Thunkd wrote:Play more games but make them fast ones. Avoid the agony of deliberating over whether to play the stone here or there, when more than likely both points are the wrong spot. Play fast, crash and do it often. Very quickly you'll start realizing which moves are just bad. You'll build up a positional database and start getting a feel for what works and what doesn't.
I tend to disagree with this, although not with particularly strong enthusiasm.
If a 17 kyu player wins against other 17 kyus by playing 10 kyu moves, that is not a good data point for your positional database. In fact, seeing a bad move work over and over again against bad players reinforces bad habits and may leave a player stuck at a particular level for a long time.
Of course, thinking long about your moves does not make a DDK play SDK moves. However, it does go a long way toward
always (as opposed to sometimes) seeing ataris, snapbacks, ladders, nets, 2nd line liberty issues and other things that require reading ahead just 1 or 2 moves. SDKs and DDKs are separated by a paper-thin gap that amounts to mostly these basics.
There are some good reasons to play lots of fast games, but I think that slow games should be the main basis for learning. By the way, what players online consider a slow game would have at least 15-20 minutes of main time and a couple byo-yomi periods.
The pros consider that to be blitz. So these games are not very slow at all when you consider that pros can read much faster than we can.
We also have to consider the fact that the OP sort of burned out once from playing too much go. He might need to pace himself a bit so that he can approach the game in a more relaxed way.
