Hi everybody,

I have decided to research improvement in go. I don't know about others, but I confess that in the past I have tried many shortcuts for improving my game, usually with disappointing results. Therefore, I have made a poll listing different strategems. Please would you take a moment to vote?

Please feel free to point out any possibilities you think should be added to the poll. I would also love to hear about your experiences with and opinions about shortcuts. Be honest, too. Some of these ideas have a poor reputation, but did that stop you from trying them for yourselves? Did you learn anything? Did they even help you?

Caveats: My purpose is not to solicit advice for improving my own game. Rather, I would like to open discussion about well-known and not-so-well known shortcuts that people have tried and continue to try. In other words, please talk about easy approaches that do not require significant investments of time or energy. Generally, I am assuming "all-in-one" approaches are ineffective, but I am prepared to entertain the possibility that certain ones do in fact have merit.



Many thanks!

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Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here:

Bingo!

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David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

When I was ~7k, I found that learning some 3-4 pincer josekis was a surefire way to beat other ~7k by killing large groups.

Thanks to everybody who voted so far. I accidentally wiped the first few results when I added an option - I didn't realise that this completely reboots the poll instead of just adding an option to it. Therefore, I will post revised versions of this poll from time to time in response to your suggestions.

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Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here:

Not sure I can call l+d an "easy way" though!

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

I dont k now if "Tenuki" choice in poll is for fun, but i am using it even now in casual games. It is rly unusual and fun method and i think it is even good for progress.

I didn't mean L&D was an easy activity, but I would like to find out if people treat it as though it were a magic pill to get stronger (which it may indeed be!).

As for the tenuki option, I did hear, second-hand, that one well-known pro teacher suggested their students tried playing tenuki no matter what (at least in the opening), and that for some of them it was an eye-opening experience. Sometimes I encounter opponents who play as though my moves did not exist, and I wonder what motivates that approach.

Again, what I'm after here is information about things people do to get better without putting too much effort into it. For what it's worth, I have the hypothesis that over a long time, even the silliest magic pills can produce effects, even if only by revealing some folly or misunderstanding more clearly. For instance, suppose you learn all the sharpest joseki, but keep on losing despite always knowing what line you're playing. Surely you will eventually want to know why, and that could be the moment your knowledge begins to turn into understanding.

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Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here:

I didn't select tenuki because I don't make the effort to ignore every move my opponent makes (even just in the opening). I do naturally ignore my opponent a lot - I think one of the hurdles (especially when playing a stronger player) is feeling confident enough to ignore your opponent when you think you can.

Life & Death is currently one of my primary study methods. I personally think L&D (aside from very simple, 1-3 move problems) is OK when started in SDK.

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I hate to be negative, but I think that if you try to find a shortcut to getting strong, you will end up frustrating yourself.

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be immersed

That's not the point, Kirby! I'm not looking for shortcuts for my own improvement. I'm trying to find out what shortcuts people have tried, even against good advice or their own better judgement.

Have you, for instance, ever learned a trappy joseki (the 5-4 joseki contain many possibilities for trickery) with the hope of getting easy wins? I know I have. Everybody knows the saying about memorising joseki and getting two stones weaker, but does it actually stop people from attempting to improve by that means?

There is plenty of good advice about. I'm interested in the bad advice, and the dodgy advice, the hustles, the cheap tricks and side paths and back passages. It's not that I'm shady, but that I would like to consider all angles of the improvement issue, and find out how and why people go astray, and whether they can even learn by doing the wrong things.

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Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here:

Okay. Maybe I misunderstood. It sounds like you are looking for "bad advice", if I understand you correctly.



I was under the impression that you were looking for "good advice".

However, it could also mean that you are looking for "tricks to win". In that case, I would suggest studying hamete. Of course, reading will help you no matter what, but I'm not sure I'd consider that a "trick".

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be immersed

There are shortcuts?!?!?!?

I guess I'm the wrong person to ask about this ... all my studying is haphazard, at best. I have no illusions that my improvement will be rapid. I seem to always be improving, though, so I must be doing something right ...

I didn't vote in the poll because I haven't done any of those things or at least I don't consider some of them to be "shortcuts" (e.g. doing tsumego). I did take weekly pro lessons long ago and advanced from 2d to 5d in one year. Does that count as a shortcut?

When I was shodan a visiting 5-dan (a former insei, back when Japanese 5-dan was around two stones stronger than now) took an interest in me. One of the first things he said to me was that I should play as 2-dan. He explained that an amateur one stone difference was actually quite small in terms of strength.

I did not believe that I could simply play as a 2-dan, and did not take his advice. But years later, after a year and a half as a 3-dan, I decided to try to up my game by one stone. (We were on a ratings system, so I did not alter any handicaps.) In a month and a half I had not only gone up a stone in the ratings, I was maintaining it.

In tennis, Billie Jean King talks about players raising their play a level. If you can do that within a game, you can do it for every game.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

In the voluminous literature about needing to put in 10,000 hours to become an expert in various activities, there is always a similar remark that mere repetition is not enough and you must find ways to challenge yourself. I have an impression that an awful lot of people read that, accept it, and then ignore it because it seems so blindingly obvious! In the same way that it's easier to cycle through the channels via the tv remote without actually watching any programmes, or to wiggle a finger non-stop over an iPad without actually reading anything, I think that many people do exercises with the mindset that so long as we get in enough repetitions everything else is OK. Possibly the greatest value of a coach is breaking through this mindset.

I don't actually study go and rarely play, so I have no experience of trying to improve in go by biting off more than I can chew, but I have done this extensively in hobby programming and it seems to pay off handsomely.

