I have been looking at a famous ten-game match between Shusai and his erstwhile rival Ishii Senji. It was published in a newspaper over several issues, with commentaries by each player, immediately after the game, on rather a lot of moves.

There was also text by a reporter in which he almost bewails the fact that play was so slow: "Play lasted 14 hours from ten to midnight and only 19 moves were played." His text is punctuated with comments such as "fours hours on move" or the "players looked haggard". But the compensation surely, and the reason for tolerating such abuse of time, is that the players might approach perfect play, no?

But if you look at the text the way I do (analysing the words as well as the meanings) the most noticeable thing is the enormous use of the word "unexpected" (意外). At times in every consecutive comment. It is always in the context of being surprised by the opponent's move. And this sense of surprise is implicit in so many other comments. For example, when a player says of his move "X was a ridiculously bad move", he comes to this conclusion because he saw how his opponent responded - and didn't expect it.

So, what we seem to be seeing is a very strong tendency, even among the very best pros, to look only at ones' own candidate moves and NOT at the opponent's. Even when you spend hours on the move!!!! This tendency seems to be confirmed by various different comments, such "I don't know whether it was a good idea or not, but my intention was to make use of my big group in the centre." MY INTENTION - regardless of what the opponent might do. Hours with no thoughts of being surprised by an "unexpected" move that bites you in the bum??!!!

There has to be something off going on. Is this a flaw in usual human thinking? Amateurs do exactly the same thing, as evidenced by threads here. We may not be talking about our own games, but we do tend to focus on the plans of whoever is on the move when we discuss a position. And of course do the same thing in normal conversation and everyday activities. We listen to our own words and are convinced by them, while ignoring the words of our interlocutors - unless given pause to think by mockery or some other overwhelming emotive reply that forces us out of our usual pattern. We see this in the threads here, but with very little scoffing, because of the TOC. Maybe, deep down, that's a bad thing? Even when alone, the same thing happens. MY commonest single reaction when looking at a pro game (uncommented) has always been: "Oh, I didn't know you could do that!" (And that's thre thing I believe I've learnt most from.)

At any rate, it would seem that it would be good to create a strategy, on the go board at least, that forces ourselves to look keenly at the opponent's possible replies in a way that is quite independent of our own desires, intentions or expectations. The upshot seems to be that we should spend less time on studying our own moves (or those of the player on the move) and more on the opponent's moves.

Any practical suggestions? It obviously can't be a doddle if people like Shusai succumbed to the tendency.

A practical suggestion is that everything has its time. There are situations when you should be think about something specific in the position. It can be that you need to avoid making a mistake, that you need to think in terms of territory or endgame, that you need to think about attacking or any other thing that you could identify. Sometimes there is only one move to consider and other times there are many that really need full consideration. Recognizing the situation correctly helps both in Go and life.

When playing Go the struggle with the opponent and the position is what would at first appear to be the most important. However, it is often the player's struggle with himself that is more important. We would all play much better if we could only play on good days or could skip any position that we are not confident about. Playing Go is a lot about maintaining composure during the entire game, so that you can play your best, and recognizing when you are about to make a mistake or have an opportunity that you are about to miss. This struggle with the self is less visible but potentially more important than the struggle on the board.

Long time controls can offer opportunity for a player to trick themself and lose the internal struggle. With short time controls there is the obvious problem that you won't be able to think for long on your moves but there can also be a good rhythm between the moves and that helps. Good rhythm can help with concentration and reinforce the players normal thinking process, which makes it easier to play well. Long time controls, however, pose different problems. There is not the same rhythm to the game anymore. The opponent can more easily see through plans and thwart them, that creates demand for more deep thinks and it is more difficult psychologically to face tough resistance. It is easier to waste energy in long games that is not possible in shorter games. And finally it is often the long thinks that lead to the most unnatural moves.

When you watch a game life you can to some extent experience how the players use their time. Certainly there are times when long thinks are clearly justified based on the position and each player will have a different approach to time management. Other times it is surprising how time is spent. Sometimes it turns out that the position calls for long thinking even if that wasn't expected. However, I believe players sometimes spend lot of time not because of the position or any external situation but as a way to stay focused and fully engaged. Maybe one can say it is similar to how one would warm up the engine in a large truck or keep it running during short stops.

