Life In 19x19

I am not very good at counting. I count slowly, and make mistakes. Actually, I find my quick estimations are normally fairly accurate.

In realtime games, I only count emotionally. "I feel about 20 points more sad than happy. I must be behind."

When I try to be careful, I'm too slow and make mistakes anyway.

I think one problem are the faster games. I prefer to play 10min & 30s/5 byo. and that is too less time to count. So I estimate, usually geometrically by comparing the shapes of moyos and territory plus the prisoners. Problem number two is the fact that we amateurs are too weak of players to count precisely, because what we might count as our or opponents points may turn out differently. I often had the case where I thought that this particular area is mine just to be disproved by my opponent .

Except for fast games, I try to always have an accurate up-to-date positional judgement, which, besides many other things, includes a territory / area count and an influence count as one essential basis for making good strategic planning.

RobertJasiek wrote:Except for fast games, I try to always have an accurate up-to-date positional judgement, which, besides many other things, includes a territory / area count and an influence count as one essential basis for making good strategic planning.

In what kind of time setting you are able to do that?

Well, on servers like Tygem I count...









...on the in-game SE to do it for me.

Pippen wrote:In what kind of time setting you are able to do that?

- 30'+, except for last few minutes
- 30'+ + byoyomi
- 1' + 5*30"+, as long as I still have 5*30"+
- for shorter time limits, it depends much on the game development (e.g., if I waste my time on LD, I can then lose it for judgement) and whether I am tired (during the night, I might simply be too tired for doing judgement)

I counted more a few years ago when I was more serious about trying to improve. I count several times in almost all tournament games (except for crazy life and death fighting).

In day to day games, I sometimes do and I sometimes don't, rarely more than once (I can count in games with 20:00 + 5x30). I do have a bad habit of only counting when the question is "resign, play the endgame as well as possible, or cruise to victory?" I know I should be counting when it's time to invade/reduce/play safe, but it's hard to motivate myself.

Oddly, I rarely count in turn based games until it's too late.

Yes, in games where I have the time. I am not so fast, though. I wonder if there are players who can count in, say, 30 seconds byoyomi by doing partial counts in each period and then adding them up. I.e., spend 4 periods counting, 1 quarter of the board each period, but actually play some move each period. I've tried this while watching games, but I find it hard as the count changes as players play. Of course, if I am watching other players, they may also be playing faster than 1 move per 30 seconds even when they have 30 seconds and that makes it harder.

I don't know if partial counting is an actual skill people try to develop or if they just not bother if they don't have the minimum amount of time to do a complete count before their next move.

It's been a while since I read Ogawa and Davies' "The Endgame" but I think there is a diagram where Ogawa says she can count some full board position in a few seconds. By twos. (At least I assume that's Ogawa's claim and not Davies'.) And I'm thinking...okay...I'm not cut out for this game. It was like learning that the standard for basketball players was to be able to jump nine miles into the air. Since then, I've seen some pros who are not that fast and some who just might be. I think Curtis Tang said one of the skills that he learned while studying at go school in China was how to count quickly.

Forget about partial counting, but learn incrementally updated counting etc. Counting can be slow, partial counting saves only 75% of the time, but incremental updates can save most of the time.

snorri wrote:It's been a while since I read Ogawa and Davies' "The Endgame" but I think there is a diagram where Ogawa says she can count some full board position in a few seconds. By twos. (At least I assume that's Ogawa's claim and not Davies'.) And I'm thinking...okay...I'm not cut out for this game. It was like learning that the standard for basketball players was to be able to jump nine miles into the air. Since then, I've seen some pros who are not that fast and some who just might be. I think Curtis Tang said one of the skills that he learned while studying at go school in China was how to count quickly.

It could be somewhat similar to chess and how pros just need a glance at the board to memorise it if strong players are playing. They effectively see shapes and large scale structures and can replicate the board position with far less time than one would need to memorise each piece's position individually. It's similar for go players early in a game if there's just four josekis on the board, they can replicate the board position without needing more than a few seconds to glance at the board. Equally if the pieces are placed randomly in either game or if very weak players are playing, strong players can't memorise the position that fast, or at all in go depending on how far into the game it is.

I suspect a lot of the counting speed of pros comes from them knowing the precise count many relatively common shapes give on the board reducing the amount of manual counting they have to do in a pro game by quite a substantial margin. But if you presented them with a 30k game I suspect they would be substantially slower giving you an accurate count if they could do it at all because as said earlier on the forum "too many stones will be in the wrong places."

I am able to estimate stuff near yose, if the difference is larger than 10pts.

Can you guys point out some counting techniques ?

There's not a lot of technique to it, just counting 1-2-3. Some people count in groups of 2 or 5 to make it faster. Depending on the point in the game, you can just drop imaginary boundaries from stones to the edge of the board, or you can try and figure out the average of yose if each side plays, which is more involved. One of the keys is to make sure that what you are counting is actually territory, though, and not a moyo that can still be invaded. This comes with experience, but generally 4th line stones do not secure territory against the edge unless there are third line stones backing them up or they are very very thick.

As Robert suggested, it's also good to not get a total count, but a count for each territory region, so that you just have to change the mental count for one region when something changes, and then add them up. Also, don't forget to add 2 for dead stones on the board (1 pt territory + 1 prisoner) and to add the komi to white's score. Don't try to get too accurate a count in the middle game, because things can change a great deal; Just estimating each group to a multiple of 5 is close enough, generally.

The advantage of counting in pairs is that a dead stone counts as one. The advantage of doing a full-board count is that you don't need to have more than one number in your memory at once.

skydyr wrote:There's not a lot of technique to it, just counting 1-2-3. [...] Just estimating each group to a multiple of 5 is close enough, generally.

You need to learn positional judgement from scratch. There is a lot of technique, and multiples of 0.5 are good enough.

bgrieco wrote:Can you guys point out some counting techniques ?

The topic has been mentioned a few times during the previous months.