How to Become a Dan

[jlt]

On bleak days, I think the core determinant of playing strength is pure reading ability.

Reading ability is one of the most important aspects, but not the only one at all. Any dan player will win against a DDK without reading at all. Conversely if you are able to read it doesn't mean your groups won't die. Many times one of my groups was killed just because I didn't bother to check whether it was necessary to protect it. Or if didn't die, it was bullied more than I expected.

[gowan]

It also depends on what you call reading. I think many amateurs think of reading as something like: I play this, she plays that, etc. ... one move at a time. Skilled players like higher amateur dan or pro players just see the moves flow onto the board in their minds. I suppose that sort of mental "seeing" is a form of reading, but it is also a form of positional judgment.

[skydyr]

It also depends on what you call reading. I think many amateurs think of reading as something like: I play this, she plays that, etc. ... one move at a time. Skilled players like higher amateur dan or pro players just see the moves flow onto the board in their minds. I suppose that sort of mental "seeing" is a form of reading, but it is also a form of positional judgment.

On reading, I think there are really two kinds: an active sort, where you are concentrating on the outcome of a move and exploring branches, and a more passive/intuitive sort where you have already internalized something. I don't actively read a bulky five to see it reduces to one eye, or that a single stone ataried on the 2nd line can't descend to escape, but I still know what the result is without thinking about it much. Similarly, there are positions that just visualize very quickly as 'no that can't be cut' without explicitly thinking about the individual moves.

I think a lot of stronger players who claim they don't read when playing are really relying on this subconscious knowledge from having read/experienced that type of position often enough that they know what a reasonable result will be, making the actual claim somewhat disingenuous. Shape knowledge ties into this as well. My impression is that these sorts of statements can be the most perplexing to weaker players because when they try to do the same thing, they just play garbage. Even when they're told something like 'invade starting here', it often doesn't work out because they can't prune ineffective moves and this just serves to create a sort of dan mystique when the reality is that the stronger player reads simple situations so intuitively they don't realize they're doing it as they judge.

[schrody]

I'm sort of on the fence about whether knowledge of shape falls under 'reading'. There are many players who know that the J group/large pig's snout is dead but fewer that would be able to kill it. Among those are players who know the main variation by heart but struggle when the opponent plays an unexpected move and those who haven't memorised any variations but are able to read them all during the game. Especially when I was weaker but even now I occasionally find myself in a situation where I know that my group is alive but am not sure if I'd be able to keep it alive if my opponent tried to kill it. Should I waste a move to make sure it lives or simply hope that my reading ability won't fail me?

I'm similarly split on intuition, however I do agree that it is a large part of this mystical ability that makes stronger players seem so strong. I frequently watch streamers/Youtubers comment their games while playing and they often say things like "I think my group is fine" or "This capturing race is good for me" or "This cut is not a problem at the moment". Since they barely spend more than a few seconds to make that evaluation this will seem like magic to weaker players. How can strong players simply know these things? I was equally astounded until a few years ago when I started seriously studying shape and training my intuition. Now I can often make such snap decisions too and the AI even increasingly often approves of my choices.

In the end, it doesn't even matter much if we see such somewhat tangential skills as a part of reading or whether we consider reading to be just mere visualision, i.e. a mental representation of various possible continuations. I think that a more important issue is that when stronger players give advice to weaker players on how to improve their reading and fighting, they'll almost inevitable tell them to solve tsumego. Perhaps you have a different conceptualisation of 'tsumego' but my prototypical idea is that tsumego are life and death problems in the corner or the side where no whole-board context is provided while it is known whose turn it is and often also the end-goal (e.g. typically kill or live). Based on the previous posts I believe we can all agree that there's much more to reading and fighting ability than that. What about life and death situation in the middle of the board, running fights, complex capturing races that span half of the board? What about strategical decisions regarding whether you want to kill the group at all, whether you'd rather enclose or chase it and if so, in which direction? There's even the current score estimate that plays a role. There was talk of large dragons earlier. I don't know why AI handles them the way it does but if I'm ahead by a fair margin, I'll protect my dragon, if I'm behind, I'll tenuki and if the game is fairly even I'll trust my intuition because I certainly won't be able to accurately read out the situation. And it is the study of intuition that is so often neglected and it is also the lack of intuition that so often makes weaker players despair because they don't even know that intuition is a thing let alone that they could and should study it.

On bleak days, I think the core determinant of playing strength is pure reading ability. Without improving one's own reading ability, tackling errors is likely to lead to small changes within a similar rating band of overall strength.

Incidentally, don't pros say "the way to get strong/become a dan" is to solve lots of problems rather than play through games? The one's I've run into seem to anyway, though maybe it's not the traditional advice over the last 3000 years.

