Some thoughts



Biggest comment I can make is be more patient, and be willing to let your opponent have a few stones saved in exchange for giving you sente. Sente is really big, particularly in the early and middle parts of the game.

Thanks for the comments! Some of the things seem so obvious and I even momentarily thought about them, BUT.. During a game I'm a different person. I often cannot reasonably explain why I did what I did, when something else is so clearly superior. Then there were the clear reading mistakes, the connecting at F12 for one.. I tried reading out a way to connect but every time I started with the exchange already in place, assuming for some reason that it was necessary! I see now that it was just ajikeshi and blinded me from the correct answers. Ahh, well. If only I could keep a clear and level head during these games

Have you considered treating moves like R6, O2, F13, etc. in the second game - moves that you seem to consider greedy, premature, and infuriating - as probes? The point of a probe is to play a forcing move and gain some aji to do something for later, although the opponent gets to choose what kind of aji you get. When you obstinately refuse to give him the sort of aji you think he's fishing for, then you just give him the other kind of aji, no? "My opponents play a lot of probes, and I have trouble answering them - for now" strikes me as a healthier attitude than "My opponents suck so bad, why do they beat half of the time?"

Sounds very rude when you put it that way, but I guess that's the "between the lines" of what I said about my opponent

I know it's an attitude problem, but I'm not sure how to change my thinking. I can say that I won't care, but while playing, I will. I definitely will. Guess it'll take some time.

In other news, I felt really tired today, physically and mentally. I think my body is rejecting this change, again. It has a habit of doing that. Before I have given in to it too easily and let it win, but I'll weather through it this time and just keep going. You hear that, brains? Yeah, I'm not stopping. I know you want to be lazy and not study, but that ain't happening. I know I did it the last 72 times, but... I know I've given up on things days after starting, but.. OK SHUSH. I ain't quitting. No. Screw you brains. I'm not talking to you anymore. I never liked your antics anyway.

Uh, yeah. Well, I could not do the tsumego today as I was just fighting against falling asleep as it were. But I did play 4 blitz and interestingly enough I won all of them by quite the large margin. They were different from yesterday.. I still messed up a whole lot(tons), but somehow I was able to concentrate a little bit better and this time more of my attempts were succesful. Yesterday I felt panicked the whole game and couldn't make any moves work. Today I felt fine, most of the time. Some touch'n'go moments, but I guess I'm getting used to blitz.

Still going to soldier through 4 Lee Sedol games no matter how tired I may be

My interwebs were acting up earlier today when I was going to play my blitz games, I didn't want to start them and just lose because it decides to lag out on me. I did play 4 blitz games against my computer, but I'm not sure how useful that is. Sometimes it figures out some incredible killing sequences on groups that I was sure were alive, and then in the next game it plays 1 point gote as an answer to my absolute sente and throws away the game So I'll just hope my interwebs don't continue acting up, I'd rather play humans.

Later I played these 2 slow games though and they went Ok-ish.
All the comments are again in the SGF files themselves, I find it more convenient to do it that way while I review the games for learning purposes at the same time.





Still continuing on with the Lee Sedol games and liking them. At least the middle-game. Based on what I've seen so far, fuseki and joseki in the 1990s were horribly boring. They only play 4-4 and never pincer and the only occasion when they don't do 4-4 is when they mini-chinese. And the mini-chinese sequence from both players is always identical up to like move 30

Ah, well, the middle-game part is still very interesting and I'm sure once I work my way up to the 2000s the modern fuseki development will start to show up.

Oh boy. After winning my previous 4 blitz games easily and wondering what was up, today I lost all 4, HARD. By hard I mean I stood no chance at all. I got slaughtered. Killed. Destroyed. What the heck is this then >< How does one go from destroying people in 4 games to being the one getting destroyed in the next 4? Could it just be mood/feeling dependent? Ugh. I went through all 4 games and they were such a mess, I cannot justify most of my moves at all. My opponents were completely different style players as well, though, maybe it's that I cannot deal with that style? The 4 games I won was against overly aggressive people that left a lot of weaknesses and the lost games today were mainly huge territory from my opponent that I had to attempt to break down and ended up pretty much dying in the process every time.

