It's better to respond to Q19 with O17. You fix your cut, and protect against any first line push.

I used to play like your opponent did. I would start on 3-3s and 3-4s and then invade any star-point stones on the board right away because I valued territory so much. You handled it quite well, building points from your walls instead of just blindly following your opponent around. This kind of game should go away by the time you get to SDK, but it is important to learn how it works and why it is bad for white.

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"You have to walk before you can run. Black 1 was a walking move.
I blushed inwardly to recall the ignorant thoughts that had gone through
my mind before, when I had not realized the true worth of Black 1."
-Kageyama Toshiro on proper moves

You played a lot of knee-jerk moves that aren't useful: 70, 74, 106, 122, 146, 148, 150 (these last three became useful when your opponent made a mistake at 153), 160 are fairly obvious even without reading. These were all approximately-0-point moves when there were bigger moves on the board. I'm sure you'd like it if your opponent passed 8 times in a game, so try not to give your opponent the same satisfaction.

thanks, I'll keep the updated 3-3 Invasion josekin in mind =)

I feel like I have had this problem of playing too many safe moves pretty much in every game I play. If I look at the situation rationally I can tell they are wrong, but in the game I'm more like "OMG must not get cut!!!!!!!!!".

Maybe I gotta force myself to loose some games to getting cut too much, maybe then I can find the right balance.

Well, time for my Friday update(on Saturday, because I spent yesterday playing Dust XD).

Got a decent number of Games in and made 13k, although the rank on KGS seems to be a little shaky, still I feel like I got better, at least a little bit.

I kinda finished "Opening theory made easy". I can't say I can use everythin yet, but I feel like just rereading it again and again will have diminishing returns, I'll work through another book when I get the time and then come back to it.

I think of going for "Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go". I've tried it once, but I couldn't quite make it through, maybe now its time for another try.

And finally a game, I just played this one. It was really interesting, my opponent took a lot of the sides and I tried to convert a big mojo into territory, here is how it went:

Here's a game I played just now, I did feel kinda good about it, but in the end I lost by a whooping 10 points.

The crawling in the top left was probably not optimal, but other than that I couldn't find any unreasonable mistakes.

Any help appreciated:

A small point about White 174. Something to look out for in your games.



Sorry, I made some mistake creating the variations on the sgf and don't have time to fix right now but it should be clear what I mean.

Edit: I missed a double atari. Gah, I'm crap at the moment. White 177 is wrong in my diagram.

A few things that jumped out at me. I don't know whether others have already covered them.

I think D8 is too submissive there billy in your first variation, I'd expect more of a fighting move from Black there. F10 would be annoying for White if they didn't know how to handle it.

Thanks a lot guys.

I think I notice a pattern in my games, my shape seems to be suboptimal and my attacking game is lacking(not aggressive enough or happening in the wrong way).

Time to get on that.

Whem, has been forever since I posted here, my abscence was a lot longer than planned.

Anyway, I'm back and I'm still trying to improve, turns out you can forget quite a lot, even if you didn't know that much in the first place =).

So, I wanna show you a quick game of mine. Here's the gist: Big fight on the right side that I win, and a few moves later the game is over and I lost x.X.

I'm not looking for a move by move analysis, but if you could take a quick look an tell me my most glaring mistakes regarding where I play(on the whole board, not in the fight or a specific joseki). Did I focus too much on the fight and should have tenukied?

Thanks in advance.

Great to have you back pak0!

Here are some comments on your game.

_________________
"You have to walk before you can run. Black 1 was a walking move.
I blushed inwardly to recall the ignorant thoughts that had gone through
my mind before, when I had not realized the true worth of Black 1."
-Kageyama Toshiro on proper moves

thanks, I took quite a bit from that

So, another game I could use some help on.

Been kind of in a slump lately and been playing terrible, I never have a clue of where to play x.X.

The one mistake in the end was just stupid, but I wanna know what I should have done against his big mojo, the attack that I tried was obviously really bad.

Hey paK0,

I reviewed the game for you. But please keep in mind, that I'm only about 6k, so what I think is good (or bad) might not be really good or bad. I also haven't commented someone's game in a while.. Still, I hope that the comments will help you to get stronger!

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Thanks for the review

Seems like I botched the game a lot earlier than I assumed, this game was pretty much my lowest point of the week.

You're welcome.

I don't think it was such a bad game for you, your worst mistake was playing too timidly on the left side (which is not playing the hane and or at least playing D8), granting black all this influence without any real defects which was too burdensome for you. But that was last week and now's the next. I wish you all the best for your games this week!

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Another game, another disaster x.X

Been playing catchup since the opening, can someone give me some pointers on how to play if the other guy just randomly plays on the side-stars?