I think most people are quite pessimistics about your goal. It's not gonna be easy but it's doable. Work for it, keep a tsumego book with you at all time, play as much as possible and try to find a teacher. And even if you fail, it's better to end up 2k while aiming at 1d than reaching a 6k goal.

good luck, don't forget to have fun on the way, let us know in a year !

You can reach 2k while aiming for 6k as well.

Everyone has met people that started a personal improvement challenge underestimating the amount of work / skill etc. that goes into reaching that goal. This is a major source of disappointment and a reason for people leaving Go altogether. It is the same for other skills, like trying to learn a language and giving up when it turns out harder than you thought.

Be willing to learn and be serious about it and you will see how far it will get you.

It's a valid point. Staying motivated sur is a tough part. I would probably have been less supportive if he didn't have a reason and a deadline.



However, I disagree with this one. Becoming 2k in a year is already not easy, and you are realy unlikely to reach it if you're only aiming for 6k.

I'm sure Magnus Carlsen would become 1d in less than a year if he picked it up for even as small an amount as 1h a day. I believe a lot in talent(*), more so I think than in the proverbial 10 000 hours. So, if you are akin to Carlsen's talent, and put in 2 hours a day, you can definitely become 1d.

Even if it took me years to become a dan player and have been stuck at the low dan level ever since, I still think 1 dan is nothing special. Quite the contrary: the hard part is to let go of your thirst to be "original", to outsmart common sense. Consciously applying the 10 most important strategic principles and the 10-20 most common techniques for local situations, calculating a few moves deep & wide each move and resisting primitive impulses that go against those, will get you there easily.

It's not easy at all. This is what I mostly mean by (*)talent: not only the reading/calculating ability, or the capacity to absorb new concepts, but the mentality to focus while playing and to train well.

You can waste away the proverbial 10 000 hours by merely going through the motions while playing and reading tons of material.

The fact alone that you appear on this forum is a counterindication: you are already spending time fantasizing about progress instead of playing for progress. I'm 100% sure that Magnus Carlsen will not be seen here when starting his go career.

To cheer you up a bit, I was 27 when I first learn about this game, started October 2015, I became 1D in OGS around September 2016, so your goal is certainly feasible. My advice would be try to practice more problem every day, forget about playing too many games, where you will do same and simple mistake over and over again, it's simply frustrating... and have more confidence in game.

just my 2 cents

I think that people highly, highly overestimate the age effect and highly, highly underestimate stereotype threat and highly, highly underestimate the value of training that fits the level, talent and previous knowledge of the respective student.

Why do you think so? Do you think age doesn't play much of a role? How old are you? I'm over 50, and I think it does play a big role...


What does that mean?


Here we agree

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Patience, grasshopper.

The stereotype threat is that you buy into the idea that because you're old, or whatever, you're not capable of doing something. If you believe it, it has a way of being a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's definitely possible - I got to 1d KGS a year after starting.

At the time I'd only played around 150 19x19 games, but much more importantly had done around 10,000 tsumego. I've always enjoyed go puzzles/problems more than actually playing. And the only two books I'd read fully were Davies' 'Tesuji' and Otake Hideo's 'Opening Theory Made Easy'. I didn't review or watch any professional games in my first year; was much more interested in just having fun with the problems than watching it.

Most games your desired level and below are simply won by whoever reads better. Yes, strategy/theory/knowledge is useful of course, but sooner or later, a fight will happen. So yeah, tsumego, tsumego, tsumego. Even if it's half an hour each day, make time for it. 10 minutes when you first wake up, 10 minutes in your lunch break, 10 minutes before bed. There's no excuse, and even if you spend an entire minute on each problem, that's ~11,000 problems in a year. Start today .

Where did you come across 11,000 problems???

http://goproblems.com/ has exactly 11681 Problems at this moment
When you go to ‘Problems’, then the tab ‘Group’, then select ‘Collections’ you can sort the collections (e.g. Encyclopedia of Life and Death 895 problems, or corner based 1356 problems) by difficulty. Starting with the easy ones should shortly sum up to some hundreds or even thousands.

And that’s only one place to go.
Here you can find some other links:
http://senseis.xmp.net/?GoProblemsOnTheInternet

How old am I? I am about 40 and started go about two years ago (I can give you more details about myself in PM, but I don't want it googleable).

Why do I think so? I think so because I encountered the same attitude when I learned languages (and other things related to youth stereotypes) and because I teach a lot and encounter people of different ages and their various attitudes and success. I also have long experience with learning in the face of stereotypes against women in my domain and this discussion feels familiar.

Do I think that age doesn't play much of a role? It certainly plays a big role whether you have young children and a career while learning go or not, but I don't think that this is what you are talking about. You seem to be genuinely convinced that you would have had much better results if you had started go at age 20 and did exactly the same things. I think that this difference would have been very small. (I DO think that it matters if you do not train your mind/memory at all as a child, but I assume that you had other intellectual and educational pursuits before you started go.)

The relevant questions are: If you were 20 and not progressing at go as fast as you want, what would you do? And why don't you do the same thing now?




Stereotype threat means that you do worse when "people" expect you to do worse. It is well-documented and studied and the people who are most affected by it are (potential) high-achievers during test situations with hard problems who don't need to believe the stereotype themselves. Studies indicate that it is simply very distracting if at every little failure you have to reflect whether this corroborates the stereotype threat or how you are confirming the stereotype for those who believe it.

