I don't think we disagree, Kirby. Three out of four of the circumstances that I mentioned (lack of effort, wrong effort, wrong application during play) could be directly helped by getting a teacher. Even if someone does lack talent (whatever that means for go), a good teacher can help them reach their full potential. I'm not suggesting that a stronger player can't help weaker players, or even that they can't empathize with being stuck. I just think many of us have a blind spot that manifests as "I did X, so you must be able to do it too."

Of course, we can learn to recognize this blind spot and adjust our behavior accordingly. I have found marriage uniquely suited to this task, though I wouldn't recommend entering into it solely for that purpose.

I've continued reading The Rookie - the travails of a weak chess player who late in life embarks on a very frustration-ridden quest to become strong enough to hold his head up in chess circles. On the way he meets several people with similar ambitions. So far none of these people have reached their goals, and on current progress in the book it doesn't look like they ever will.

To that extent daal may be right that he will never reach shodan (but I'm still chary of accepting it's a case of "can't"). However, the book mentions a new graduate in his twenties who decided he wanted to be a grandmaster before he settled down. He worked very hard and made significant progress, reaching some sort of respectable milestone (FIDE Master?) before he gave up. He gave up because he had done enough work to realise with horror how much work would still be needed to reach his goal. He didn't want to "waste" his time any further.

I think we can all empathise with that. But the story made me realise there's another way of looking at this problem that I don't actually recall being discussed properly, even in chess. Turn it round and ask: if I do X amount of work, how much can I improve?

Obviously that's very hard to answer, but a couple of interesting points emerged from my thoughts on it. One is that you need to do quite a bit of work just to stand still, and people are apt to forget that. They wrongly equate it with lack of progress.

Second, from my experience and apparently also the experience of many on this forum, certain types of work don't seem to work for most people very well even if done intensely. Straight off I'd cite tsumego problems, learning josekis and memorising games. In these cases the amount of work needed to improve appears to be huge with little return.

On the other hand a relatively small amount of work on studying professional games seems to pay off quickly.

There are provisos to this. One is that studying pro games doesn't mean reading commentaries (that's useful but with rather low direct returns). It means studying raw games in in bulk.

I have tried this myself in the past and certainly found it was the best way forward, but I never put much effort into it. I have only two data points for cases where much effort does apply. One is the traditional Japanese advice to play over 1,000 pro games to reach shodan (in the old sense, i.e. modern 5-dan). Judging by very many anecdotes I have read, this does seem to work, though neither the proverb nor the anecdotes explain how you do the work involved.

The other one, now well known in our circles, is the case where T Mark went from 2-dan to (strong) 4-dan just by transcribing the games of Go Seigen. Coincidentally, that was just short of 1,000 games. He went on to transcribe many thousands more games yet did not make such a big or rapid improvement again (he was certainly 5-dan strength at one point but never qualified as such).

This is the more interesting case because I know quite a lot about the details.

Some of these details:

1. There were no commentaries attached.

2. He transcribed complete games (i.e. he did not follow the common practice of just playing over the fuseki, or just the fuseki and middle game).

3. This was his first big session at playing over pro games. He had previously transcribed all the games and commentaries in Invincible but (a) the number of games was not very high and (b) the commentaries and especially the variations got in the way.

4. Because it was his first major work on a single mass of uncommented games, he was very focused. Every week when he handed over the games to me to add the player/event data (we were still on floppy discs in those days), he would, with shining eyes, describe some new strategy or tactic he'd observed and we'd discuss it avidly. This seemed to reinforce what he had learnt, though it didn't have any obvious benefit for me!

5. He did this intensely over a relatively short period, and he concentrated exclusively on a single player.

6. He never had any goal of improving in mind, or even of studying. He just wanted to produce discs for sale. It was only very late in the process that he noticed his tournament results took a dramatic upward turn, but he also noticed he was able to talk about the game in a different and more interesting way.

7. He never separately studied tsumego, joseki or counting (though he had done some of this in his kyu days).

Assuming all these factors did in fact explain his improvement, we have to ask why his improvement stalled after that, apart obviously from the law of diminishing returns.

