Introduction to fighting

[Lamp]

Keep playing! Remember the 100 games rule. If you can't prune the tree at all when reading, you'll benefit more from practice than from anything else. Easy tsumego will help too; try the beginner collection on sensei's library.

It may seem insulting when people go on about what a liberty is and what a ladder is, but do you count the liberties on your stones while you wait for your opponent to move? Have you ever read out a ladder that wasn't on the board yet, and played a ladder breaker for it? If you try to do these things, even if it seems hard at first, it will be good practice.

Davies tesuji book is his best, IMHO, but all of them are good (if not necessarily at the level that you want yet).

I just started reading Davies Tesuji book again last night, because fighting and reading is my biggest weakness as well.

Normally to avoid fights I just go out of my way to play moves that look simple or solid. If someone attaches, I look for an excuse to push rather than hane. If someone approaches, I defend in the other direction, jump out, or play a shape move rather than engage in a fight. Of course this doesn't work every time, but it keeps me out of many situations which I'd be otherwise unable to handle.

A friend of mine IRL is about 4k on KGS and he's great at fighting. I think he does the 2D problems on goproblems.com. But I'm only 9k on KGS, but I can beat him in even games about 20-25% of the time by just not fighting with him.

Hopefully reading this Tesuji book again, and maybe following it up with Making Good Shape or Shape Up will help me fill that gap.

[otenki]

I would second "playing on tygem" since I think it is a great fighting learning experience.
But I would not go on tygem before you are about 10k kgs.
Before that just play lots of "normal" games on kgs.

The reason I say this is because I think that early exposure to mega fighting will just leave you not understanding general principles or get confused about them.

For example:

In general people will teach you that jumping three spaces from 2 stones is a good idea.
Howhever on tygem the first thing people will do after you play a 3 space extension from a two stones is play right between it and start fighting. This is not a good move (I think...) BUT this will then start teaching you wrong things. It might teach you that you cannot make this extension because you keep loosing stones with it while actualy it is good, you just don't know yet how to keep the stones alive.

So first some easy structure games on kgs and then go for big scale fighting on tygem

Happy fighting

Cheers,
Otenki