In today's or yesterday's Meijin game there was a long think that I perceived to be largely that Iyama wanted to get the engine running smoothly. I'm not going to check the time usage, I'll simply state them how I perceived them. Iyama spent something like an hour at the end of the first day before sealing his move. Then on the second day when the move is unsealed there was something like 15 minutes spent by his opponent, Shibano, on a move that wasn't unexpected and then Iyama was back thinking for what seemed like 40-60 minutes. I think he was warming up the engine With eight hours per person there can be a good case for using the clock to get fully engaged in the game before playing any move.

Something similar could apply in games without any time limits. In those games there is no reason to think on your opponent's turn at all. If there is a move that warrants an hour of thinking it could also warrant another hour or two of thinking for the other player who will need to warm up his metaphorical engine when it is his turn. Then they can play one move and if the other player doesn't respond quickly it is reasonable to rest while they are thinking.

Thx. I like the points about rhythm and warming up the engine. But I'm not sure that any of that really helps us to redirect our energies to thinking more about the opponent's moves - which is what I am positing may be lacking.

I am influenced in my own view of this by ballet. It is an art, much tougher than go, that is characterised by intense discipline. 12 hour days are normal, every day. The first part of the day is "warming up the engine" - a class workout for at least 1.5 hours. Afternoons are usually devoted to rehearsals and learning new ballets. Evenings are dedicated to a show. Every portion of every day is thus very, very physical. The dancer is thus permanently exhausted, constantly risking serios injury, typically stricken by stage fright, is constantly competing with other dances for star roles, often has body image issues, and in the end has to face public criticism as well as praise. But it's very like go in some respects - not much pay at the lower end of the scale and those who can, do, while those who can't end up teaching.

I find it very hard to understand why so many dancers put themselves through this torture from a very young age, for just the possibility of a glittering career that will end normally in one's 30s. The nearest I can get to understanding that is to assume that dancers learn (or are taught) to think about themselves and their technique obsessively. They leave the joining-up bits to other people - choreographers and directors. It is a form of egotism, I suppose.

What I am wondering is whether the self-discipline necessary for this profession actually exaggerates their self-absorption. Since we are all born to be self-absorbed to some degree, I consider it easy for that to happen.

If it does happen like that, then my next guess is that the self-discipline needed to become a strong go player (even at an amateur level) is equally likely to lead to a great degree of self-absorption, which MAY express itself in thinking significantly only about one's own moves and not the opponent's.

Of course, your suggestion that thinking may go awry because of other factors such as too much time has to be given due consideration. I remember a long chat with the shogi pro Yonenaga Kunio and some of his pupils, who he had in stitches by pretending to start a rude word begin with o- (in the same way we might say f-). But he never said the rude except in a story about a title game in which he sat for ages and ages, sometimes looking at the board but often looking out of the window/door into the garden. Finally he made a move. At the end of the day's play, the reporter reverentially asked him what he had been thinking about. Yonenaga said, "There's an umbrella stuck in the middle of the grass and I was wondering how the f- it got there." Similar stories are told in the go world, of course, and so it may be a concocted genre. But it does illustrate that slow play and the problems it brings are an enduring topic of conversation in the games worlds. In fact, one of the longest index entries in my forthcoming Segoe book is "slow play" which was a major theme in all the reform battles of the go world in his lifetime (for various reasons which I won't list here, but they include health and the unfairness of having iron buttocks, e.g. Kogishi Soji).

Maybe the title of this thread should have been, "Is too much thinking time bad for you (or for the game and its fans)?"

But whatever the explanation or whatever is the best way to address the topic, it does seem to be the case that both pros and amateurs are apt to give much less consideration to the opponent's moves then their own. I read some of the match after posting the OP. The word 意外 kept coming up! Mutatis mutandis, it seems like a version of "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck

I think you're onto something with the self-absorption. Whatever the discipline, you need to overcome a major amount of disbelief, from yourself and others, to make it, that worrying i.e. being realistic about opponents' strength would only aggravate it. So they ignore it to a large extent. Then again, the best of the best are able to maintain the belief in themselves while acknowledging there might be someone just as strong at the other end. This is what we observe in Nadal and Djokovic. The latter in particular seems to enjoy nothing else than the hardship of having to fight for every point.