I'd cite as the most important factors that he became "too" good at transcribing and there were too many humdrum games. When he was working on Go Seigen he was still a novice at transcribing, and was relatively slow. He therefore had to spend much longer on each game. The time was spent on hunting for the next move on densely filled diagrams. His brain was working subconsciously somewhat like AlphaGo doing pattern recognition. By the time he had finished the GSG collection he had got the average time for a transcription down to under 30 minutes whereas for me it was still about 45 minutes. Eventually he trimmed his time down to about 20 minutes, but even after about just 800 games he had become adept at predicting accurately where top pros played their next moves, so that he could find them quickly on the diagram. But once he had become adept, his brain did not have to work so hard. Eventually his transcription speed also slowed significantly.

Another factor with the GSG games, which actually made transcription harder, was that Go in particular made many unpredictable moves. I highlight this because I believe one of the most significant learning experiences for all of us are the "I didn't know you could do that" moments. In fact I think that is ultimately why studying many pro games pays off so much: in every facet of the game we see a host of moves that we would never have thought of for ourselves, which not only adds a new weapon to the armoury but also provides interest and thus motivation. This is why the "humdrum" games I mentioned add a negative element to the equation.

The skill set that Mark acquired was such that he became perhaps the best lightning player in Britain and one of the best in Europe. I think that could be expected from the neural network training kind of work he was doing. What was surprising, though, was that he also became very, very good at tsumego and tesujis (but mainly of the type where you have find a surprising move - presumably he'd seen them all before!), and that he was rather good at instantly estimating the count.

Another factor that applied after he completed the GSG collection is that he never again worked as intensely on a collection of a single player. He did many collections, of course, some much bigger: Shusai, Kitani, Takemiya, Fujisawa, Sakata, Hashimoto, Yi Ch'ang-ho, Cho Hun-hyeon, etc etc. But at that stage he was dipping in and out, doing yearbook games of many different players in-between. My speculation is that this blurred the focus: no longer could he build up such an accurate network of how an individual player played and how his moves could be predicted. Having seen so many styles he was predicting too many possible moves during the transcription process. These moves were clearly not bad moves but they slowed him down and introduced inconsistency into his thought processes.

What tentatively I draw from all of this is that the time needed to play over several hundred games of one player at a smooth and moderate speed, but attempting to predict the next move, gives one measure of how much work is needed to make significant progress. But it must be focused and fairly intense. With a relatively small number of games no measurable progress can be expected (an unformed neural network is presumably almost as useless as no network).

But once this hurdle is crossed and improvement is made, further progress may well require (in addition not instead of? a different kind of study. The neural network has been formed and can now only be tweaked.

As to how long it would take you to show a very significant improvement if you followed T Mark's method, he generally aimed at a minimum of transcribing four games a day (7 days a week) and sometimes did as many as 10, but he didn't quite manage that in the early days - apart from being slower at transcription he was still working for a living. From what I recall it took him a little under six months. So I take that as the baseline. Anything shorter or less intense than that means, if you are like me for instance, you will just stand still.

Unlike John suggests, tsumego problem or learning josekis can also be very useful means for fast improvement - if done well. In the case of josekis, it means to also understand them and the underlying theory, and use their study as a means to get a representative overview on various details of go knowledge. Joseki study was a major factor when I improved from 8k to 1k (as part of my improvement from 10k to 1k at a rate of ca. 3 or 4 weeks per rank on average).

Maybe T M Hall was strong 4d or like 5d by British standards but certainly not by - at those times - ca. 1 rank stronger EGF standards. He never showed such strength in games against me; it was like playing a weak German 4d. Why do you suggest that he were one of Europe's strongest blitz players? I do not recall such appearance in lightningtournaments at EGCs. (Studying pro games is useful but do not make him a stronger player than he was.)

Don't know for certain, but I never saw him go over a game once he'd transcribed it.



No experience from Mark to put forward here, but there are certainly lots of comments by Japanese players that support that idea.



We are talking about T Mark. I said he'd already done all that as a kyu player.



For example he came out ahead of (and defeated) European champion Matthew Macfadyen in tournaments. He was British Open champion several times.



I assume you've mistyped something. If not, then I believe him and my own eyes over you, but with the reminder that I specifically said he did not "study". He trained his neural network.

