Finally, the summer vacation has begun.
I have only two main projects that I wish to work on. Now feels like a heaven-sent opportunity to improve my go. So that's project No. 1. The other is to compose a polychoral Magnificat for a composing competition that I wish to enter.
I'm noticing a real effect from having spent the last few weeks patiently studying with the help of a physical go set. The patterns are actually registering in my mind! As I was drifting off to sleep last night, I was able to imagine the different notcher formations, door groups and so on and play through them mentally.
The funny thing is that now I look back on it, my progress slowed down at precisely the time I got it into my head that it would be a good idea to try to read the examples in my go books purely mentally. To some extent, perhaps that also had a positive effect: I don't find it difficult to read. But - and it's a big but - I would always be looking in my games for opportunities to read, and would get frustrated if I could not see some forcing sequence or other. I think too much mental practise has the strange drawback of making you unable to see the wood for the trees. You end up being able to see some fine plays, but not being able to engineer a situation in which to play them.
In contrast, I'm just beginning to find a subtler approach. In a recent game, I recognised the
potential of an opposing group to become an unsettled notcher, and bullied the opponent mercilessly. I actually messed up quite badly in the finer details (it was not killable, but I let him live more generously than he deserved to), and STILL made a lot of profit despite my clumsiness! The game was a comfortable victory.
I have also been going over some of my defeats in light of John Fairbairn's rather amusing imagining of me on a jolly old partridge shoot. I found that it was kind of true! So, I have been attempting to play a lot less directly of late: making more probes, leaning plays, kikashi and more distant attacks designed not so much to kill outright as to restrict ("semaru", I think). I'm making good progress up through the 2k level now, so perhaps I can reach 1k (again) before too long. The more important thing is that I really do feel stronger, irrespective of what my KGS rank is.
I've worked my way through Davies's
Life and Death and am most of the way through
Attack and Defence. I have found both books revelatory. As I said above, the act of playing over the examples has impressed me much more deeply than merely reading them through off the page. And I find that mental reading has become easier, because I have the physical experience now to support me. It IS like playing a musical instrument! You could attempt purely mental practise of playing the guitar (or, for me these days, the organ), but it won't do you all that much good. However, if you learn the correct form on a real instrument, and THEN use mental practise, then one thing supports the other.
To give myself a structure, I've set myself a "reading list" based on the books I already have. I plan to work on two books at a time, with one chosen for its focus on details, and the other for more generalised applications. L&D is obviously a details book, but as already explain, I'm finding that those details crop up in as useful way in real games. A&D is more about general strategy, but it contains quite a few specific exchanges that are well worth knowing, and, naturally, principles are much easier to use if you have a mental library of real examples to back them up with.
On the general list, I plan to progress to
Strategic Principles of Go (Nagahara), which is a book that I've read (but not played through) many times. I fully expect it to have a much deeper effect on me this time around. Then, I would like to go through
Reducing Territorial Frameworks by Fujisawa Hideyuki. I've owned that for the last 17 years, and whenever I've read it it's just caused my mind to boggle. It won't this time around, however, because I shall be playing through the diagrams and not trying to follow the numbers mentally. (This is, I suppose, a much belated realisation that I'm not as clever as I would like to be, and so have to do things in a more humble fashion. Could that really be the breakthrough that I've been searching for for so long?)
On the specific list, I have the Nihon Kiin Tesuji dictionary, attributed to Yamashita Keigo. That should probably keep me going through the whole summer. After that, maybe I shall obtain Cho U's L&D dictionary.
A non-go book that I am currently reading, but which I have already found to have useful go applications among other things is Steve Peters's
The Chimp Paradox. It has helped me to understand why you can't just play by instinct (which would be a mistake attempt to go to Daniel Kahneman's System I). This is because our minds are not JUST the rational, reasoning part and the automatic system, but ALSO a more primitive beast that is an atavistic survival of the simian brain: in other words, we have the human (logical, verbal, a bit slow, System II), the computer (automatic and lightning fast, System I) and Bonzo (somewhat faster than the human, highly emotional and aggressive, and definitely not very good at playing go, chess or whatever). The key is to learn to keep Bonzo under control, so that the human and the computer can work together.
I like to tell my "chimp" that it is allowed to watch while I play go - and cheer me on - but it is NOT allowed to play. Likewise, while I was singing a complex solo part yesterday morning, I told my nervous chimp that it was just going to be a spectator. It was unbelievably calming.
What happens when you go on tilt, is that you basically allow King Kong to take over. The chimp desperately wants to win, because winning confirms its status in the troop, while losing puts it lower down, with consequent loss of mating and feeding rights. For the chimp, it's a fight with severe consequences and not a game. That's why tilting is so miserable, and is often accompanied by rudeness and aggressive behaviour. I am coming to think that the appropriate corrective action is not just to walk away and take a break (the usual advice), but also to talk to King Kong and tell him that a) we're NOT in fact in a terrible fight for status in the troop and b) if he really, really wants to get better rights and status, he'd be much better off leaving it to the human and the computer to play. Good instinct is when the computer sees something it knows and lets us act on it automatically. Bad instinct is when the chimp runs amok choosing moves because they appear to lead directly to the desired goal (it's not very bright, you see).
That's the thing which relates to my previous post: the human within us likes to win, of course, but is much more interested in go as an endlessly fascinating game. It's the chimp who has the potential to spoil that enjoyment. That's perhaps why bad behaviour is more common on the Net than in life. Nobody wants to be seen acting like a chimp at a go event (and before you remind me, I have been there too
), but the possibility of letting your inner apebeast get loose while playing in the privacy of your home is a much more clear and present danger.
).
cap (-2.5%), she would prefer to play E9 instead
: your winrate goes from 46% to 35% by playing the wedge. For LZ, D8 is the only move possible.
, the game is even.
you should double hane (a -12.5% winrate loss, dropping from 50% to 37.5%)
is not the correct move locally, C8 is better :
is not a good shape : white can play at F7 to capture your two cutting stones
if you tenuki without playing F4 ? (LZ think F4 is really important and would play it nearly at every occasion until white kill the aji with move 130)