I think that when trying to find a good move (with a lot of time to spend on that), people, especially pros, do take their opponent's options into account. I'd guess that they even take their opponent's intent into account, as that seems to be a prerequisite for kiai in the sense of countering the opponent's intentions.

Given enough time, you can switch your own intentions at every move, and this is something that I'd expect (haha) to happen frequently in a high level game. Since Go has such a high branching factor at almost every move, I think it is often possible to evade (taking your intention away) and counter (punch at the intention the opponent presented). In a way, this frequent 意外 then expresses that, yes, this is an intense game.

But I agree that people tend to only hear themselves. I think that sometimes it is linguistic habits that can help (or hinder) better discussion and thinking patterns. For example, qualifying statements:

- »I think«
- »I guess«
- »I am convinced«
- »it seems«
- »it might«
- »probably«
- »I can imagine«

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

A few comments:

In ballet, as was mentioned, performance careers often end at a young age, perhaps because of the physical demands. Ballet is similar to professional sports in that way. It is now more common that go professionals' competitive careers end at a young age. How many tournament go pros compete successfully at age 40? 50? Why? There is some belief that mathematicians often reach their creative peaks before the age of 40.

As for long time limits, how much of the unexpected moves come from some sort of katte yomi? Because of the number of options at every move, even with long time limits it is simply not possible to consider all possible responses to every move. So some sort of assumption about the flow is needed in order to reduce the number of moves considered. This opens opportunities for surprise.

Imagine if Kirby saw that title and then the name of the Author!



Hopefully this means four player go becomes popular! Which is automatically encoded in Lentitear rules



It seems to be 00 03 06 09 12 sub peak 15 pre peak 18 pre peak 21 pre peak 24 near peak 27 near peak 30 peak 33 peak 36 near peak 39 post peak 42 sub peak, decline after this over years is individual specific

I think those who mention rhythm and flow are probably closest to an explanation.

Apart from the reasons cited by those other authors, I'll suggest another two to support that idea - though one is a bit off the wall.

The most fitting is again from ballet. I go this from a ballet teacher. There are young dancers who like to show off on social media doing something they think is mind-boggling, such as ten pirouettes. This, apparently, can depress other young dancers who can only do two (remember it is a very competitive art). But the 2P dancer may actually be much better than the 10P one and the way an expert ballet teacher would tell is to look at the "transitions" each dancer makes between the pirouettes and the next movement. These transitions are crucial to converting technique into art. In other words, to become good a young dancer needs rhythm or flow. I am assuming that only the wilfully obstinate here would deny that good rhythm, flow or suji is vital for a top (human) go player.

The other, off-the-wall reason starts from the totally untested assumption that a top go player prizes a good understanding of the flow of the game and has practised techniques to achieve good flow (which is what suji is, after all). Now, in the game I am talking about, both players played up to 14 hours a day over 9 days. They ate, but sparingly, and took no exercise. They lost weight to the extent that the maids in the inn became worried. Shusai's high cheekbones made his haggard face look like a coat-hanger.

So, why didn't they walk around for a bit, do a bit of stretching, or anything else that would stop them turning into crazies?

I have never seen any reference to a rule such as: you have to make a move if you get up from the board (with loo visits maybe an exception). But I can imagine there may have been some such social constraint, especially as they played without clocks in those days. In that case, I can also imagine that a player was reluctant to get up and move away from the board because he feared he might lose the thread of the game. Maybe the strategic thread of a game (as opposed to the tactical threads of suji) is something we amateurs (and perhaps also young pros) do not properly appreciate?

Players of all levels have their "I didn't think of that" moments, but I'm betting Shusai's oversights are at a different level than that of an amateur.

In general I would expect oversights to stem from holes in a mental model of the game and how the game should be played. Setting aside Shusai, we have seen a lot of "I didn't think of that" again when AlphaGo turned up. Before that the New Fuseki movement showed us refinements in the game that surely would have elicited similar responses from players of old. And yet very few of those moves were ones that a top pro of old couldn't have thought up.

