_________________
Pasta of Muppets, pulled into strings
Twisted fusilli, macaroni with cream,
Filled up with me you can`t taste a thing,
Just call the waiter, he`ll hear you scream.
Pasta, pasta, eat up your pasta!

Thank you for sharing your first impression on Yoda's book! I would be interested to learn more, especially since I can't read it.

Tesuji learning: Your aim is too modest, well subject to your rank. I am not sure exactly what is KGS 1k. If it is anything close to European 1k, then you'd better aim for doing 1500 tesuji / tsumego / life+death problems. You might like All About Life and Death.

Joseki learning: You describe the hardness of learning variations, but you do not say yet why it is hard for you. Do you also study understanding, meaning, strategy related to joseki? That makes learning much easier.

I have not read the whole thread. Just in case: Playing through 1500 pro games also helps at European 1k level.

If you don't do it yet: start making positional judgements.

250 yen? Oh my god! Yoda's book is only worth a bento?

_________________

Yes, this confirms a nagging feeling that I have been having, namely that perhaps I was spending a lot of time reading books aimed at players slightly weaker than myself, so not learning as much new material as I need to in order to progress. There are quite a few problems in Segoe, though, in its three volumes, and when I've done with that I also have his Book to Increase Your Fighting Strength, which is more of the same. I agree that you need to know a lot about a lot, but given the way my brain works I think it`s going to be better to do little amounts and often than trying to do my 1500 problems in a short time frame.

I think the same thing applies to joseki, too. As I said, I tended to study several joseki and their variations in one sitting, but I found I kept forgetting what I learned. For me, I remember better if I do one thing at a time, leave it, and then do something different. During the off-periods I can feel the new data swirling around the back of my mind.

As for positional judgements, I did notice that my winning streaks tend to come when I make the conscious effort to evaluate exchanges on a whole-board basis, playing it like a financial market game: "I give you this, and take something more valuable in exchange". My losing streaks come when I become focussed on purely local issues. In relation to this, I liked your way of thinking described elsewhere, where you assessed the value of a move in terms of its shape, endgame potential and other factors. It was concrete and understandable. I`ll try to incorporate that sort of thinking as best I can.




It`s not even worth that! A good bento starts at about 400 yen At least go books can be had second hand, but I don`t fancy second-hand bento very much.

Anyway, if I get time, I`ll try to keep you posted on the Yoda book. It`s very dense text-wise. He really does cover a great many topics. I read some of the opening chapter in the restaurant just now, and he described his early days when he played through the games of Go Seigen and Kitani Minoru, and was thrilled by the way they would save stones he thought would be cast off, and would throw away stones he thought would be saved. To be able to play like this, he recommends laying out pro games repeatedly, saying that your ability to emulate their moves will increase without your being aware of it.

Sorry if that`s not particularly novel or earth-shattering, but it`s early days yet, and I`ve got a lot of music to practice...not to mention my job

_________________
Pasta of Muppets, pulled into strings
Twisted fusilli, macaroni with cream,
Filled up with me you can`t taste a thing,
Just call the waiter, he`ll hear you scream.
Pasta, pasta, eat up your pasta!

Schedule 9 months and choose easy enough problems that teach you new stuff. Study other things in between; only problems is not fun.



You need motivation for remembering something (say, half of the variations you learn), such as getting to know a set representative basic josekis. Understanding the background of joseki theory can also be source of motivation. To start with, you must understand the functions of the groups once a joseki is settled and why it is a fair exchange.



I prefer to be aware:)

I am grinding my way through Segoe`s Tesuji dictionary, one problem at a time. In the past, I went in too much for quantity over quality, but now I am making my best effort to read each problem out completely.

Two things I have noticed:

* The need to broaden and deepen my reading. I must strive to notice all the characteristics and flaws in the surrounding position (broadening), and I have to attempt to see further than before. Often what looks like a solution is thwarted by some aji in an adjacent area, and what looks like a failure turns out to be the right move to exploit such aji.

* The need to push past my "horizon". This is basically the same as above, but it`s about me rather than the position. In chess programming, the "horizon effect" means the limit to which a computer can look ahead, and I seem to be suffering the same issue. Fairly often my head begins to swim before I can read far enough to find the solution. It`s driving me crazy to be honest. Somebody please tell me that with practice I can push that horizon farther back!

One thing that gives me a little hope is my experience with music. When you`re learning to sight read a score, you tend to concentrate on individual notes and chords, but with experience you learn to "chunk". That is, with music at least I can read and remember long pieces because I can imagine them as chunks of information rather than single items. Maybe with effort the same thing will happen with go reading.

