Life In 19x19

Who knows...you might run into me....we can't both lose

mayweed wrote:Long...

I heard some ppl saying that you keep losing consistently on a regular basis til 8k...

In fact, you necessarily win more than you lose on the medium term as long as you improve.
What is true is that a go club is usually mostly visited by high kyu or dan players (because you don't stay very long DDK). Overall, as a beginner, you can feel that most games played would be with handicap but you shouldn't worry that much about it. Little by little the handicap reduces.
On my experience, I would say it could take between a few months and a year to get to 8-9k KGS (obviously depends on your investment in the game).

I would read a couple of beginner go books. The Janice Kim series helped me a lot at that level and showed me some basics on correct play. KGS teaching ladder also will help.

When I was a beginner I started playing in person with people who could easily give me more than 9 stones, so I lost every game. Then I played on IGS, and at that time, there was no BC (beginner class.) I lost not every game, but many games, until I dropped down to 28k. At that time, I said, "aha, at least now I'm at the bottom" because I knew from the documentation that there were no ratings below 28k. Then one sad day I logged in and noticed that my rating was NR*. This requires some explaining. In the old IGS rating system, a * after your rank meant that you had played enough rated games that your rank was reasonably accurate according to their system. (Kind of like not a having a ? on KGS.) If you didn't want to play rated games or didn't want to expose your rating, you could set your rank to NR, meaning "not rated." There were actually some very strong players who played as NR, so this was a kind of anonymity and not necessarily a stigma. But it seems I was losing so much that I was branded with this strange NR* rating, which in effect meant "we are confident that you are so weak we cannot measure how weak you are."

Now I am stronger than my first teacher, so do not lose faith. But I confess I did enlist a better teacher to improve...

Mmm, a teacher is a good idea, but probably equally effective as a DDK is just finding someone around your level to be a study partner/friendly rival. When I started a couple of months ago, I got as many friends as I could interested, since well - it's more fun to play with friends than random unknowns from KGS! I find that with most things in life, if someone finds it fun, they're more likely to improve. How many people get good at a subject in school when the teacher is crap and completely unmotivating? Compare that to having a really good teacher who makes their subject come to life, or having friends interested in that subject who can share their passion with you. As such, I think (especially as a DDK), you're likely to improve naturally quite quickly just by having fun and playing a few games with friends. If it becomes a chore/annoyance due to the "damn, I'm always losing, this is no fun...", that's really not a good way to get stronger. At the end of the day, it's just a game .

Wow, I would LOVE to gain 2 stones every fortnight!!

Just don't give up, the good games will come faster than you can imagine!

Actorios wrote:

mayweed wrote:Long...

I heard some ppl saying that you keep losing consistently on a regular basis til 8k...

In fact, you necessarily win more than you lose on the medium term as long as you improve.
What is true is that a go club is usually mostly visited by high kyu or dan players (because you don't stay very long DDK). Overall, as a beginner, you can feel that most games played would be with handicap but you shouldn't worry that much about it. Little by little the handicap reduces.
On my experience, I would say it could take between a few months and a year to get to 8-9k KGS (obviously depends on your investment in the game).

Not necessarily true, it's only true if you stick with a single account or never self-promote.

In general, it takes a long time for the system to recognize a significant jump in strength, so many players just make a new account and play that one, which usually ends up being 50-50 until they have another jump in strength.

Put it this way, you could make a new account and win 40% of your games for a while, creating a steady downward trend, then, suddenly (as often happens) you jump in strength, and start winning 60% of your new games. You still bear the weight of the older games, so your overall winning percentage is below 50%, but your rank is more represented by your games in, say, the last month, rather than the last year. You make a new account, jump up to the new rank, and then hang at 50%, you now have more losses than wins, and yet you are stronger.

Is that so? I thought KGS heavily weighted your most recent games.

Joaz Banbeck wrote:Go has the hardest learning curve of any game that I have ever seen. What you are experiencing is normal. Hang in there, it will get better. It will be worth it in the long run.

Exactly. It took me a while to even understand the objective of the game. When I first started to play online, it was a totally humbling experience, and I was thoroughly hammered, back in the day when they had 30k rankings.

SkyNative wrote:How long are you suppose to lose for

You're supposed to stop??? Nobody told me that!