robertg wrote:
daal: Theoretically I should be good enough to see those things at a glance. I just somehow overlook it.
This describes a problem in your mental game. I know, mine needs a lot of work as well.
There is a difference between knowing that you should be able to see those things at a glance and actually taking the glance on each and every move. It's the difference between knowledge and execution. This is a bigger difference than it seems.
There are a variety of mental mistakes that you can be making, such as trying too hard, rushing moves, moving without thinking, the so-called "analysis paralysis". It's different for each person and there's no single solution.
Experience helps, it's true. However, I'm not sure how much really. If you play more, you'll get better at Go, and you'll stop making these mistakes -- this is correct but it's almost a tautology. Who's to say that we don't stop making simple mistakes, and thereby improve at the game, and not the other way around?
I'm just about convinced that studying the game itself helps very little. Surgeons study for a decade before being allowed to operate on people, and surely one of the things they have learned is "don't forget anything inside the patient", yet it still happens. There is a class of errors that are not borne out of ignorance.
I wish I could say there was some particular thing that helped me, but I still have a lot of similar issues. I'm working on focusing on process. I think for this type of problem, the *how* you arrive at the decision is more important than the elements going into that decision. One advice I've heard is to practice your decision-making itself, one aspect at a time. For instance, you could play blitz games where your goal is to know the liberty count of all unsettled groups before every move.