My tournament chess rating was stuck at around 1800 for 15 years before it shot up to 2000 in my forties. I think of this as approximately a 2k->1d improvement so maybe it is relevant to this discussion. I had always studied a lot so that wasn't the difference. The main thing I did was to start learning flashcards with spaced repetition, including

• 3700+ cards (eventually) covering every position in my opening repertoire
• Exercises from strategy and tactics books (mostly Yusupov and Hellsten, if any chess players here are interested)
• Theoretical endgame positions

Of course the fact that this worked for me does not imply that it is a general solution for everyone. I'm hopeful I can use similar techniques to improve at go. We'll see!

How do I play differently from an 1800 player now?

• Obviously I can now play the opening faster and more accurately.
• I am less often at a loss for what to do next; I know (and can recall) enough strategic patterns that at least one will probably fit.
• I am better at pruning my tree of variations when calculating, focusing only on moves that are likely to be fruitful.
• I play the proper move a lot more. At 1800 I was much more likely to say "I know the proper move is to play A but I think I can get away with B". Now I listen to the angel on my shoulder much more than the devil. (This is something I would probably have to unlearn somewhat if I got much stronger, which I won't. )

These all seem pretty relevant to go as well, and I can easily imagine myself being better at them than I am now.

How does a 2200 player play differently from me? Of course his calculating skills are stronger and he know more patterns. But largely I think he just wants it more. He concentrates hard on every move, and if I pull ahead he will fight back hard on every move, instead of collapsing, lashing out, or marching glumly to the end as we all know it is easy to do. These are skills I can work on too, in go as well as chess.

This is something that has cropped up a few times in this discussion - it falls under "fighting spirit." You attribute it to your 2200 opponent wanting it more, but I suspect that there is also a big element of knowledge and experience. If you have seen and remember how it is possible to get out of a bind, to dig yourself out of a hole, to not drown in deep water, then you are all the more likely to believe it is possible and do what you can to make it happen.

Just today, an opponent of mine beat me in a situation where his one eyed group was surrounded, and instead of rolling over and dying, he kept pushing until one of the weak links broke. He knew from experience that instead of striving for a second eye that he couldn't get, it would be worth trying to capture some of the surrounding stones. I knew it too, but instead of keeping my stones safe and letting him out (where I could have continued to pressure him) I let greed get the best of me and died.

The idea of using spaced repetition to strengthen your pattern recognition seems quite good. I've often considered it with go, but haven't done it - partly because I don't really know what would be the best info to put on the cards. I've heard that Guo Juan has a spaced repetition system for studying on her website. Has anyone here tried it?

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Patience, grasshopper.

It is very well done. A good fraction of the lectures now have problem sets. I used to watch lectures, kind of nod my head and then forget much of it. The problems are based on the lectures and sometimes explore variations not covered in them. After the problem sets were added, the site became much more valuable. But you have to do it. When I thought it was helping me I was doing 150 problems day, but that was hard to sustain.

How about 150 problems per year? Now that's really spaced repetition.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I think that Knotwilg is on the right track in that not particularly technical aspects of go are where to place a good part of your energy now. Such as on concentration and on not being greedy. And, if I may add, on applying the technique that you have, such as by counting liberties.



If I may make a suggestion, make use of the concept of just noticeable differences. Suppose that you have a problem that you missed or a game position that you misplayed. You can make a card for that position, but also make cards for similar positions with one stone removed or one stone added, or for positions where a stone is moved to an adjacent point. That will give you quite a number of possible cards, and you will not make all of them, maybe not even most of them. But if you want to improve your pattern recognition, you need to be able to discriminate among similar patterns.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Trying not to blunder and not blundering are two different things. The combination of b195 and b197 are a classic that I've done before, and I recognized it as soon as I played it. This is why some of us can't have nice things. Other than that, I did make a useless move at b161 forgetting that it no longer threatened to cut anything, but aside from that, I was glad that I decided to save my stones in the center, and that I managed to keep them alive...

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Patience, grasshopper.

Luckily there's an "easy" solution in this case ( not true in general ):
force yourself or make it a habit to read at least 5 moves deep ( more the better ).
Locally, and globally. Next: how to train yourself to do it consistently, so that eventually it becomes a habit, second nature, like breathing.
Then: how to see it way before yose, so you already have the trap sequence in mind much earlier ( at 180 ) ; make this a habit, too.

( Still, even 9p's self-atari once in a while... )

But keeping adding things to the list and you can eventually find one to beat him with.

A few years ago, I thought it would be fun to have people try and make their list of topics where they can say "there's no one who knows more about each and every one of these topics than I do".