Such is life. Ups and downs. Just gotta keep going.

Oh yeah, note to self. Learn 3-3 invasion variations. 2 Games went to the crapper after I messed up dealing with them.

Yesterday was not a good day. Looking back, I guess those 4 blitz losses were due to how I was feeling. Everything just went wrong and I ended up going to sleep early just so the whole day would be behind me. I skipped doing the 4 pro games in the evening because of that as well.

Today I will do 8 then. Not about to disappoint Mr. Sedol due to a bad day.

On that note.. I have actually made some changes to my check-list based on how I felt about doing it these past days. First change is that 2 hours of tsumego does my head in and it's going to get cut down to 30 minutes. If I find myself not thinking that 2 liters of coffee is the meaning of life after 30 minutes, then I'll incrementally add to it as time goes by. Secondly, I will play the 4 blitzes and 2 slower games on alternating days. I find that to be nice and not too stressful. 4 Lee Sedol games will remain as-is because it's fun and I feel no need to lower it.

I have started to do more reading in my own-game reviews to compensate for the lowered tsumego time as well.





Comments in the SGF files.

In the first game, doesn't Move 134 at N19 form at least a ko (assuming Black plays Q19)?

Just an observation ... it might be foolhardy to start a ko up there ... I don't know.

Huh.. I actually did not consider that at all. I looked it over briefly, but decided I had no liberties to do anything, but now that I looked at it again.. Neither does he.

I wouldn't call it foolhardy as it is a huge ko where white takes first and the other option is to not get anything up there. Even if black wins it, I would at the very least get 1 free move as he does have to ignore SOMETHING to win it.

Nice find! Unless someone else can find something for black neither of us is seeing

I think what Marcus is saying is that B has a local threat and there are no other real threats on the board, so it might be better to wait to make more threats. That said, if W ignores T14 he can then fight another, heavier ko for the T13 group, and this time he has a local threat (T15!) and B doesn't. B also has approach moves in the second ko. So if W starts the ko immediately, he should get the entire corner (60 pts?) in exchange for some pointless threat somewhere.

I don't know how to take just a position from an SGF file, so just skip to move 134.

So unless I am wrong somewhere I honestly don't see how it could be bad for the game to hang on my opponent needing to win a two-step ko where I have 3 local threats and he has 0. I am still of the opinion it should've been played straight away. He needs to make like... 5 threats to win it? And as you said, there are no meaningful threats on the board, I can just answer the biggest ones and then choose to ignore some small one for the 60+ point kill.

Just an ide but why not study just one Lee Sedol game a day, rather than four or even eight, and really try to understand it? It might be the difference between really reading one book instead of skimming several･

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

I wouldn't know how to do that. Even if I spent a week studying 1 game I would never understand it correctly. Maybe they're just dodging events that are 10+ moves in the future? They both see it, react to it and it never comes to be, and to a "normal" person it appears they're making passive, weird, too aggressive etc. moves. The main reason I am doing them én masse is not to fully understand what he's doing, but to learn good shape/fuseki/joseki/tricks. Memorizing 8 games vs 1, 8 will see 8 times more of each and if I remember only a fraction of it, again, 8 wins out.. I appreciate how good some of the moves are, I have internal dialogue about them, but I cannot pretend to fully understand it all, so I move on.

Maybe once I become stronger.. Who knows. I can't fathom what it would be like to look at a move and go "ah, this is to prevent that dangerous situation that could happen on the left side if this and this and this and this and then that and cut here and then that.." by just looking at it, but maybe I'll get there someday.

There are 370 Lee Sedol games in this collection, it's only up to 2005 and probably doesn't have everything.. Around 450-500 more can be found in go4go, but individually download all of them? Uh.. Well, anyway.. After going through and memorizing, if only in short term/work memory, ~850 of his games, I'm sure I will be a lot stronger and understand him better. Maybe I can then return to some of them and start going through them with more care.

Korean games often are based on fights, exchanges, threats. Just skimming through them is probably not improving any particular part of your game. They often skip honte plays for an exchange somewhere else.