Some classical study set-ups:
1. You let some American male college students play a tricky mini-golf course. You tell half of them that this problem is a good indicator of athleticism, result: the Black students excel. You tell half of them that this problem tests strategic planning and intellect, result: the White students excel. And the difference is not subtle.
2. You give a maths test to Asian-American female college students. You ask half of them whether they are housed in single sex dorms or not. You ask half of them whether they speak languages other than English. Those that are reminded that they are Chinese do a lot better on the maths test than those that have been reminded that they are women.

There are ways to mitigate the effect and I have found that I have used some of these ways in my own life instinctively. However, I still feel that people who emphasize a lot that "X cannot do Y well" are engaging in an aggressive action against me if I am part of X, want to do Y and the sentence is not part of an actual discussion whether it is true, but simply repeated over and over and over again as an unsupported statement of fact. And I find it hard enough that there are practically no women in this endeavour. I certainly don't need a second stereotype threat on top of that.

I actually teach people how to play Go for a living and advertise that I can help them reach Dan. http://www.shawnsgogroup.com and http://www.youtube.com/clossius You can watch and see if you like my style or not there. Reaching 1d in a year is very possible. I taught a student who was 12kyu and got him to 1d in 1 year and 3 months.

This is advertising, yes. But what you seek is exactly what I advertise and do for a living. Teach Go and provide study methods for improving your game in the most efficient way possible.

For realistic views, you need around 1000 hours of playing and studying Go to reach 1D. Not just playing for fun, but playing and studying with the intent to improve and learn from every move and every game. It is work, but it can be fun work if you enjoy it.

Shawn
A.K.A. Clossius

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Check out my youtube channel at http://youtube.com/Clossius/

I will teach 100 people how to play in order to get 1 Go player.

What exactly does age have to do with the progression of Go rank?

Sent from my ONEPLUS A3000 using Tapatalk

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

Count me as one of your encounters Interestingly enough, I also came to my opinion through my experiences learning and teaching languages. My impression is that it gets harder to remember vocabulary as one grows older, and that younger people can better internalize the sounds and flow of a foreign language.

I also see some similarities in these discussions. Some argue that inherent abilities are more important than external factors or the other way around. It seems obvious to me that both are important.

Yes, we disagree. All things being equal, I do think that if I was 20 and put as much time and energy into go as I have since I started in my mid 40's that I would be significantly stronger. I am 100% sure that if I had put in this time and energy as a 6 year old, that I would be significantly stronger. Of course you are right that all things are not equal, so it is indeed hard to make a comparison.

Who says I'm not doing what I would have been doing then?

Interesting studies! I don't doubt that psychological factors play a role in one's ability to perform a task and that positive thinking is beneficial to performance, but it's only a relative factor. In other words, psychological conditions will help or hinder one compared to how they would perform without being subject to such influences. They don't cancel out other possible influences such as age.

It also seems that these studies are dealing with the short-term effect of an external suggestion and not with the long-term effect of an internalized opinion. For me, whether it's true or not, I view the idea that age affects one's abilities as an obvious fact, like today being Sunday. It's not something that distracts me much.

I do think that it is true that age affects one's ability to perform and learn, and I base this on my own experience and observations. For example: there are a lot more people who started playing go when they were young and are now strong than there are people who started playing when they were older and are strong. A recent thread mentioned that the age of the strongest chess players averages to about 31 years old, and I assume that it is slightly younger for go players. Either their abilities start to decline after that, or they are not learning the newest moves as well as younger players.

I guess similar to what you describe, I take offense to the claim that age is not relevant. People who say that X has no influence on my ability to do Y while I feel that X is a limiting factor are to me discounting my accomplishment when I perform Y at a certain level.

Interestingly enough, it is also possible to view a stereotype threat as a challenge. This has been my approach to learning Chinese, and I think it is working well. The notion that Chinese is a hard language for a native English speaker to learn, and that it is even harder to learn as an older adult is a big source of motivation for me. My Chinese is better than that of anyone I know who has started learning at my age and has not lived in China. If I didn't see it as a challenge, I probably wouldn't know any Chinese at all.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Hmmm. I had not heard that Chinese was supposed to be an especially hard language for native English speakers to learn. True, you can't rely upon cognates, but grammatically, both Chinese and English are analytical languages, as opposed to synthetic languages, like Latin and Japanese.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Understanding spoken Chinese is difficult for English speakers for several reasons. First, there are far fewer individual syllables in Chinese than English, making it easier to mix up words. This is compounded by the fact that to an ear accustomed to English, many of these sounds appear similar. Chinese makes distinctions between some sounds based on whether they are aspirated or not, whereas English doesn't. Also, the semantic function of tones is absent in English. Reading and writing are also difficult for English speakers (and most everyone else) due to the lack of an alphabet. The meaning and pronunciation of thousands of characters needs to be memorized. The lack of cognates is also a significant difficulty for non-asian learners. The fact that both English and Chinese are analytical languages is something I wasn't aware of, and although I am glad that Chinese words don't change their form, many of them do have the annoying property of having multiple meanings and grammatical functions.

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Patience, grasshopper.

As do many English words.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I recently started learning Polish for fun. I don't have the impression it's particularly harder than when I was 25 and learning Portuguese. However, the motivation is completely different. Back then, I needed to crash into it because I was studying math in Lisbon. Now it's just for fun and not in any way practical, other than impressing my Polish colleagues whom I visit a few times a year. According to them, my accent is flawless, so it doesn't seem much harder to internalize the sounds and flow than it was for French back when I was 10.

I'm my own anecdotal evidence.

Overall, I tend to agree there's a difference in capacity but I do think you overestimate the effect.

Majordomo's study journal reveals a progression to 1 kyu KGS in one year: viewtopic.php?f=48&t=13265.

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Occupy Babel!