Bill Spight wrote:
Seo Bong-soo may have advanced mostly by play (and, presumably, review). But who did he play against? To advance by play it is important to play against the stiffest opposition you can find.
i heard that he played cho hun-hyun many many games for few dollars per game.
i wish i can play him for that price...
"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown" Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson
Serious games, tournament games, games against opponents you are desperate to win against all of it with slow or no time limit... are the best way to improve for me. When I play such games automatically the review and study becomes more useful and focused as well.
Playing with adjustable handicap (3 wins in a row = different handicap) against another player was an especially good motivator for me = the "Go is a 2 player game" thing. Betting may be a good motivator as well, though not well accepted in western amateur culture.
Especially I would mention writing in discussions, talking about learning instead of doing it and clicking through random pages on Sensei's Library (as much as I do it) as procrastination techniques that are not well spent study time at all, both in Go and elsewhere. And that is embarassing to me, that I spend a huge amount of time on Go, but much of it is like other people look for football results I study the professional game results and go fastly through some games. Bad idea. But I can't help it.
tapir wrote: Betting may be a good motivator as well, though not well accepted in western amateur culture.
This is temporal in Western culture (if we use chess as an example). Now we are comfortable paying a pro for lessons and the pro with receiving such pay but 100+ years ago the social convention was to maintain the fiction "we're all gentlemen here" so you got to play against the pro at small wagers which served as pay for the lessons without it being gentleman and servant. I am old enough to have encountered the tail end of this phenomenon.
So I would say this is more a matter of now in Western culture. We no longer feel the need for the fiction and pay or receive pay openly without shame.
