Ten hours of study for every one hour of play

[DrStraw]

When I was a kyu player I spent hours just putting stones on the board to see shapes that I was tring to understand. I essentially was playing myself, ensuring that I practiced what I needed. I encountered many positions very quickly which would have taken me lots of games to see in real play. Of course it was artificial, but I still got to see how to counter my own ideas.

[Bill Spight]

Am I the only way who thinks playing games should take the majority of time spent? I can potentially agree that it may be more efficient to spend more time on problems, but a ratio of 1:5 or even 1:10 seems ridiculous to me. Learning to apply concepts and knowledge in real games, at least for me personally, takes much more time than reading about them/seeing them in problems.

That is exactly why you need to study. There isn't enough time in a real game to learn how to apply concepts. You have to do that during study and then apply the concepts after they are learned.

That is not to say that learning does not take place during a game -- even at the pro level. Some years ago I played a yose demo with Nam Chihyung, where we played out an endgame position and then switched sides and replayed it. It seemed to me that she learned more about the game position during the first play out than I did. We meet novel positions all the time during play, and learning about them is part of the game.

This is especially so when we are just starting out, which helps to explain the advice to "lose 100 games quickly". There would be no point to that unless rank beginners learned a lot just by playing. The talk about losing is to emphasize that the point of playing so many games is not to win, but to learn. "Quickly" emphasizes that there is little point to going into deep thought when you have not learned much to think about. One thing missing from that advice is the review. Review is a very important part of the learning process, even if you have to do it by yourself, and having just played a game provides material to review.

[Boidhre]

10:1 or 5:1 make sense to me in that my experience across many fields has been many hours "wasted" for precious minutes gained. You're not talking about 10 hours of "in the zone" study, you're talking about the totality of study, including all the "wasted" efforts going over something until finally it clicked and you made progress. I don't consider these wasted, there is nothing intellectually complex in life that you can achieve 100% productivity with. Sometimes you have to spend a lot of time trying to learn something the wrong way before you figure out the right way to approach it.

Of course, the real argument is over what exactly constitutes study in that sentence. Are reviews study for example? Does what Bill Spight relayed from learning bridge of play fast, review slowly echo the title of this thread in a non-obvious way? It's interesting.

[Mef]

I would assume the 10:1 includes all study of all kinds (tsumego, reviewing played games, etc)...even then might be a little steep. Imagine you were a series go student. If you studied 10 hours in a day you'd allow for one game/day. This might work if you ignore tournaments...but still sounds like too much... of course I'm one of those of the opinion you can't learn to box just by reading a book...

[Boidhre]

I would assume the 10:1 includes all study of all kinds (tsumego, reviewing played games, etc)...even then might be a little steep. Imagine you were a series go student. If you studied 10 hours in a day you'd allow for one game/day. This might work if you ignore tournaments...but still sounds like too much... of course I'm one of those of the opinion you can't learn to box just by reading a book...

You can't learn to box by just stepping into the ring either (believe me ). With any martial art the amount of training that surrounds competitive fighting is enormous for serious practitioners, far more than 10:1.

[Mef]

I would assume the 10:1 includes all study of all kinds (tsumego, reviewing played games, etc)...even then might be a little steep. Imagine you were a series go student. If you studied 10 hours in a day you'd allow for one game/day. This might work if you ignore tournaments...but still sounds like too much... of course I'm one of those of the opinion you can't learn to box just by reading a book...

You can't learn to box by just stepping into the ring either (believe me ). With any martial art the amount of training that surrounds competitive fighting is enormous for serious practitioners, far more than 10:1.

How much of that training is reading a book?

[DrStraw]

I would assume the 10:1 includes all study of all kinds (tsumego, reviewing played games, etc)...even then might be a little steep. Imagine you were a series go student. If you studied 10 hours in a day you'd allow for one game/day. This might work if you ignore tournaments...but still sounds like too much... of course I'm one of those of the opinion you can't learn to box just by reading a book...

You can't learn to box by just stepping into the ring either (believe me ). With any martial art the amount of training that surrounds competitive fighting is enormous for serious practitioners, far more than 10:1.

How much of that training is reading a book?

How much of studying go involves a book? Less that half if you do it correctly.

[illluck]

I would assume the 10:1 includes all study of all kinds (tsumego, reviewing played games, etc)...even then might be a little steep. Imagine you were a series go student. If you studied 10 hours in a day you'd allow for one game/day. This might work if you ignore tournaments...but still sounds like too much... of course I'm one of those of the opinion you can't learn to box just by reading a book...

You can't learn to box by just stepping into the ring either (believe me ). With any martial art the amount of training that surrounds competitive fighting is enormous for serious practitioners, far more than 10:1.

Well, the risks associated with actual fighting is much higher than actually playing games, so I'm not sure if that's an apt comparison :p

[Boidhre]

I would assume the 10:1 includes all study of all kinds (tsumego, reviewing played games, etc)...even then might be a little steep. Imagine you were a series go student. If you studied 10 hours in a day you'd allow for one game/day. This might work if you ignore tournaments...but still sounds like too much... of course I'm one of those of the opinion you can't learn to box just by reading a book...

You can't learn to box by just stepping into the ring either (believe me ). With any martial art the amount of training that surrounds competitive fighting is enormous for serious practitioners, far more than 10:1.

How much of that training is reading a book?

The point was it's a poor analogy. Sure, books aren't really much of a part of boxing training, this doesn't mean that you don't do a load of training if you want to box competitively or that insei need to get the skipping rope out.

[DrStraw]

The point was it's a poor analogy. Sure, books aren't really much of a part of boxing training, this doesn't mean that you don't do a load of training if you want to box competitively or that insei need to get the skipping rope out.

I would suspect that an insei should get the skipping rope out. Mental fitness is important, but it will not suffice alone. In most games physical fitness is also essential.

[Boidhre]

The point was it's a poor analogy. Sure, books aren't really much of a part of boxing training, this doesn't mean that you don't do a load of training if you want to box competitively or that insei need to get the skipping rope out.

I would suspect that an insei should get the skipping rope out. Mental fitness is important, but it will not suffice alone. In most games physical fitness is also essential.

Getting the skipping rope out was a reference to boxing specific physical training.

[emerus]

How much of studying go involves a book? Less that half if you do it correctly.

Tsumego books should probably be more than 50% of study alone.

[DrStraw]

How much of studying go involves a book? Less that half if you do it correctly.

Tsumego books should probably be more than 50% of study alone.

Nonsense. Reviewing your games should be at least half of study.

[illluck]

How much of studying go involves a book? Less that half if you do it correctly.

Tsumego books should probably be more than 50% of study alone.

Nonsense. Reviewing your games should be at least half of study.

Nonsense. Reviewing your games should be at most 46.34% of study.

Edit: to add to my completely unexplained assertion, it would be strange to spend 5 times as much time to review games assuming a 10:1 ratio. A game taking an hour and a half would then require a review of 7.5 hours.

[Abyssinica]

I think that the benefits of playing a lot diminish the stronger you get and the benefits of studying diminsh the weaker you are. What use is all the guidance, theory, and explanations in the world to a 28k player who still hasn't gotton much of a feel for basic shapes, concepts, or ideas yet? Just play more; it'll do you a lot of good. But what if you're a 6d amateur? You already know so much about the game (Which is probably still close to nothing at all in the grand scheme of things ). Your opponets aren't going to be weak either, and I doubt there's more that you can figure out on your own that you already don't know just by playing. Maybe there's a balance of the two at SDK levels.