Moves must be unexpected because they don't fit into our mental model of what moves are viable in a given position--in essence a reflection of biases. Once we understand that a certain move or way of playing is possible it broadens our horizons. That is at least one of the advantages of playing through pro games to get strong--we see what moves are viable and how a game progresses. The down side, of course, is that we can only learn what has been played in the past.

In many respect this reminds me of a physics paper I read some years ago in the American Journal of Physics, which tends to focus on pedagogical topics such as physics education. The authors had created an experiment in which they rounded up a number of physics professors and gave them a physics problem. In theory, it was a problem that was solvable with first-year physics--if I recall it was an inelastic collision. The catch, however, was that it was presented in a way that was different from a normal physics textbook.

The physics professors completely bombed the problem. In the analysis presented in the paper, the authors indicated that this difficulty was largely because the professors couldn't fit the problem into their repertoire of known standard problems that would allow them to short-circuit their way to the solution. These were all accomplished physicists--professionals in another field, and yet they were stymied in a similar way to John's example of Shusai and Ishii Senji. They would have solved the problem eventually, of course, but not without a lot more work.

I don't know what professionals have in mind, but personally I keep telling myself that I should consider non-standard moves, from my opponent or from me, and I keep forgetting, as old thinking habits take over during the games.

Not directly in response to John's question, but I made my own little proverb some time back to the effect that you should be worried when your opponent plays a move you dismissed as a mistake.

The rationale is that when that happens, one of you has missed something significant, and it's just as likely to be you as it is to be them. The more obvious seeming the mistake, the more careful you should be. Blunders do happen, but only so often.

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Occupy Babel!

If your opponent has already played the move, it's a bit late for that, isn't it?

Maybe, maybe not. Your opponent playing the move should make you reconsider the odds are it’s a blunder, and think hard before playing your “refutation.” But even they played a good move, you might still have a chance, as long as you don’t rush to play a punishment that doesn’t work.

The most vivid example is when you think you’ve captured a stone in a ladder, but your opponent extends it anyway. If a simple misread (not a sacrifice tesuji), every stone you add makes your position worse.

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Occupy Babel!

I'm not familiar with the Shusai match that was mentioned, maybe there were genuinely unexpected moves, otherwise it could have some entertainment value to describe moves as unexpected.

It is always hard to guess the opponents move, they can usually play in different ways and could it be counterproductive to try when you don't have a good chance of anticipating their move anyway? However, if you are reading then you need to consider all kinds of moves, not necessarily only moves that occur easily to you.

I know in Japanese they talk about katte yomi, which was mentioned and I think that means selfish-reading, that you read as if the opponent has no good moves and you are unfair to your opponent in this way. Another related problem, that I don't think has a name but I call random-reading, is to ignore lot of things for both sides and be lost in some variation that makes no sense. I think this is a more common problem, in actual play, than the similar selfish-reading, but I think it has a solution which is to learn and know your limits.

This analysis could be labeled introspective, I mostly observe how I think and what some other people do.

I observe that lot of relatively weak players like to push their limits and stronger players also do this (arguably they are often aware of it). This can be satisfying when we don't meet the resistance that could have been possible and the opponent has some sort of a collapse on the board. However, I don't think that helps much in the long run. In the long run it is, in my personal view, better to learn to find something that works with sequences (or suji) that you can work out correctly every time. Gradually your skill will improve (or not) and if you have this as your practice habit then you will also have learned something about yourself. Namely that you can handle certain positions really well and that in other positions you are simply gambling.

There are many gamblers on the Go board and I'm not saying you should never gamble and never take risks. Only that knowing your own limits will make most people stronger Go players. That both applies in how to play a competitive game, that includes strategy and degree of risk aversion that suits the situation, and when identifying what to study and how to improve.

I'm not sure this has much to do with top-level professional play but it is likely that the stronger a Go player is that he can more effectively work around their own limitations.

If we are suggesting what is the correct thing to study then I think your own limits as a Go player is one of them.

