Well... everybody has the right to treat their passions or their lives as shallow or as deep as they want.
Far be it for me to stand in your way or tell you to stop.

_________________
- Bantari
______________________________________________
WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

This comment stuck out to me, so I thought about it for awhile before responding. "You don't like playing go". When I first read it, it sounds ridiculous. Of course I like playing go.

But then if I think about the phrase a bit more - "playing go"... I guess this is not the same exactly as saying, "You don't like go". It's a comment about "playing go"... Do I enjoy "playing go"? I guess this also depends on the definition of "enjoy", too. Defining what it means to "enjoy" something might be tricky, but I can at least comment on the feeling I have when I am "playing go".

When I am playing go - that is, when I am in the middle of a game - I know that I have a feeling of "comfort" when I am ahead on the board. When I feel that I am behind on the board, my feeling is... "concerned", maybe.

So if I think about the feeling that I have when I am "playing go", I guess that I am typically either feeling:
a.) Comfort, or
b.) Concerned...

Do these equate to feelings of enjoyment? It's hard for me to say.

What is "enjoyment"?

_________________
be immersed

Kirby, may I ask what you like about go? Perhaps focusing on what you enjoy about it will help you to relax more? I think that may be a bit of what topazg is getting at. If you like all of the intricacies and tesujis, try to learn some of those. If you like the depth of the professional scene, perhaps try to focus for a while on studying pro games and such (There was a mention of a variant of Malkovich games just to study pro games). If you can figure that out, that might give you a little more direction. You obviously love the game, but perhaps just playing games endlessly is distracting you from what you really like about it?

My problems with rank are more a matter of concern about the future. It's really fun to set goals and feel yourself, and rank is the best metric to show that you did. What I'm worried about is if I will have a harder time enjoying the game once I ride out the improvement curve and it becomes harder to tell when I learn things.

Until that point though, I just need to figure out how to mind less when I lose. I like the game because of its depth, and how there's always something to learn. However, though I enjoy playing, I get very into games, so when I feel like I have made stupid mistakes, it is really frustrating. I just need to figure out how to acknowledge mistakes and let it go. I think that's what I need to work on?

_________________
Someday I want to be strong enough to earn KGS[-].

Some people who just started playing Go say that they don't want to play because they are afraid to lose. They are terrified. In the beginning many people feel elated when they win and miserable when they lose. The feeling is so strong that they refuse to play so as not to experience the misery and pain.

The only cure for this is to play more games. The more you lose the easier it becomes. The negative feelings after loss are quite understandable. You might feel stupid and worthless, and nobody likes that. However, after losing so many games in so many different ways, each exposing your deficiency and limitations, you are bound to stop worrying about it so much. Another loss will mean little. Another ten losses in a row will not stir you much either. This is when you stop worrying about your rank.

So my suggestion to you is to embrace losing. It is good. The more you have it the less it (and the rank that directly depends on it) affects you.

I think about my rank constantly and I am okay with it. I celebrate when I rise in rank and I am deflated when I drop or seems like I can't advance. I am okay with this, and I still enjoy the game itself. Part of it is treating the rank as a barometer of my skill, but I have discovered that I also enjoy the simple fact of the number being next to my name . I am happy that I am an sdk and not an ddk anymore, and I look forward to the time when I can see a "d" next to my name. It is motivational, and overall makes me feel better rather than worse. I don't find that I am not enjoying the game or the movement of the stones just because I am obsessed about rank, so I see no problem with this at all.

You don't study your own games after you play them. I obviously can't be 100% sure of this, but I know what kind of effect it had on me when I started to actually look at my moves and my opponents' afterward.

If you lost, you should probe, find out why. A lot of the time a "behind feeling" can be traced to a move quite early which was played in the wrong direction or without a clear objective.

If you won, you should probe, find out why. Find the move your opponent didn't that would have turned the game around and caused you to resign.

Negative side effect, at first: finding out that you only won because your opponent made a foolish oversight in a capturing race makes you feel foolish too.

Positive side effect: feeling foolish about a game you won is a step forward from thinking you won because you are better than your opponent. And it's a step toward not feeling foolish about winning or losing. If your opponent is equally talented, or the handicap is correct, you will each win 50% of the time.

Several pros have said that the study of Go is the study of Truth (or something to that effect.) By understanding more of it we come closer to the Universal Mind, or satori, or whatever you like to call it. That's the calling, not the numbers by your name.

But guess what? Even the Enlightened Individual may lose if he has worthy opponents - about 50% of the time. Before enlightenment, chop wood. After enlightenment, chop wood.


As far as valuing your play when you lose, one of my most memorable games ever was against a 7d in a tournament when I had just turned 2d. I took 5 stones and played fast over the whole board and took outside influence until he invaded my lower left corner. He was weak - I attacked. I chased him across the board to gain profit. I chased and chased. He cut me from behind but I had miai to connect to the left or right and he had to continue running. But I overextended. He was able to make his connection in sente. No problem, miai, right? But he played a stone in the very center of what I had been building - three spaces from anything else. I looked and said "huh, well, I can connect to the left." And then I did a double-take. My "wall" to the right was thin and eyeless. If he cut he could tear through it like tissue paper. If he squeezed it, it would die. If I protected it, my "attacking" string of stones would be cut off and would die. I read both variations as far as I could and couldn't find a way to make both live.

