Hi All

As I am slowly getting to grips (although not necessarily improving yet!) I hear a lot about reading. I assume this to mean analysing the position.

Has anybody got any good tips or information on how to become better at reading.

I play on OGS as well and KGS and although I am starting to see certain patterns, I have periods of board blindness where I dont always foresee my opponents responses.

Is it just a matter of time and a few thousand games before this comes or is there a way that I can study that will increase my ability and confidence in this area?

I may have said before that my background is chess, so I would like to think I have some spatial awareness. although granted the 19x 19 board is a very different landscape for me to try and compute!!

Regards

Markeemark

Doing tsumego problems helps to train your eye for reading out positions. It also teaches concepts like false eyes and shapes that can be killed.

I think reading is based on hard-wired basic responses. Once you know gut reactions like extending from atari, this knowledge helps give length to reading. Reading is useful to determine whether a move works and whether it's beneficial to play (opponent's response might make it a bad move!).

The suggestion to practice tsumego is a good one. Also, just play a lot. That is practice in a wider sense.

When you do, you will improve in at least three different ways:
1) You will begin to recognize patterns, so that upon reaching them you can terminate searching of that branch, instead of having to search all the way to the leaves. ( You probably have experienced this in chess )
2) You will have a probablistic database of what move feels best in a certain situation. This will allow you too choose branches with a higher than average chance of being your best play. ( Vital points are a good example of this )
3) And, like most mental activities, practice will increase your speed.

To make #1 and #2 happen, study good shape and study basic life and death. A good place to start studying shape is: http://senseis.xmp.net/?SixGoodAndSixBadShapes. Also, just do a search for 'shape' at that site.

A useful concept to comprehend both good shape and life&death is vital points: http://senseis.xmp.net/?VitalPoint.

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Help make L19 more organized. Make an index: https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5207

By reading, we mean being able to see that "If I go here, he could go here, and then I'll go here...". A lot of your ability to read will come from the pattern recognition you gain from just playing again and again. This is especially true at your level, for instance, if you haven't already, you will quickly be able to see that the black stone here is dead and cannot escape:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bcm1
$$ --------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . .
$$ | . . O X O . . . .
$$ | . . . O . . . . .[/go]

But there is another rather essential thing you must do if you want to get stronger, and Toge has already mentioned it: tsumego (go problems). Go problems are similar to chess problems, except that we don't keep track of the number of moves a solution takes, and instead of trying to win the game, most problems are either about killing your enemy's stones or making your own live. You might want to read through this short guide to go problems, and then when you have time go to http://goproblems.com/ and try to solve some of the easy problems there. If you do this for a few days, you will probably find yourself improving.

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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.

Try to read by visualizing (literally imagine black and white stones on the board) not by verbalizing (if he moves here, i can move here). It is just a burden to try to make sense of what happens by sort of talking to yourself (even if silent) - it slows up the process too much.

Also, simply reading http://senseis.xmp.net/?BasicInstinct might be an enormous help. Spending less thought on those moves that will look obvious to you soon enough will give you spare brain power to think about the less obvious moves and will help your intuition to adapt. Most of us (including the dan players) play bad moves because we are thinking too complicated - in my very personal opinion.

If you are a 30k beginner like your user info says, some of the most important points are probably not reading, but things like looking at the whole board and not necessarily answering locally, struggle about sente, intentionally sacrificing stones (each one may well make you 5 stones stronger).

I like to suggest 321go.org to beginners. This contains a course with lots of exercises to practise shapes and reading.

The ability to "read" comes with the knowledge of certain shapes and patterns as some of the previous posters have stated. I can exemplify this with an easy calculation. Imagine you want to solve a certain problem, e.g. a life and death problem, and you need to read five moves ahead. Go on imagining that as a beginner you have seven follow-up moves for every move. That would be around 7*7*7*7*7 moves to read - more than 15000! As a more experienced player you can prune the number of good follow-up moves to (maybe) two for every move. You would have to read about 2*2*2*2*2 move, so only just around 30. If you see this huge difference, it becomes obvious how important it is to know the basic shapes. It also makes obvious that in the beginning it is absolutely normal that you have problems with reading. We've all gone through this learning phase (and are still going through it).

Thanks all

Plenty of useful information to get me started with.

Thanks again

Markeemark

Figuring out the moves that your opponent will make you that much better a player. It helps to think the moves out prior to getting started so that you can anticipate the next move. Good luck in becoming a better player!

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Family game night includes setting up the patio furniture and playing for hours and hours.

Start with reading out ladders. Set up a ladder somewhere on the board, and read it out. Once you can do that, throw a random stone somewhere across from the ladder, and read the ladder again, to see if that stone affects the ladder. As you get better at this, you can put more stones down, either randomly or in patterns or blocks, and see how the ladder is affected.

That's how I started to develop my reading, and it's much easier than life and death problems. Once you get the ladder down, then you can start looking into l&d problems.

(Thanks, Kageyama.)

My advice is to play only 19x19 that will increase your level a lot, but at least this is my opinion.

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Stefany, web programmer

Hi all
Lots of useful information to be getting on with.

Thanks all,
Happy new year
markeemark