This is purely anecdotal, but I'm awful at pure reading, i.e. the visualisation aspect. I can barely read a few moves ahead and even then I'm often unsure if I've read it correctly. This is probably because the last time I was regularly solving tsumego was over 10 years ago. Would it have improved my game if I did solve them regularly? Probably, but I simply don't enjoy it. Yet, I've still made it to dan ranks recently and am still improving just by studying pretty much everything else. I think this shows that pure reading ability is not the be-all end-all even at low dan level. You can not only get by but even kill a lot of groups just by having a good knowledge of shape, good intuition and at least decent positional judgment. Small mistakes matter because they quickly add up to a 10-point loss and bad shape matters because it quickly adds up to a dead group.

Of course, if you are or want to be a mid to high dan player then you better make sure there's no weak points in your game (reading, intuition and what have you included).

[John Fairbairn]

I'm sort of on the fence about whether knowledge of shape falls under 'reading'

I don't think I disagree with any of what you say, but we may differ a little if I add a little clarification to my view of it all. Let's ee.

First, intuition can be used and abused. If we use it just to play quickly to fill in time (which I think is by far the commonest form of play from mid-kyu to mid-dan, it's tantamount to playing the first move that comes to mind. That's abuse. But because abuse exists we shouldn't therefore denigrate intuition. The real value of intuition is to produce at least one candidate move, though ideally a collection of such. Each candidate move should then be checked, even if cursorily. Only serious players or terrified DDKs do that.

My second point is about visualisation. This is tricky, because when we've talked about it in the past here, it has emerged that it means different things to different speakers, even native speakers. But, however, you want to word it, I think a distinction should be made between identifying static shapes (where identification may range from just giving a name to a shape to being able to identify its likely weaknesses) and being able to see in your mind's eye the entire FLOW associated with the shape. So, if we have an L+1 shape, you don't just see the shape and know its name but you see in your mind's eye at the very least the hane that is needed to turn it into a dead L-shape.

A third point, which follows on from that, is that for mastery you need to be able to make this flow visualisation for all sort of positions, not just those that have pretty names. Talking of L-shapes brings to mind a good example (even though it could be said to have a name - but it's my own, not a standard one), namely "Shuei's L shapes in the centre." Just making such a shape may give you a satisfying semblance of thickness, but the real benefit comes from knowing how it flows from there. One typical flow is the creation of what the Japanese call the 'hoisting a flag' shape - hata o motsu. I recall talking about that here in response to a question from uberdude. That was interesting in that he had discovered such a flow for himself but seemed keen to cement his new knowledge by attaching a name to it. If that's what he was doing, I think it is natural and I heartily approve of it, with the caveat that the name should be attached to the procedure (the flow), not the shape. That flow is what is happening in hata o motsu, because motsu is an action verb. Purely static terms such as 'sake bottle' or 'giraffe's neck' are a complete waste of time as far as I'm concerned (the "L shape is dead" is fine because a verbal/action element is implied). This is one area where the Japanese score over us: when they say hane they feel it as verb; we feel it as noun. That's much more significant than it might seem at first blush. A verbal action is part of their intuition. Nominal non-action is part of the intuition of English speakers.

[xela]

The computer just never defends dragons, if you make eyes it is sure to be a point loss.

Recently I've been looking at some 1970s pro games and seeing the same thing! A few times I've looked at a tenuki and thought: surely black needs to make a second eye for that big dragon? And black having played away, why does white answer? So I ask KataGo -- what happens if white tries to kill the dragon? In most cases so far, the result seems to be that some white stones somewhere get cut off, and it turns into a giant one-eye-each seki. My conclusion: you only need the second eye once the other player is thick enough on the outside to actually kill. Defending before that time means that you've just given up sente unnecessarily. I think this is something that amateurs can learn from.

[kvasir]

Maybe a tangent but analyzing with the computer is sometime similar to joseki books and YouTube videos. It makes you feel really powerful. You experience how you can think through all the variations in a flash just moments after watching or browsing through the variations. But try and explain what you have learned to someone else or even something easier like using it in a game. You just won't be able to do it well (with maybe one exception).

Maybe there are two main reasons:
* You only observed (watched, read or followed the blue dot), you didn't think through the positions until you could find the moves on your own.
* You didn't spend enough time on the subject to really learn it.

The only exception, that I can think of, is if what you are learning is almost in reach. If it is something that you have almost mastered, something that you really do understand, and it is emerging as a new skill, then you might experience that the straw is breaking the camel's back. We have probably all had moments like that. The first time we were able to read or the first time you could understand a foreign language. Sometimes such things feel instantaneous and have a big impact on our psyche. Of course, even if it can feel like it does, learning is not something that happens instantaneously.

Maybe these considerations are part of the reason why the usual mantra about getting stronger seems to be to do life and death problems. Playing games with longer time controls, also, and playing stronger opponents. It is things that you (mostly) can't do, with positive results, without thinking through the moves on your own.