As I have said at length, I can`t afford to spend hours every day studying go, but I am trying to do small things frequently in spare moments. While I am frustrated with my limited reading ability, I do at least feel I am retaining things better than before, and I do feel it`s better to have several short bursts of trying hard to get better than one sustained session in which I`m struggling to keep going. Ironically, I think the desire to get stronger sometimes makes it hard to become stronger, because one tends to try too hard instead of trying smart.

_________________
Pasta of Muppets, pulled into strings
Twisted fusilli, macaroni with cream,
Filled up with me you can`t taste a thing,
Just call the waiter, he`ll hear you scream.
Pasta, pasta, eat up your pasta!

Yes, chunking happens with go.

Good luck!

_________________
Sheik Yerbuti -- if that really is your name --

Tami, I find your posts very interesting and enjoy your openness in expressing how you are doing with your go studies. I found the insight about 'chunking' very interesting and it is encouraging to hear Bill confirm your thoughts on it. I hope you keep posting

Here is another point I forgot to mention in the other thread: What really worries me about how, if correctly, I understand your current joseki learning proceeds is that you take a newly learnt joseki and try in your games when it works or does not work well. This means that, for ca. 400 josekis to be learnt, you are likely to make 400 good and 1000+ bad choices. You will lose too many games due to wrong choices, and continue to do so less frequently during the following years. Such was my experience because I had to rely on tactical joseki literature. You want to improve and you are in the lucky position to choose your literature. So why do you want the hard trial and error way? Of course, everybody makes (also strategic) mistakes, but 400 good to 200 bad choices would be so much better, would it not? This I mean with reading also literature about (joseki) strategy. You have the chance to relax your current experience of hardness of remembering new josekis; by better understanding their possible strategic intentions, it should be much easier to remember them. Understanding the local aspects of a joseki also greatly helps, but is at best half the motivation.

Thanks for this Robert. I`m starting to realise that you are a good deal more well intentioned than I had given you credit for, and I`m sorry for suggesting that you only wanted to advertise your books.

I admit that I do sometimes try out newly learned joseki without concern for context, but that`s by no means my habit. Generally, I do try to apply what I think is the right move for the situation...but I often get in trouble for lack of knowledge or for lack of reading or for lack of insight.

I think, actually, the culprit for finding joseki and techniques hard to learn has been that I have been trying too hard. What I thought were good study methods turned out to be less helpful.

For instance, for much of my life I`ve been a compulsive note-taker; but it`s gradually been dawning on me that my memory works better if I don`t take notes. To be more precise, I find my memory works better if I make notes some time after studying. I realised that by taking copious notes in a study session that I was concentrating more on making a paper or computerised record of the matter than of actually getting it into my head. With my Japanese, I found that once I stopped taking notes, I started passing exams!

So, recently, I gave up the kind of note-taking that involved copying from go books into my local copy of cgoban, and started just reading the books in a focussed way. Lo and behold, I`ve found that the material has started to stick! I do continue to make notes, but after the fact, and of a cryptic nature intended to stimulate my memory rather than serve as a replacement for it.

The other problem I have had is trying to learn too many new things at once. Actually I do believe it`s possible to learn a lot of new data in a short time, but the trick is to break it into small pieces and learn each piece in a separate mini-session. This is backed up by the pyschological literature, which notes the fairly limited nature of short-term memory and the way the mind uses offtime to begin transferring new information to the long-term memory. Neurologically, you need breaks to allow certain chemicals within the brain to replenish themselves. By trying to learn five or six complex items in one go, I was not only overloading the buffer of my mind, but working my brain too hard physically!

I`m confident I`m on the right track now, and besides which, I have already improved at go in spite of my poor study skills and the fact that go is only my third priority (after music and work). I may still be 1k on KGS, but I`m much higher on the graph than before. Okay, it`s nothing very impressive, but it`s better than not having moved at all.

I also attribute a lot of my losses on KGS to the fact that, go being my third priority, I tend to play late at night when I`m tired and irritable - the alternative being not being able to play at all. Finally, dullard as I am, I realised the obvious solution: create a second account to play on when you`re out of condition, and give yourself permission to make silly mistakes, losing streaks or to be irrational. The out-of-condition account allows you to play, and get experience, but does not reflect on your progress as a player.

There is something more profound to the decision to make an "out-of-condition" account. It is namely the acceptance that I cannot always control my mental or physical state. It is not easy for someone like my to acknowledge that I cannot beat tiredness, hormonal swings or sickness by will power. It is not easy to accept that one cannot always be at peak form.

Of course, I make sure to rest before working or giving a musical performance; but I often don`t have that luxury with go, as it`s something I do after the other things.

