A couple of days ago I had the following idea. Is it possible for a novice to improve at Go for the first 3 months just by replaying pro games in addition to playing actual games? Hold off on puzzles until after the 3 months have passed; by this time the novice will have acquired enough background information to be able to make educated guesses when solving tsumego and other Go puzzles.

I don't know about replaying pro games, but I did not tackle go problems until I had been playing go for almost a year, by which time I was 4 kyu (maybe an AGA 3 kyu today, I dunno. Probably a Japanese 2 kyu now.) I had the English translation of Korschelt, which has problems in it, but they are above beginner level. Except for the first problem, which I did solve. (I checked, and I had marked it solved.) I did play over a few pro games, but since there was a single diagram per game, I found that tedious. I did study the endgame and opening diagrams, since they were not too crowded.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Probably, for a newbie, it can help a bit, but IMO it helps MUCH more if he gets club advice, reads good beginner books or takes lessons because these sources (should) know what is relevant for his understanding.

Say that playing a move happens in two stages:

• gather candidate moves
• read them out

(these stages of course aren't strictly seperated, for example reading out your first guess might lead you to finding a better first move, then read that out etc.)

While replaying pro games can certainly help with the first, I don't think it helps much with the second stage, which is the meat of your playing ability.
(It won't help a 20k much to know about fancy clamps if he puts himself into atari on every 3rd move.)

And the idea that you need pro-games to be able to solve tsumego is kind of outlandish.
I bet every dan-player has done a few ishi-no-shita problems, yet most haven't seen that sort of tesuji occur in any of the games they played/observed.

I think the point of playing over pro games is often missed. As with many other controversial things, too often it is dismissed and then reasons are sought to justify that dismissal. A more open-minded approach can be useful, although the guidance of a commentary is often also needed.

E.g.



One reason for looking at pro games (or josekis) is to see moves that you would not normally think of, so that they swim into your consciousness in future. In the position above, the last move A usually elicits the reply shown in the variation (2), and in fact it can be called a knee-jerk sequence among amateurs.

Black here, Miyasaka Shinji 5-dan against Segoe Kensaku 6-dan, did not like the White cap that results after the usual sequence, so he played a very unusual alternative (1). At first I thought it was a misprint!

That move drew a comment from Honinbo Shusai. What do you think he said? It might be useful to remember that there was no komi then.

Yes, but the beginner must become aware of the basic moves first.



Eh, Black 1 is a kind of move I learnt by myself when I loved attacking regardless of how bad the shapes;)



Both static and dynamic aspects should be considered when analysing a position. (Both are difficult for beginners, who can hardly learn them on their own just by replaying pro games.)

When I started playing table tennis competitively 1,5 years ago, I also watched a lot of pro movies. It's fun, it's spectacular, it's inspiring.

A while ago a strong player watched me and said: "your serve looks like you copied it from a video or something, but there's not much going on". I had copied the body weight shift, some arm motion and a lot was going on in my head that didn't transfer into the mechanics (loads of spin - NOT, astute disguise - NOT).

It turned out there were some aspects that I was not copying at all: backswing, keeping the bat flat, wrist action, keeping the contact thin, using the tip of the bat for extra momentum ... all details of serve action that I either had not noticed, or thought I executed but didn't.

I needed to go back and train these aspects first and each one in isolation. Now my serves didn't look like professional serves at all. Now I was really training.

I guess there are people who think pro games obscure basic moves and those who think they exemplify them.

I would say no. It would be incredibly boring, and not the most effective use of time.

They do both. Most of a pro game is below the surface.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

As for learning by imitation, I think that a lot of people do not understand it or its power. After all, we all learned our native tongues by imitation. That is quite a feat! We just don't remember how we did it.

At a certain point what seems to be the most frequent word in a child's vocabulary. Why? Kids wonder about things. They ask why. The make guesses. That's all part of imitation (Edit: at least, when they wonder why by themselves). There is surface imitation, monkey see monkey do, but there is also deeper imitation, which generalizes and makes distinctions. Both are learning by observation, which is the definition of imitation.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I disagree. I think it is possible. And I find it quite enjoyable. I claim that a significant portion of my early improvement was using this method.

Could you imagine telling your kids at a young age to play through three months of game recordings and only after that they could play a game?