Or perhaps the biggest problems are how to decide how much extra to bite off, and also deciding which bits make up the extra. Again, getting a teacher or coach may be the best way forward, but judging by what happens in sport, music, etc, it is not enough simply to find someome better or stronger than you. They also need to know how to teach. Maybe the simplest criterion is to find someone who's been at it a long time. If so, the vast array of young pros who are switching to teaching because they can't make it in competitions and/or who want to teach as a way to learn English may not be the best options.

Hello John, and thank you for joining the thread. As it happens, I have been reading the research literature extensively, too, and have radically changed my approach to all the important things in my life, not only go, and so far my results seem to be improving, and my level of enjoyment increasing. Certainly, one conclusion I have is that it's not so much quantity of time that counts so much as quality of time. It may take 10,000 hours to achieve mastery, but there's a difference between 10,000 hours of mindful study and 10,000 hours of going through the motions. I think it's why people can stay at the same level for many years - I know guitarists who proudly boast of having played for 40 years, but they haven't troubled to learn as many chords in those years as I have in two.

There are many well known and well regarded paths to getting stronger at go, but just for now I am curious about the other things people attempt. I mean, for example, why not memorise joseki and discover why you get 2 stones weaker? Could there be a learning value in creating an offbeat fuseki pattern and trying to find ways to make it work? (Thereby developing your creativity instead of merely trying to win by confusion.)

I would like to express my appreciation of your many insights into pro thinking and the go literature that hasn't yet appeared in the West. Reading about 3D (立体) shapes and about combining loose and tight haengma were two especially 悟り moments for me. I also stumbled on "The Big Game" (Kudo-O Meien) the other night, and I feel very stirred up by it. Thanks largely to your explanations, I'm starting to perceive much bigger things than before, as though being finally being allowed a glimpse into the real treasure house after spending twelve years in the antechamber. If you ever find time, it would be wonderful if you wrote a strategy book.

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Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here:

Hamete. Lots of them.

When I was starting out there was a point at which I wanted to play a stronger player taking only 5 stones rather than the usual 7 I used. I don't believe that were we keeping track of results, there was no kadoban or anything. And I didn't have any particular reason to believe I could beat him at 5 stones, either. But what he said to me I'll never forget: "Sure. The only way to lower your handicap is to lower your handicap." I don't remember whether I won the game or not, but I definitely felt more pressure to play fewer slack moves. It made me reset expectations as to what acceptable play looked like.

When you get comfortable at a certain level, there's this danger of cruising---playing the same old familiar moves and strategies that give you a 50% result at your level, reading to the same shallow depth, etc. To shake this complacency, I advocate experimental self-promotion. Depending on your level on some Go servers, this is easy to do online (some servers have caps on new account ratings). When I was DDK my usual practice was to create an account 5 stones stronger than my stable account and play with that for a while, getting those games reviewed. Of course I'd lose like 90% of them, but that doesn't matter. The resistance made me stronger in OTB games. The new account's rating would quickly drop down but the funny thing is that often it would stabilize a stone or two above where my old, stable account sat. This is a strategy I call "swooping." I firmly believe that I would not have been able to raise the rating of my old accounts to that level using the same number of games and maybe not even with any number of games. Whether this is psychological or a behavior of the rating system I'm not sure---I think both factors matter---but it worked for me.

Whether it's rated games or free games, online or OTB, I really believe that even (or underhandicapped) games against stronger players are immensely valuable. It's good to be generous and offer weaker players the same chance, of course, but your own improvement is going to come from those games when you are the total underdog.

I don't consider this a shortcut, BTW. To get results I had to make a lot of effort step up my game and learn from my mistakes. Just casually losing a lot of improperly handicapped games doesn't have the same effect. I know because I tried that, too, with blitz games but it didn't work.

So I'll say it again:

The only way to lower your handicap is to lower your handicap.

I think it is. I have only one account, but what i discovered, not only in online play but OTB as well is, that prior to improving one rank, comes a stage where i "lose the respect for xK/xD".
That isn't meant to be rude, even though it may sound so. What i mean is losing the respect towards the rank or strength, not the players. Let me try to explain what i mean with this.
I remember at my first tournament, which i entered as a 25k (roughly one month after pickung up the game) i awed across the room where 15k were playing and i thought "i want to be that strong someday". That is the kind of respect i mean. (Respect may not be the best word for that, but i can't find a better one)
When i was a 4k, 2k seemed just so strong. While playing against 5ks there were so many mistakes they made, that i could take advantage of (and of course quite a share of mistakes on my side), but against a 2k, their play seemed so solid and flawless. I couldn't find any mistake to take advantage of.
The funny thing is, that seemed still true, after i improved to 3k. Now i should be able to win games with black against 2ks, but it still felt like hitting a brick wall.
I won't say, that losing this feeling was what brought me from 3k to 2k, but i think it was an important step in this improvement.

Today i try to apply this, a 1k might be still stronger than me, but i firmly believe that in a tournament game i can win - that it will be a struggle, but that i'm not at a disadvantage, even if i have to play as white.
I firmly believe, that i can beat a 1d in a tournament game, if i play to 100% of my ability and don't slip during the game (which of course i will do).

I have not enough evidence to clearly back these statements up (only one win against a 1d in a tournament and a lot of utter defeats against 1d), but i think starting the games with this mindsets, helps me play at the top of my ability.

So, the first thing to become one stone stronger, is to think you can beat those 1 or 2 stones stronger than yourself.

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Magics way up the hill (personal study journal)