Mike's Motivational Tools

[Mike]

So, Day 1 is behind me and I gotta say, doing all those things seemed a lot easier when it was just 4 short lines of text. I finished reviewing the 4th pro game around midnight.. Yes I took small breaks and I also went to the gym, but daym, it took the entire day to do basically. Worst part was, as expected, tsumego. I literally started falling asleep while doing them. I don't know what it is about studying that makes that happen ><

I played 4 Blitz as well, but I am worthless at them so posting them is meaningless. I need to do them, though. Only staying within my own comfort zone is not helpful, and that's where the blitzes come in.

Game 1 the opponent was a bit on the weaker side, but it was a nice game anyway. I did some stupid things, but meh. Comments are in the SGF.



Game 2 the opponent was stronger and had also adapted the unfortunate side-effect of being 1-3k in KGS. WARNING: Comments may contain some bitterness, do not read if you're chipper.


Wooh. Coming up on 2AM with this post and the comments/reviews on those 2 games.. Dang it all. This stuff takes time. Well, tomorrow I'm not going to the gym, maybe I'll be done before midnight.

[Tami]

Just my ¥2 worth on your game with okeichan.

I thought you played the opening very well, and I liked your plan of expanding from your thickness and permitting him the under-connection.


However, while I know what you mean about the 'kyu disease', maybe the move you first criticised was not so bad (although making a base in the other direction was probably the right move) - he was playing in your sphere of influence, so an attachment to begin sabaki seemed plausible at least. But then he extended instead of crosscutting, and you built thickness.

The game seemed to go rotten for you about move 43. You attacked so hard that you made him stronger and your own group weak! In fact, by the end of the fight you had to work hard and expensively to live, while he got a fabulous wall in the centre.

Instead, just e5 looks perfect. It doesn't kill, but it would have worked well overall hhad you played it soon enough･

You must have read Attack and Defence, I guess. There's a great anecdote about the player who was superb at tesuji, but kept ruining his own position by attacking relentlessly. Perhaps you were like that player in this game?

A lesson for us both - respect the opponent. One or two bad-looking moves does not mean that they have no plan or that everythinng they do will be an overplay.

Do you read go books? I don't know about you, but somehow recently I have been finding it a great deal easier to remember sequences and joseki when shown in the context of a game or explanation. Obviously, doing tsumego is good for your tactics, but then there's strategy and technique...

Finally, if you're tired, maybe you'd do better to rest? Just grinding on is like cramming for your exams, which doesn't work. Little and often might help you to remember more and enjoy it more. Enjoying the study has to be part of the motivation to do it.

[Mike]

Yes, I know, the comments are somewhat belittling, but it's because I've played dozens of games against people that do it even more frequently. Even if they fail, they keep trying to trick, over and over. So, I sometimes kinda project this "past anger" towards the entire style to others that may have only done it to a lesser extend.

I've read the beginning of Attack & Defence, before I got bored, does that count?

I intend to read more of them this time around, though. Just trying to find the time for them. And resting, taking it easy and all that.. Doesn't work for me. I've tried that. I get annoyed at the "too slow" progress when I just do little and it pushes me to give up. Also, unstructured learning isn't good either. I have to have this "check list" and specific amounts/times, or I will just not do them properly. I know it from past experience. It's easy to say "well just do it", hard to ACTUALLY "just do it".

What I might have to adjust is the 2 hours of tsumego. Getting better at reading is one of the most important things in my mind, but 2 hours of it just makes me so darned tired and kinda makes me not look forward to the whole thing at all. I hate not being able to do it more, or rather, not enjoying it.. I know some people that think tsumego is the best part of studying go and they'd rather not replay pro games or things that I enjoy greatly.

On the subject of replaying pro games: What I'm actually doing is replaying all of Lee Sedols games starting from 1997. He's my, well, "Go Idol" if you wish. Replaying and memorizing his games was the most enjoyable part of the day! Despite taking hours, I didn't even notice the time. Oh how I wish I could just play and replay his games and become stronger, but alas, I doubt that would do a thing to my reading ability. The moves he makes are not possible without deep reading.

Wait, what was the subject again? I forgot. Oh well. Nice to have a thread like this for rambling on about stuff that's on my mind.