Just my thoughts.

Not sure where the word skimming got into this. I said I memorize them. I can replay the first 50 to 100 moves, depending on when it got too messy to be meaningful. Skimming to me would be replaying it once, going "Huh." and then removing it and replaying the next. And even if they start fights and all that, I am still learning fuseki and joseki, not to mention shapes that are involved in those fights. They attack positions that come up in everyones games, not some randomly laid down stones. There are good ideas for attacking, defending, sabaki, when it's necessary to defend etc.

And considering how I've ALREADY used many moves and ideas I got from these games, you're just blatantly wrong and I have nothing else to say to you.

Sorry I didn't read the entire thread. I didn't mean to offend you in any way.

One thing you may find useful Mike, is something I did fairly exhaustively when I was studying:

Load the game up in an SGF file, and run it through GOSWF (see http://justplaygo.com/ for an example), and try to guess the moves yourself, slowly playing out the game as you get them right.

That way, you're encouraged to find the moves yourself, and get a feel of your instincts improving as you go

I actually do that a lot when playing it out on the real board. Of course like that I only get 1 guess then the move is revealed, but I've had a fairly good success rate in the fuseki stages of the game. Even found some nice looking tesuji moves during a couple of tough fights.

I'll definitely try it out, though. I'm just worried it would turn into a frustrated click-fest when I can't get the move right again and again Also, I have a kind of a kinetic memory I guess. I have a really hard time remembering games that I've seen/played on the computer, but can usually remember all of my games that I play on a real one.

Yesterdays blitz games were worrisomely bad. I continued the losing streak to 7 games(counting the previous 4 I lost) and then finally broke it in game 8. I don't really mind the losing, but I got so angry when the reason I lost was just so stupid. It wasn't like the first 4 I lost where the loss became clear early on or in the middle-game, no.. In the 3rd game I think it was, I lost 15 to 20 stones in the late-endgame. I'm talking 2 point moves stage here. I just messed it up. They weren't even hard to read, it was literally "if he plays right here I am in atari" and I didn't notice. 2 Out of 3 losses were in the endgame. I am not that good in endgame in regular games either, I guess it translates stronger to blitz, then, when I have no time to think about it.

But the last game made me feel a little bit better. I had a good attack going on I felt, but I of course messed it up in the literally last move. I still won, even if some "luck" was involved, but the "kill" before that was nice.

Today it is time to play slow games again.

So, today my slow games went 1-1. First game was.. well, annoying, but you can read in the comments how I dealt with that. Second game was much more interesting, with my opponent taking his time to make his moves. It's far more fun to play a game where you feel like your opponent actually cares where he places his stones.





Reading is still a big issue. But it's not just that, there are some very clear mistakes in the early game where it's pretty much just a wrong decision that I make. But there is time. Ohh there is a lot of time. The timeline for reaching this goal is set on June 2012 and by my calculations in that time reviewing 4 games a day I will just have gone through all of Sedols games

In the first game, you mention the following position:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$c 3-3 invasion var 1
$$ , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . X . W . |
$$ . . . . O . . . a . |
$$ , X . . . . X . . . |
$$ . . . . O X X O . . |
$$ . . . . . X O O . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ -------------------[/go]

In this particular case, White can be cut at a (note that this might not be the best idea for black in this situation, just an example of the shape) ...

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$c 3-3 invasion var 1
$$ , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . X . W . |
$$ . . . . O . . 2 1 6 |
$$ , X . . . . X 3 4 . |
$$ . . . . O X X O 5 . |
$$ . . . . . X O O 7 . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ -------------------[/go]

However, White can follow a different path to make work:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$c 3-3 invasion var 1
$$ , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . 1 . 0 . |
$$ . . . . O . . . a . |
$$ , X . . . . X . . . |
$$ . . . . O 9 3 2 . . |
$$ . . . . . 5 4 8 6 . |
$$ . . . . . . 7 . . . |
$$ -------------------[/go]

Because of Black can no longer cut.

Just some theory from when I was doing a bit of study on 3-3 invasion shapes.