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Occupy Babel!

I've read many good and thoughtful responses to this post.

I'm not one of those who thinks that anyone can reach anything, given "sufficient" effort. Talent and starting age do play a role, as does the fact that there's only 24 hours in a day and most of us have to eat, sleep and provide for that.

But for a person as strong as Daal already, with his apparent capability to discuss Go at a high level (if not in terms of Go then at least in terms of level of discussion), the fact that he hasn't reached 1d (yet) for me is unlikely to be due to lack of talent.

The likes of Daal may need to put in more effort than the likes of Uberdude, or if he had started as early as Bill, he may have gotten near Bill's level. True, not any kind of effort will bring significant progress right now. What you (we) need is directed effort, targeting directly what seems to keep you from reaching that goal.

With effort, we also don't necessarily mean time. Effort can also mean being fearless. For example, when my coach told me my thumb was still creeping up my blade when playing a backhand, I consciously tried to get rid of that bad habit. It didn't require a particular amount of time, but the "effort" went into accepting a step back in playing comfort, to leap forward in a major way later.

I like John's idea of going over pro games like T Mark did. From the post, though, I got the impression that he was saying that tsumego is not an efficient way to study. Robert Jasiek appeared to point that out already, and John said we are talking about T Mark's case. So maybe I misunderstood this part.

Anyway, I suspect that both studying pro games and tsumego can both be efficient ways to study.

I still attribute my jump from KGS 4k to 1k solely to doing the problems in the first book in the Train Like a Pro series. I devoted a lot of time to that and never had the energy to study the second book consistently (I.e. Every day).

Combining my own experience with T Mark's, as John describes, I will submit two hypotheses. I don't know if either are correct:

H1.) Studying any area (tsumego, pro games, joseki, etc.) intensely *every day* will lead to improvement. T Mark had a minimum daily goal and spent hours on this every day. In my own case, Train Like a Pro problems sometimes took nearly an hour for me to solve at 4K, and I always completed the daily allotment of problems. Adding in the time I spent in commute + evenings, this was probably around 3 hours of study a day. Maybe studying anything that long will reap some results.

H2.) Maybe different study is more efficient at different skill levels. My improvement was in the KGS SDK range, so maybe tsumego was really what I needed. T Mark was already 2d, so maybe pro games were a better bet.

I don't know if either of these hypotheses are correct. Makes me feel I should either:
a.) Study volume 2 of TLAP
b.) Study pro games

Doing either intensely at 3 hours a day can't hurt, but seems more difficult now with kids

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be immersed

Yes. To clarify, in an earlier post (in this thread, I think) I made the point that optimal improvement comes from studying or training the things that come up most often in your games. The problem with tsumego when you are a dan player who has already learnt the common tsumego techniques is that the things that occur in advanced problems, such as under the stones, tend never to occur in real life. Why waste time learning them when there is so much else that can still be learnt that is immediately applicable in your games?

In over 50 years of go I have seen rabbit/flower six (hanaroku) in my actual games just three times. I don't think I've ever seen a proper under stones. Of course they may have been there and I missed them, but I suspect not very often - at least nowadays I'm attuned to looking for them from having worked on books like Gateway to All Marvels.

I would never dismiss doing advanced tsumego problems, but as a dessert not as a main course. The book I've mentioned, The Rookie, describes one reason many weakies spend fruitless hours trying to improve at chess as being a search for the truth in a position. That's not a phrase I'm comfortable with - for me (a little ironically) the truth of a position is given by the numbers that show how often the different components come up. But if it's taken to refer to the beauty that's inherent in, say, a chess combination or a tesuji, I can empathise with that. Seeing beautiful moves can be a great motivation. The sugary part of go.

I can see your point somewhat, but I think there is more to tsumego study than techniques (under the stones, etc.). A lot of go problems consist of simple techniques played in the correct sequence. Practicing such problems doesn't teach you a new technique, but exercises your ability to read ahead and evaluate outcomes. These are useful skills in just about all of my games.

I doubt you disagree with this, but I bring it up since you mentioned that certain techniques in problems are rare.

So the question remains as to whether tsumego is a "main course" or a "dessert" for dan players. I'm skeptical that it is not a main course, but will admit that I don't study pro games much.