_________________
Pasta of Muppets, pulled into strings
Twisted fusilli, macaroni with cream,
Filled up with me you can`t taste a thing,
Just call the waiter, he`ll hear you scream.
Pasta, pasta, eat up your pasta!

Greetings,
your comments about note taking are very interesting. Actually I am a compulsive note taker. The small room I have studied so lectures and books on Go over the summer is littered with kifu of interesting variations and joseki I will probably never remember n time in a game....
Some years ago I was teaching at a woman`s college here in Japan and I decided to make use of the NeuroLinguistic Programming training I took for learning English. The basic premises were as follows.
1) Note taking in class pre-programs the brain `not to bother.` One is taking notes, after all.
2)In order to retain and understand what is being said one should repeat it in the head to a mental construct of someone who is very meaningful to you in some way, such as a spouse or lover. That person asks questions , or parapharases what is said.
3) The most powerful means of embedding material in long term memory is `re^teaching.` In other words, after you leave the classroom, immediately explain to a friend what you just studied. Failing that, teach it to the person in your head.
4) Ue a tape recorder in class as back up.
Using this approach, significant improvements in learning and usage occurred very rapidly.
In the same way, I suppose, one could mentally talk ones way through a joseki with a partner, explaining the reasoning behind each move, have them ask questions and paraphrase. Then when one gets home, reteach the new material to the dog who is trained to sit patiently in front of the goban.
Best wishes,
buri

Knowledge: Easily overcome, just read the books providing it.
Reading: a) psychology, b) effort
Insight: Be patient. It improves along with playing strength and more knowledge.



Really? It does not matter if you learn two dozen josekis a day and forget 50-60% within the following weeks. You can learn the forgotten ones later at a similar rate of success. I did that about 4 or 5 times. Learning and forgetting was not wasted: it made the next learning cycle easier.



And a problem is: for everybody, it works differently. So, e.g., your learning problems would not apply to me.



Every player has this problem. I needed many years to overcome it - almost (and so far only in real world tournaments with sufficient time). IIRC, my blunder rate as 1d was 2 per game. Now it is varying from 0.3 to 0.1. (Server games are completely different, but for many players.) Even top pros are not beyond making infrequent blunders. The human mind wants to make mistakes.

At the moment, I`m reading several books on go, in my spare time. I`ve been slowly working through Segoe`s Tesuji dictionary for the last two weeks, and I`m just starting to feel an improvement in my ability to see ahead - the horizon is being pushed. Also, I picked up Yamashita`s Tesuji Dictionary just over a week ago, and found myself enjoying it in a new way. On the backburner, I have Yoda`s book on pro thinking techniques (which seems more like a kind of autobiography to be honest), and I`ve just picked up a MyCom book on the subject of sabaki, by O Rissei.

The reason I`m enjoying the Yamashita Tesuji book is that it`s causing me to see the whole business of tesuji in a new light. I`ll compare my old and new ways of thinking:

OLD - tesuji are special moves, mainly to capture stones but sometimes for other purposes like connecting or spoiling shape.

NEW - there are about 30+ kinds of ordinary moves (e.g., ikken tobi, keima, kiri, hane). There are a number of strategic and tactical goals. For example, "cutting" is a tactical goal and "blockade" (sealing in) is a strategic one. There are obvious ways to accomplish the goals, but depending on the situation any move can turn out to be the tesuji necessary for achieving the goal. Rather than thinking "Oh, there`s a Slapping Tesuji" or "here`s a Nose Tesuji" or whatever, it`s better to look for the move that works! Taking the chapter on cutting, as one illustration, Yamashita shows situations in turn where a cut can be achieved by a straightforward cut, a push and cut, a keima, a warikomi, a two-step hane and even by unlikely-looking placements and contact plays.

The point I`m trying to make is that rather than seeing tesuji as specialised moves that don`t normally crop up, it seems much better to think that any kind of move, even a humble ikken tobi, can be a tesuji if it happens to be the one that works under the current circumstances. I think that minds trained on James Davies`s tesuji book and similar works can become too narrow in their focus, and playing experience only deepens this; the Yamashita dictionary shows how to look beyond the obvious, to find the tesuji that lie waiting to be found. In the case of cutting, if the obvious cutting moves don`t satisfy, try looking at the other candidates and see if they lead somewhere. In other words, you don`t apply a tesuji so much as find it.

So, for me, the Segoe dictionary is my way of training reading depth, and the Yamashita dictionary the book for broadening my vision.

_________________
Pasta of Muppets, pulled into strings
Twisted fusilli, macaroni with cream,
Filled up with me you can`t taste a thing,
Just call the waiter, he`ll hear you scream.
Pasta, pasta, eat up your pasta!