I know playing capture go regularly with a kid, I couldn't see him wanting to do that for three months. I'm just a bit skeptical.

Who is advocating that? Tekesta is only saying not to do problems for three months.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Sorry, then, I misread. I'm guessing most novices just do the play games and never touch problems.

Most of us that are not pursuing a professional career in Go have only so much time during the day to cultivate Go skills. Still, it takes a while for one to see any appreciable improvement in the same, so an effective training régime is desirable.

(And at the risk of looking like some cheap philosopher...) an infant must nurse at mother's breast, since it has no teeth. A toddler has to eat soft foods, since her teeth are not yet fully developed.

I work from the assumption that a toddler has to practice constantly to master human speech, but at the same time she absorbs a lot through attentive observation of her environment. Overtime, constant imitation, practice, and refinement allow the toddler to understand some basic vocabulary and know how to use it. Eventually the toddler grows into a child and has a fairly good command of human speech.

With that analogy in mind, I surmise that the novice learning Go for the first time should just imitate the moves in pro games to gain experience. Of course, let's remember these are plays made by seasoned experts and it will take many lost games and erroneous plays to make progress, but the novice should strive constantly to play the right way. Once the novice has gained experience in Go, puzzles can be used to weed out the worst playing habits, beginning with tesuji and life & death ones. Through this process of constant practice and refinement, the novice can make steady progress toward shodan.

In a nutshell, by the time a toddler begins to talk, she has absorbed thousands of hours of conversation. Perhaps if the Go novice sticks just to replaying pro games and playing actual games against opponents for the first few months, a solid foundation for subsequent study and improvement can be laid.

Nice analogy.

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Patience, grasshopper.

We don't learn to speak by mere imitation and we certainly don't subject our toddlers to Winston Churchill speeches alone. We say "ball" "baaalllll".

Mostly we do.



No, but they hear correct (pro level) speech all the time.



Sure, but most vocabulary is picked up, and nearly all grammar is. Picking up grammar is a remarkable achievement that nearly every child accomplishes before school age.

Yes, we correct children's speech, but we also reward some mistakes because they are cute.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

There are also numerous examples of adults correcting children's speech, only to have them reproduce the incorrect version because it fits their understanding of the language at the time. It's certainly decently documented that children progress from using "went" to using "goed" before going back to "went", as their understanding of English develops.

Furthermore, there is some evidence that correction in adult language learners can be counterproductive: http://www.hss.nthu.edu.tw/~fl/faculty/John/What%27s%20Wrong%20with%20Oral%20Grammar%20Correction%201999.htm. I would be completely unsurprised to learn that this is the case in go as well. I, for example, may have a general sense of "this move looks bad", but that doesn't mean that I fully understand the situation that I attempt to explain to someone, and I have certainly told people a move was good or bad and been dead wrong before. It's also very easy to focus on "oh, I need to play this move here" or "this is the joseki move, so I have to play it" without the understanding necessary to make those moves good moves, or applying them in the wrong context.

To my mind, the most important thing in playing go is the ability to generate and prune candidate moves. You need to develop an innate sense of which moves could be interesting, and which are not, in order to confine your search space to something managable. Similarly, you also need that to expand it to include the sharpest moves, as you will never be able to read if they work when they don't occur to you in the first place. I don't know how many lectures I've seen, or books I've read, where the answer in a particular position seems so counterintuitive to my level that not only do I fail to consider it, but I don't really understand the explanation either and can't implement it in my own games. You can tell me "no, this is good!" all you want, but there's no way for me to apply it because my understanding isn't there yet.

As an example, most beginners learn the basic 3-3 invasion under a 4-4 stone pretty early on, and once they do, you start to see it all the time in their games. It takes a long time to go from that to the understanding that this sequence is not actually good except in fairly specific circumstances, and it's not something you can just tell someone and expect them to be able to implement well. They may listen to you and not do it when they think they should, but then someone will do it to them and they'll handle the result poorly, and it's back to square one. I would go so far as to say that at certain levels, the immediate 3-3 invasion is right, and it continues to be right until a player is strong enough to use the thickness created from the 4-4 stone somewhat effectively. Once they reach that point, their 3-3 invasion timing will become much more nuanced and balanced, and they will no longer fear its early deployment against them.

I think the only way to get to this point is with experience, both your own games and that which you acquire vicariously through the games of others.