What's it like reading out a ladder?

[skydyr]

The other thing that he's saying implicitly is that you should know if a move works or not before you play it, and if it doesn't work, you shouldn't play it hoping it will.

Oh, well. So much for my game!

I never said I was good at following all his advice, mind. But, looking at the original titling of Ama to Pro, I think the implication is that this is how you should think to think like a professional.

[Fedya]

The other thing that he's saying implicitly is that you should know if a move works or not before you play it, and if it doesn't work, you shouldn't play it hoping it will.

Oh, well. So much for my game!

And yet you could probably give me nine stones and still win.

[Gotraskhalana]

I also follow the path of the inner stones while letting earlier inner stones fading out as they lose importance. However, I imagine every inner stone giving a little kick to the place where the enemy stone is going to be which helps to switch to all stones at the end of the ladder. I often retreat a couple of stones at the end to redo the ladder there with full visualization.

I wouldn't say that I visualize more than a couple of stones at a time, but I have pretty reliable results on reading ladders with a little twist at the end in my games.

I am aware of many short-cuts, but I don't find that they give me better results, although I *always* "estimate" whether the ladder will work before reading it out and my intuition is pretty good, too, which is nice for the fast blitz games I like to play.

Generally, in life and death, I mostly remember which places are filled with stones and try to retrieve the information if I need to know whether a liberty is already filled. I doubt that one can actually increase the number of items to visualize simultaneously (ok, maybe by one or two with lots of practice). What you need to do is to learn patterns and then visualise five patterns instead of five stones and ladders may not be the best object for this skill.

I have read about a study of chess players where it was shown that very good players and beginners remember about the same number of pieces on the board *if those pieces are distributed randomly*. The gap opens when the grandmaster can remember "The left upper corner is the typical result of opening XY, the right side is like the game of A and B except for the bishop, and the left lower corner is like recent game G.".