John Fairbairn wrote:
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By replacing the question "how do I punish?" by "how do I avoid getting tricked?" or, even better, "what are the best follow-up moves for both players, and are they worth playing immediately?", one might expect a more reasonable result. Nevertheless, I have the feeling that you exaggerate this point.
The point possibly is exaggerated - perhaps simply through being exposed as a new idea? But rephrasing old ideas as above strikes me as the sort of thing that would make a Zen master hit you with his paddle (or whatever it is they do). Rephrasing is still an attachment to the old way of thinking. Detachment to allow in a new way of thinking is called for. For such a major shift maybe exaggeration is not enough?
Before letting this conversation derail into a technical squabble, let us agree on the subject of the discussion (which is already waaay off-topic). Are we talking about: (a) the way a senior professional selects young children; or (b) the best attitude for an amateur to progress? With the possible exception of those select few amateurs who play evenly against professionals and those young players who have the potential to get there, these discussions seem fairly disjoint. I can understand the perfectionist approach towards go that you advocate; your approach might even be employed in Japanese professional go schools - if so, you are a far greater authority on that than anyone else here. But the reality of amateur (and also, I suspect, professional) tournament go is that every game is decided by mistakes, and that none of us has the faintest idea of what we're doing.
In actual real-life practice, it is not so easy to get stronger simply by pretending to understand "honte", or some such "good" approach to the game. In fact, I think that pretending to really understand any aspect of the game will only lead to stagnation in your development. I, for one, most certainly do not understand go! I do not understand honte, I do not understand sabaki, I do not understand fuseki, and whenever I play a tournament game, I am uncertain at virtually every juncture of the game. What's more, I believe that the same holds not only for all of us here, but also for professionals (though at another level). We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars... Acknowledging this, I do not see how any amateur can really progress by following a shallow misunderstanding of a perfectionist, "professional" attitude. I don't need to tell you how Takemiya Masaki 9p, winner of many Japanese- and world championships, advocates freedom and experimentation at every level!
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I think that before one can really understand the value of honte, one must first have a good amount of experience in sharp fighting. There is a very thin line between a honte move and a slack move, and there are moments where one simply has no time to play honte, no matter how solid it might be.
I don't think that fighting is the only way to understand honte, and maybe not even the best. That's a bit like saying that a criminal learns to be good if he gets in trouble enough. I think it's more likely that he just learns to pretend to be good. The best way to teach someone to be good may be to teach them from first principles. I think those who are destined to be go pros probably learn about things like honte also from first principles. They learn about fighting from first principles, too. They don't really need one to interfere with the other. The essence of "first principles", I suggest, is learning how to make your own moves efficiently meet the criteria. Learn your scales before you try to play jazz.
Continuing your metaphor, I happen to be a jazz piano player and I am very glad that I learned to improvise before I ever really studied the traditional jazz scales and chords. It taught me how to play both with and without the jazz voicings - and that greatly enriched the way I play the standards. Sometimes you can hear so-called "jazz" musicians that have been almost scholarly taught at a conservatory to play in the given style; though technically refined, their music tends to lack any passion and joy of playing.
However weak I am, I feel that every game of go is a battle, and fighting spirit is at its heart. It saddens me every time I see somebody lose a game by 15 points without putting up a struggle. At an amateur level, the idea of playing by "first principles" is misinterpreted far too often, leading to insipid play by the book without any fighting spirit or creativity. I am not saying that honte is unimportant, far from it! But he who mindlessly defends when not necessary has failed to grasp the idea, just like the musician who forgot to use his creativity.
John Fairbairn wrote:
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I've seen "safe groups and restraint" being misapplied just as often as greedy invasions and unnecessary attempts to kill. I doubt that anyone here would not agree that blindly defending is just as bad as blindly attacking.
That again seems to me simply to be either a statement of the obvious or another restatement of old ideas, but it certainly doesn't seem to be relevant. To be relevant it has to address the question of whether a safe move was played when a safe move was called for, but was just the precise point that was wrong - full marks for style (i.e. attitude), poor marks for technical merit. Or was it played when an attacking move was called for? Poor marks for style, good marks for technical merit.
My still coalescing view is that a senior pro assessing pupils would select those that had good style, reasoning they can be taught technique with enough time. He would, however, tend to reject those with poor style and good technique because his experience would tell him that it is much harder to teach style (again, in the special sense of attitude). As a concrete example of that, I refer you back to a remark by Kobayashi Satoru I quoted recently here where he talked of "professional tactics, amateur hallucinations" in relation to some top amateurs. After all, we don't make a guy professor of mathematics just because he can do Rubik's cube in 12 seconds. Nor would we even make Rubik a professor on the strength of his invention. We expect a professor to have the right approach/attitude/style to the whole subject of maths. I regard the hamete experts and the like as Rubik cube solvers, nothing more.
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How to play against an unusual opening is an interesting and difficult question, independently of attitude.
Interesting and difficult, yes of course. But I don't see how any fruitful consideration can take place independently of attitude. It then seems a reasonable stance to suggest that some attitudes are better than others.
Actually, I think studying hamete can be an interesting way to practise reading... More to the point though, I strongly doubt whether a professional player would select a child that does not show any fighting spirit. Even if that would be the case, due to all the reasons stated before, I don't see how an amateur would benefit from following such an approach.
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And what is amateurish about crushing an opponent?
Nothing per se, probably, but that wasn't the point raised. The characteristic identified was amateurs WANTING to crush the opponent. Real pros just want to play the best move. If that involves crushing, so be it, but it's incidental, not the motivating factor.
Sure, but the original comment expressed no such intention. It only said "I had a game against someone a while back and crushed him".