If I were to make a list it could be:

• Knowing your own limits.
• Playing well and within your own limits (I think I mean "no gambling").
• Playing quiet endgame-like positions well (doesn't every game end like this?).
• Shape, tesuji, life and death, vital-points and everything else that relates what can happen when the stones crowd each other.

This doesn't directly explain how moves could be unexpected when top-level players spend hours on their clock. However, could it be that they aren't trying? This might have been suggested a few times by different posts above. I'm not sure if it was suggested that there could be moves to anticipate and moves that you don't need to anticipate, but that is how I think about it (or think I think about it). If you miss a move that you should have considered this can be a blind spot but if you miss some other move it is harder to find the fault in that.

If the tradition is to look in philosophical terms with strict reading added on as an aide, that may in part be an elegant explanation for the surpise.

Another even simpler, and perhaps more mundane explanation may be that they are surprised for a completely different reason than would be the case for a game with less time. It could be that they did indeed read out the move deeply, and concluded it was unviable, but their opponent read different variants just a deep and found the move good. Knowing each others abitlity they may be surprised that the other did not see the obvious result 100 moves down the line, whereas if it were a game with shorter time limits they wouldn't have been able to read deeply enough to generate an opinionated opinion on the move in the first place.

Either way, it's endlessly fascinating . . .

There is a danger in allowing oneself to be overawed by professionals. That is not to say pros are not a LONG way ahead of us, but personally I happen to believe we amateurs tend to overrate ourselves too much. The result is that we then add on the huge difference between us and them and assume that the pros must be almost superhuman. The truth is, pros are just as human as us. They make the same sort of mistakes we do. What we need to do is to downscale (significantly) our estimations of our own level. The size of the gap then remains the same, but the pros become human again.

Not in any rigorous way, I did an analysis of the various "unexpected" scenes in the game in question, and found that various types of unexpectedness did indeed occur, as hinted at above. But the gross types we are so familiar with were among them.

For example one scene is illuminated by Shusai's own comments as follows (it is game 1907-12-02a in the GoGoD database). You may fall off your chair in surprise!



It's going off at a tangent, but this and subsequent analysis of the endgame is just like the simple-looking endgame that Dieter puzzled over in another thread recently. Again the pros found it just as taxing as Dieter found his position. The pros may have better tools in their mental cupboard (and in this game MUCH more time - it took 122 hours) but they are still taxed to the limit. Diverting to ballet once again, I was surprised to learn recently that the reason dancers take a bow after a pas de deux is not to milk the applause and feed their egos. It is because they are knackered and need to catch their breath. They are human, even if it does look like they can fly.

As to pros being human (they screw up, they cheat, they mock, they abuse women, etc etc) remember that eminent surgeons cut off the wrong limb rather more often than we would like. The latest incident I read about was due to a surgeon thinking that X mean "don't cut" whereas it was the piratical "X marks the spot".. Xs are now commonly used on web sites to denote a selected option. But for many people that still means NO. A tick is much better. I just had a questionnaite in which the compiler felt obliged to make the point: TICK TICK TICK if that's you CHOOSE CHOOSE CHoOSE.

Yes, my white player is several ranks weaker than my black tsumego player.

But if we are talking about studying in general then maybe ancient Chinese joseki is the wrong thing to study?

Humans aren't that different from AI really. They do better in the positions that occur most often.



Sonjin and Seyroung getting roasted in the unlikliest of places, haha

I'm not really an instagram person but taichart just posted "Familiarity with the movements makes you perfect. You must practice and forget the moves, which is the real Kung Fu! what you think?" In a way us outside of Asia must really look at the the sayings for wushu and weiqi as fully intercompatible as indeed in china they are both considered as falling within the branch of arts which most express kung fu! It's silly for us to not do so really. But us trying so hard to morph into an understanding of how mindsports we are used to in Europe and America will only get us halfway results. In a sense this thread and others in a similar vein are on the path to enlightenment.

I am not a strong player and I do forget to analyse the possible strategy of my opponent but I think strong players will never make such mistake. I am convinced that when two strong players analyse the same position one of these players might choose a surprising move. In addition AI might also choose a move that can be surprising for both players.
IOW I do not think strong players forget to analyse the opponent strategy. In any case a player may surprise an other by a seemingly strange move which at first sight may look as a mistake.