[Tami]

You probably know about the 10000 hours idea that's been floating around recently. I think the catch is that it's as much the quality of time spent as the quantity that matters. If you're just clocking up the hours without paying attention, then you won't learn much; but if you pay attention to something that really interests you and engages you, then you will clock up your study hours without even noticing them. If you don't enjoy tsumego, that might not be the best study method for you, even if that's what most people recommend. Or perhaps you might want to try easier problems (which is actually what the experts recommend the most, anyway), and you can enjoy the repeated pleasure of getting the right answer, both in study and in real games.

Can you get hold of commented games by Lee Sedol? I'm starting to think that playing over pro games is a two-edged sword - if you misinterpret them, it might even hold back your progress. With a decent commentary, you can at least learn what really was important.

[Mike]

There are some commented games of him, I know that much, but enough to keep me busy for more than a week or two? Not sure. He has obviously played in a lot of tournaments and those are the games that get commented most frequently, so, there's that, but I could not locate a "collection".

And yes, I do know about the 10,000 hours idea. I also know that studying "an hour per day" like many suggest, would lead to that 10,000 hours taking 27+ years to do. I believe it's 4.5 years even if you do 6 hours every single day. To me at least, 4.5 years seems far more reasonable than 27 and doing 1 hour per day to me would suggest no interest in ever reaching it.

I would drop tsumego and study only the things I like if I could know that it actually works like that. Have people reached any decent level of play without touching tsumego? I'm not sure that I can advance much further with my playstyle if I don't fix the gaping hole that is my lack of reading ability.. I agree with you that it should be something I enjoy to be effective, but even ineffective training of reading should be better than no training at all. That's how I see it at least.

EDIT: There appears to be a 3 book series written by Lee Sedol himself, where he talks about 9 important games in his professional career and all the meaning behind each move.. But it's not available in English as far as I can tell. Urge to add "Learn Korean" to my goals, rising x_x

[topazg]

Some thoughts



Biggest comment I can make is be more patient, and be willing to let your opponent have a few stones saved in exchange for giving you sente. Sente is really big, particularly in the early and middle parts of the game.

[Mike]

Thanks for the comments! Some of the things seem so obvious and I even momentarily thought about them, BUT.. During a game I'm a different person. I often cannot reasonably explain why I did what I did, when something else is so clearly superior. Then there were the clear reading mistakes, the connecting at F12 for one.. I tried reading out a way to connect but every time I started with the exchange already in place, assuming for some reason that it was necessary! I see now that it was just ajikeshi and blinded me from the correct answers. Ahh, well. If only I could keep a clear and level head during these games

[jts]

Have you considered treating moves like R6, O2, F13, etc. in the second game - moves that you seem to consider greedy, premature, and infuriating - as probes? The point of a probe is to play a forcing move and gain some aji to do something for later, although the opponent gets to choose what kind of aji you get. When you obstinately refuse to give him the sort of aji you think he's fishing for, then you just give him the other kind of aji, no? "My opponents play a lot of probes, and I have trouble answering them - for now" strikes me as a healthier attitude than "My opponents suck so bad, why do they beat half of the time?"

[Mike]

"My opponents suck so bad, why do they beat half of the time?"

Sounds very rude when you put it that way, but I guess that's the "between the lines" of what I said about my opponent

I know it's an attitude problem, but I'm not sure how to change my thinking. I can say that I won't care, but while playing, I will. I definitely will. Guess it'll take some time.

In other news, I felt really tired today, physically and mentally. I think my body is rejecting this change, again. It has a habit of doing that. Before I have given in to it too easily and let it win, but I'll weather through it this time and just keep going. You hear that, brains? Yeah, I'm not stopping. I know you want to be lazy and not study, but that ain't happening. I know I did it the last 72 times, but... I know I've given up on things days after starting, but.. OK SHUSH. I ain't quitting. No. Screw you brains. I'm not talking to you anymore. I never liked your antics anyway.

Uh, yeah. Well, I could not do the tsumego today as I was just fighting against falling asleep as it were. But I did play 4 blitz and interestingly enough I won all of them by quite the large margin. They were different from yesterday.. I still messed up a whole lot(tons), but somehow I was able to concentrate a little bit better and this time more of my attempts were succesful. Yesterday I felt panicked the whole game and couldn't make any moves work. Today I felt fine, most of the time. Some touch'n'go moments, but I guess I'm getting used to blitz.