So while I feel tsumego is more important than a dessert, I certainly agree that it may not be a bad idea to expand my palette and try digesting some pro games for a change.

What have I got to lose? Variety is the spice of life.

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be immersed

I've had that simple one where it looks like you'll have a false eye on the edge but you sacrifice 4 stones in a square and then capture under them for a real eye in at least 2 online games, but my most memorable under-the-stones was in the Rengo tournament after the London Open a few years ago in which Andrew Kay, Klaudia Kleczkowska and I all managed to find that classic one with the wriggly tetris 4 shape to save our group in some important fight. And I remember a pro review of my game pointing another one out deep down some variation line that I had earlier dismissed as hopeless.

Having said that I agree such fancy tsumego aren't so useful for improvement (in terms of game results) until you can consistently get the easy ones right, which I still don't (particularly in byo-yomi). At the recent Gold Cup tournament in China I failed a basic life-and-death that probably a 10k can solve which cost me the game, which elicited a wry smile from some Chinese chap watching the game, see move 180 in viewtopic.php?p=209970#p209970. Noob Europeans! (My mental mistake in that game was to think if I blocked the hane he could kosumi in sente then hanging connection for ko, but the kosumi isn't sente, I can peep vital point and if he pushes out just connect/capture on the top and he doesn't have enough eyespace outside: that peep is not ingrained in me enough to read in a glance).

Btw when was T Mark doing those Go Seigen games and going from 2d to 4d? I only started playing Go in 2005 and met him a few times over the years, though unfortunately we never played a rated tournament game (we did play at the London teams tournament). He was notable to me as one of those older generation of British 4 dan players who held his rating, whilst many others went down (probably a combination of getting weaker and grades getting tougher).

Why some people never reach shodan is probably too vague of a question. Some started late, some didn't put in the effort, some perhaps just don't have a very good go sense. In my case, a few very good points have been made as to why my play is not dan level. Here is what seems to me is keeping me back the most: I blunder (fixable), I lack fighting spirit (fixable) I lose fights. The last point is not a matter of fixing, but rather of slowly improving a wide set of skills. Additionally, my sente awareness, aji awareness and miai awareness are all below dan level. There's also counting, but I think quite a few dans don't count either.

Some have pointed out that as a matter of attitude, optimism will take one farther than pessimism, and I admit that my optimism could be improved. People who don't believe that they can change probably won't. So what are the changes that need to take place? Basically it amounts to playing fewer bad moves and more good moves. Doing this is a matter of both knowledge and practice. The knowledge aspect is on the one hand knowing which moves are bad and not playing them, and on the other hand knowing patterns, tesuji and theory that help me find better ones. The practice part involves consistently making the effort during play.

At least I think I know what needs to take place in order to keep improving, and that's something...

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Patience, grasshopper.

I am on a quest to improve from KGS 1d to 3d and I'm doing the hitachi go problems as a main course, next to replaying Otake games and refreshing my "mentality" diet of fighting spirit, time management and concentration. I'm also playing games on Tygem as a 3d. When I joined as 1d I got a 16-1 record. After promotion to 3d I'm at 12-1.

I'm still missing so many relatively basic problems, or fortunately neglecting some variations of them even if I "got" the solution, that I don't think it is fruitless effort. As you stated, the benefit will be an increased awareness of shapes and vitality of groups but also an improved proficiency at reading itself.

I think the ROI on L&D starts lowering from KGS 4-5d onwards.

"Counting" is too ambiguous a word when describing go skills. daal, I think you mean "territorial positional judgement". It is right that some (esp. low) dans don't do it. OTOH, it can be good for 1/2 rank for an SDK. Seeking excuses for several topics like this then can prevent you from reaching 1d because of having too many omissions. For SDK, learning the basics of using influence is responsible for 2 +-2 ranks. The same applies for 3d wishing to become 5d. Using influence involves several topics incl. fighting and dynamic positional judgement of influence. Of that, counting numbers of stones is a part. A very easy part. However, if you dismiss it as "counting which some dans neglect", you miss your chance to improve easily. There are much harder aspects of using influence, so why dismiss the easiest part? Yes, one can become 1d without counting and positional judgement but I say: it is easier with them. The same goes for easy cases of endgame counting. Make 14 additional correct choices between 3 and 4 point endgames per game and you are a rank stronger. 3 1/2 ranks in one message; good enough for now:)