Every time my eye caught the white stone in the middle of the lower part of the board, my grin grew bigger and bigger. It was perfect. It was exactly the right spot. Nothing worked. It was terrible. It was beautiful. It was exhilarating. I resigned without playing another move.

A friend of mine squeezed my shoulder and said "that was a very manly resignation." But it wasn't. I couldn't make him understand. In the face of the Truth shown by that move I had no choice. It was amazing. It was the best thing in the world to be shown such a beautiful move. It was especially wonderful that the move would not have existed without the game that I helped to create on the board.

I don't always think like that, but when I do it makes everything worthwhile - winning, losing, studying, everything.

For me, the easiest way to stop worrying about rank was to play on an account that no one I cared about knew of. There was no way for anyone to judge me, so I was free to just play.

You are being overly self-conscious and dangerously introspective.

Starting a thread like this on a discussion forum is not helping you.

I figured that caring a lot about rank was not something that was unique to me, so it seemed like an appropriate topic to bring up.

I don't really understand what you mean by "dangerously introspective".

However, I do appreciate the ideas that you and everyone else here have brought up.

_________________
be immersed

Since Kirby asked the original question, it's only fair to quote his own signature:

;)

I'm guessing that to stop worrying about rank you need to stop wanting to improve. Does that sound sacrilegious enough?

Think about it:
* Wanting to improve means you're playing Go for a reason other than having fun playing Go.
* It also means you're currently unsatisfied with yourself. Not the healthiest state to perpetually be in.
* And if you don't actively want to improve, you're still going to improve, provided that you play and study. So ideally you should just want to play and study, not improve.

I suppose this is entirely unlike how pros approach Go. Which is why they say they hate it. And care about rank, a lot.

Has any pro other than Cho Chikun said that they don't like / hate Go?

_________________
We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

Not to my knowledge.
lee chang ho once said that he sometimes hate playing go. does that count?

_________________
"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson

Simplified statement: Studying is not fun, it is kinda work. You will only do it if you want to improve. Improve what? Your rank, of course.

So you want to improve? Then you probably care about your rank. Be honest about it, nothing wrong with it.

_________________
Stay out of my territory! (W. White, aka Heisenberg)

Lets look at it from another perspective. You don't improve your rank. You improve your skill. Rank is a by-product of skill. That way, you can study in order to improve your skill. I like being skillful, studying doesn't feel like work to me. It's quite enjoyable. I like to learn new things. (I do it quite seldom though due to too many other commitments.)

If you see rank as the ultimate goal I could see that studying would be work and not very enjoyable though.

_________________
FusekiLibrary, an opening library.
SGF converter tools: Wbaduk NGF to SGF | 440 go problems | Fuseki made easy | Tesuji made easy | Elementary training & Dan level testing | Dan Tutor Shortcut To Dan

Well, my point was that there's not really a difference between those two perspectives. Skill is reflected in rank and vice versa. So if you say you want to improve your skill, you can as well say you want to get your rank up.

And if you say 'I want to improve my skill but I do not really care about my rank' then that might sound nice, but imo it does not make much sense.

_________________
Stay out of my territory! (W. White, aka Heisenberg)

Well, you can learn things without increase in rank.
And you can increase in rank without learning new stuff...
I know, I've done both.

If you equate these two, then you will stop studying and learning when you reach a saturation point at which your rank does not improve much. And you WILL reach such point, everybody does. According to some people here, you will then not only stop studying the game, but stop enjoying it as well, and thus stop playing it. Which is a pity... And this is all because you chose to motivate yourself with a shiny little number by your name. To me that means that you do not really enjoy the game, but enjoy the chase after the next higher rank. And this makes the game you play meaningless, might as well be chess or renju or tic-tac-toe.

Wise people don't do that.

_________________
- Bantari
______________________________________________
WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Whatever rocks your boat, friend.

_________________
Stay out of my territory! (W. White, aka Heisenberg)

The thing is, to me it seems difficult to have confidence that you are really learning new things if it is not reflected in your rank.

Let's say that I didn't know anything about sabaki. Then I read some material on sabaki, and study up on the "right way" to play in certain situations.

And after that study, it doesn't affect the results of any of my games.

I have to wonder at that point, did I really learn anything? Maybe I misunderstood this new thing that I thought that I had learned.

If I have truly come to know something better, shouldn't I win more against the same level of people because of it?

If not, it makes me wonder if I am really learning anything at all.

After all, if I won just as much before I "learned" X, then is what I have learned about X really useful to the game? I must have not learned it properly.

_________________
be immersed

Looked at a different way: Did you enjoy learning about Sabaki? Has it added an element of fun that wasn't there before into invading people's territories? Do you feel you have some fun tricks up your sleeves to play when you feel like it?

If so, who cares if you win more - you're making your Go games into richer experiences

It's a pretty convincing point... I still have to wonder if I truly learned anything in the first place... But I suppose that, even if I hadn't really learned anything, I might have more fun in my ignorance.

_________________
be immersed

And that feels like a pretty big success to me That's how I've been playing Go for the last 3 years, and some of it seems to have made a difference (not sure which bits, but that's part of the fun too - it's like playing mastermind and never knowing which of your guesses are the black pegs - eventually you get there!)