Still going to soldier through 4 Lee Sedol games no matter how tired I may be

[Mike]

My interwebs were acting up earlier today when I was going to play my blitz games, I didn't want to start them and just lose because it decides to lag out on me. I did play 4 blitz games against my computer, but I'm not sure how useful that is. Sometimes it figures out some incredible killing sequences on groups that I was sure were alive, and then in the next game it plays 1 point gote as an answer to my absolute sente and throws away the game So I'll just hope my interwebs don't continue acting up, I'd rather play humans.

Later I played these 2 slow games though and they went Ok-ish.
All the comments are again in the SGF files themselves, I find it more convenient to do it that way while I review the games for learning purposes at the same time.





Still continuing on with the Lee Sedol games and liking them. At least the middle-game. Based on what I've seen so far, fuseki and joseki in the 1990s were horribly boring. They only play 4-4 and never pincer and the only occasion when they don't do 4-4 is when they mini-chinese. And the mini-chinese sequence from both players is always identical up to like move 30

Ah, well, the middle-game part is still very interesting and I'm sure once I work my way up to the 2000s the modern fuseki development will start to show up.

[Mike]

Oh boy. After winning my previous 4 blitz games easily and wondering what was up, today I lost all 4, HARD. By hard I mean I stood no chance at all. I got slaughtered. Killed. Destroyed. What the heck is this then >< How does one go from destroying people in 4 games to being the one getting destroyed in the next 4? Could it just be mood/feeling dependent? Ugh. I went through all 4 games and they were such a mess, I cannot justify most of my moves at all. My opponents were completely different style players as well, though, maybe it's that I cannot deal with that style? The 4 games I won was against overly aggressive people that left a lot of weaknesses and the lost games today were mainly huge territory from my opponent that I had to attempt to break down and ended up pretty much dying in the process every time.

Such is life. Ups and downs. Just gotta keep going.

Oh yeah, note to self. Learn 3-3 invasion variations. 2 Games went to the crapper after I messed up dealing with them.

[Mike]

Yesterday was not a good day. Looking back, I guess those 4 blitz losses were due to how I was feeling. Everything just went wrong and I ended up going to sleep early just so the whole day would be behind me. I skipped doing the 4 pro games in the evening because of that as well.

Today I will do 8 then. Not about to disappoint Mr. Sedol due to a bad day.

On that note.. I have actually made some changes to my check-list based on how I felt about doing it these past days. First change is that 2 hours of tsumego does my head in and it's going to get cut down to 30 minutes. If I find myself not thinking that 2 liters of coffee is the meaning of life after 30 minutes, then I'll incrementally add to it as time goes by. Secondly, I will play the 4 blitzes and 2 slower games on alternating days. I find that to be nice and not too stressful. 4 Lee Sedol games will remain as-is because it's fun and I feel no need to lower it.

I have started to do more reading in my own-game reviews to compensate for the lowered tsumego time as well.





Comments in the SGF files.

[Marcus]

In the first game, doesn't Move 134 at N19 form at least a ko (assuming Black plays Q19)?

Just an observation ... it might be foolhardy to start a ko up there ... I don't know.

[Mike]

Huh.. I actually did not consider that at all. I looked it over briefly, but decided I had no liberties to do anything, but now that I looked at it again.. Neither does he.

I wouldn't call it foolhardy as it is a huge ko where white takes first and the other option is to not get anything up there. Even if black wins it, I would at the very least get 1 free move as he does have to ignore SOMETHING to win it.

Nice find! Unless someone else can find something for black neither of us is seeing

[jts]

Huh.. I actually did not consider that at all. I looked it over briefly, but decided I had no liberties to do anything, but now that I looked at it again.. Neither does he.

I wouldn't call it foolhardy as it is a huge ko where white takes first and the other option is to not get anything up there. Even if black wins it, I would at the very least get 1 free move as he does have to ignore SOMETHING to win it.

Nice find! Unless someone else can find something for black neither of us is seeing

I think what Marcus is saying is that B has a local threat and there are no other real threats on the board, so it might be better to wait to make more threats. That said, if W ignores T14 he can then fight another, heavier ko for the T13 group, and this time he has a local threat (T15!) and B doesn't. B also has approach moves in the second ko. So if W starts the ko immediately, he should get the entire corner (60 pts?) in exchange for some pointless threat somewhere.