Maybe a checklist will help you, it helped me:

Always before you play a move think about:

1) Look at every single stone on the board.
If you have weak lonely stones, try to help them.
If your opponent has weak stones think about putting pressure on them, maybe even attacking them directly.

2) Which areas of the board are wide and empty; just look around the whole board and search for room. If you dont have to play somewhere because of 1), maybe you should choose some wide area to play there.

3) Before you play a move think about what the purpose of this move is.
Will my opponent answer? What will happen if he ignores my move? Can he play moves from 1) or 2). Sente, Gote?

tldr:

1) search for weak stones and reinforce or attack
2) if no 1) play in large wide area
3) is my move any good, is there a move from 1) or 2) better?

This helped me alot.

@Xylol: This would help me as well if I would follow it =).

In theory I know this, but I often end up making rushed moves, regardless of my intentions. I will keep trying though.


Today way rather productive:
- Played 6 games on Tygem: 5-1 (The lost one was because I rushed it.....)
- Did 2 sets of 50 problems each, and repeated one of them 3 times. I'm gonna try this for the next few days, rather than do a lot of problems, do a smaller size but repeat them shortly afterwards.

So, today was kind of a lazy day, but I still got some time to spend on go.

- Did about 150 problems. They are getting more and more trivial, which is great, seems like I can move on to harder ones soon
- Finally decided to shell out some money and get an actual go board. I probably won't use it that much, but even if it just gets me a couple of hours away from the screen it was probably worth it
- Played one game. Its kind of weird, I feel like my game is somewhat shifting, my fighting gets better, but my whole board awareness seems to get worse. I managed to win by 20 points, but the game was a lot closer then that and I only managed to pull it out because a lot of my opponents don't seem to know the joseki that went down in the lower right.

Anyway, here it is, I would appreciate some general thought on how to fix my direction of play problem =).

Instead of vague general thoughts, you may enjoy this discussion,
starting at Post 34.

For example, on , you missed the huge shared vital point of E13.

And again, on , the huge shared vital point of F13.

And the ( - ) exchange makes a nice broken shape for yourself.

Study all these details. Not vague general principles.

Thanks, I'll have a look at it

A few details.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Thanks Bill, a lot of those moves seem really obvious AFTER one has seen them played

Gotta work on that, maybe I still play to fast/don't consider enough alternatives

It's a good idea to consider up to 5 options for each move.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

If you play to fast, sit on you hands or force yourself to wait everytime 20s or more before you move, even if you know the joseki, just sit there and wait the 20s. After a while you will get bored of the 20s rule and you will start to look around the board and search for things and start thinking more about the move.

Why 20 sec.? A reasonable pace is 15 sec. per move on average, which means that most moves will take less than that.

If you play too fast, it is because you are not thinking. If you are not thinking, come up with a way to think about your moves. Sitzfleisch is not strategy.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

- 150 Problems
- Studies some joseki
- Played some games, one was really good, the others not so much...

Here is one of them. I found two big problems:
- Failure to use my walls: Got big walls on the right and top side but failed to make anything happen with them
- Couldn't kill the left side. This was probably the game decider, my fighting is as weak as ever

Any comments appreciated.

At black 11 I would play k16 to make a sanrensei since your stone on the bottom left has miai of going into the corner or coming out to the side while all of white's stones are on one side.

Maybe someone can correct my reasoning here.

failed to pincer . Sanrensei would allow White to rectify that omission.

(So does the actual , BTW, so I think that it would be better on the left side. )

As the play went, at move 13 White ended up with too many stones on the bottom side.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Your wall on the right could have been avoided if you had played at R-10, for instance. Divide and conquer. But you actually got good use out of that wall. It supported your invasion at M-03 and allowed you to get your wall in the center. (If you had not had your wall on the right White would have played differently.)

As for the left side, you missed a couple of chances to shore it up. J-10 would have been better at H-10. Then when the fighting started, White would not have had the push and cut that gave you trouble.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Thanks for the comments. I chose the slide on the left side because my right group already has a pretty good invasion point near the white strength and I din't want to make another one like that(I try really hard to not make more than one weak group, I recently lost 2 games in a row because of that).

I can see why one would choose R10, but the white response of Q6 looks really strong to me as well. Anyway, in the game I didn't even consider the iron pillar, maybe its time to reread the how to play go series =).

Oh, I also played my first game of real life go today, my mother got curious when the board arrived, so I taught her to play and we played two games afterwards(who needs sleep anyways).

After W Q-06, B O-14.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

200 Problems
8 Games

Went 2-6 and it really should have been 0-8, I play at super blitz speed, which is rather annoying. I wonder why it is so hard to slow down a little...

Then play real blitz and no slow games. Not worth beating yourself for that, just enjoy it at your pace. The 200 problems are for the week for for the day?

_________________
Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

For the day, I try to do daily updates right now, since I got enough time to actually get something done =).

I wonder if playing blitz actually makes you better. I got 10k KGS doing only that, but right now I'm struggling at 16k Tygem level on normal time settings.

Well, can't be sure. I've been told to play blitz since I don't have that much time for slow games, so playing anything is better. Keep in mind that Tygem (and wbaduk) are quite full of sandbaggers, at the DDK area.

_________________
Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net