Life In 19x19

The Snapback Rocket is too slow to hit the fast moving bomber, which has already put black's A4 group in atari.

Indeed, only just in time!

I finally won my first even game as black, so I thought I'd review it. It was a pretty weird game because after the first few opening moves, white just continued to make weak group after weak group. I think they were overplays, but they resulted in some interesting fights, and it was good practice because identifying an overplay and profiting from it are two very different things.

I think you're starting to understand what the most important thing in go is. But just in case, let me clarify. Reading is the MOST important aspect of go and pretty much determines your strength. I noticed in your earlier posts that you said you needed help in joseki, endgame, ect. However, what you should focus on is Tesuji and Life & Death problems. Even if you're opponent has huge lead in the opening, with a strong reading ability you can still crush them.

Responding to your first post, I believe the reason people make gains after a break is because they learn to forget the principles previously studied and internalize them through trial and error. After attempting the principles through trial and error, you learn when to use the principles and more often then not you don't even think abut it. It just seems to come to you. Although principles are important, I believe by problems/trial and error are the most effective way to learn go. This is my theory of how professionals get strong fast. They do loads of problems and through trial and error then they learn when to apply principles they may have never studied specifically. Go reminds me of math. You don't get good at math by reading how to do the problem (although this can be very helpful to some), but by doing problems you get better and better.

Here's a review of your game, but take it with a grain of salt since I"m a just shodan and not that muh stronger than you.
7: Should be t K3 because even your opponent played L3 you still have a two space extension.
15: Good! But I think if you played the forcing move at O7 first it would be a more aggressive attack.
23: I think you should tenuki. A corner enclosure at P16 would be pretty big.
53: I like G17 better. Your group doesn't have a base and it's harder to pincer.
Overall good game. Your opponent made some bad moves and you took advantage of them well.

Thanks for the comments Christian, I think you may be right about how taking a long break forced me to stop relying on learned theory and start making moves based on experience. Although my rank hasn't really changed much, I feel like I have a much better understanding of the game than I did previously, and I think that's mainly down to the fact that I've learned to rely more on my own judgement instead of blindly following joseki or adhering to principles. I've made mistakes because of that, but now I understand why they are mistakes, which I never did before.

7: Should be t K3 because even your opponent played L3 you still have a two space extension.

You might be right, but I felt that move at L3 wouldn't strictly need a reply after H3, and if I did decide to reply, extending towards the center looks satisfying in this situation. I also wanted it to be useful against a white invasion in the Q5 area, and L3 seems like the correct distance for that. If White hadn't enclosed the bottom left I would have wanted to play further out to support a possible approach move later, but since that wasn't really an option I wanted to focus on the right side.

53: I like G17 better. Your group doesn't have a base and it's harder to pincer.

This is the only comment I really can't agree with. Black doesn't have a base, but is thick and well connected, while attacking the corner and attacking the pincer stone seem like miai for F17. I think the best white could hope for is to live small with the cutting stone after defending the corner, but even that seems optimistic.

Woops you are totally right about move 53. My mistake I only briefly looked at the top of the board and didn't see it connected to your group on the right. My mistake I apologize.

K3 is better because if your opponent played H3 you can play Q5 or R5. I would favor Q5 because the high corner enclosure puts more pressure on the stone if it invaded at M3. And if he doesnt you could jump up at K5 which would be the ideal situation.

That does sound good. K3 is definitely starting to look better than L3 now, but I think it's something I need to experiment with to really understand. Thanks for the help.

Christien wrote:Responding to your first post, I believe the reason people make gains after a break is because they learn to forget the principles previously studied and internalize them through trial and error. After attempting the principles through trial and error, you learn when to use the principles and more often then not you don't even think abut it. It just seems to come to you. Although principles are important, I believe by problems/trial and error are the most effective way to learn go. This is my theory of how professionals get strong fast. They do loads of problems and through trial and error then they learn when to apply principles they may have never studied specifically. Go reminds me of math. You don't get good at math by reading how to do the problem (although this can be very helpful to some), but by doing problems you get better and better.

This is so intriguing that I cannot refrain from entering here.

I agree that reading strength is absolutely crucial, and there`s no doubt that pros can read far more deeply and broadly than ordinary amateurs. But I think you`re a bit offbase about principles. One mistake I have made and have seen other people make is to be too general-minded about principles, i.e., to think that "one size fits all". Reading through some of the MyCom books (a rather good range of mid-to-advanced texts by Japanese pros), I`m starting to see that many principles need to be applied in a very specific way.

For example, supposing you want to make the opponent`s 3-4 corner to prevent a shimari. Everybody knows that this is a good idea, on principle. But would you know when to play a low, one-space approach? Or when to play a high, one-space approach? Or when to hang back a little and use a high or low two-space approach? The answer would depend on the opposing corner and other factors. Ishida Yoshio explains some of the differences in meaning between these methods of approaching, in アマの知らない布石・絶対の急所 (The Absolutely Vital Points of Fuseki that the Amateurs Don`t Know). You could try to discover these differences through trial and error, or you could take a piggyback ride on a Honinbo`s shoulders.

The point I`m trying to make is that there`s principles (the proverbs and other sayings) and then there are thousands upon thousands of specific situations, but that`s not all. There are many "meta-principles" that apply only to limited situations, but which you have to get to know about. Getting to know all of these special situations takes a lot of effort. In other words, there is a time in every player`s life when they realise that re-reading Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go is not going to yield a noticeable benefit anymore, and that they`re going to have to start reading something...chewier.

It`s kind of painful, but sort of obvious really, to realise that neither adhering to the proverbs nor super-charging your reading alone is going to do the job. There`s a lot of extra knowledge that needs to be obtained, but which can only be found in "high protein" sources like detailed pro commentaries, hard-but-exhaustive dictionaries and the like.

As for your remark about people benefitting from breaks. I agree with this, but not for the reason you state. It`s not that people forget what they learn, but rather they assimiliate it into what they already know. It's like when you learn a new word as a child, and you use it all the time, but eventually you learn to use it appropriately. The psychologists call the process "relational memory", and it`s basically the bridge between acquiring something new and completing its installation. You learn skills, practice them and even walk away from them for a long time, but even while you`re unaware of it your brain makes connections and prunes bad connections. It seems almost like a magical process, but you know the experience of learning something with great difficulty and self-consciousness one day, getting fed up with and leaving it alone for a while, and then coming back to it another day to discover it`s somehow become much easier.

It all boils down to this: keep trying to learn new things, keep practicing with real games, and be patient, because it takes time.

Interesting post Tami, I'm sorry I missed it earlier. I agree that go proverbs etc can be useful, but your point about how you have to learn to apply them properly is why I think forgetting them can also sometimes be useful. When I took up go again I found that a lot of the habits from my former life had survived, but now I have to consider these moves in terms of how they affect the board because I can't just say "this is Joseki" or "hane on the outside", or whatever. Of course, I should have been doing that anyway, but forgetting my previous justifications made it much easier to reassess what I was doing.

Your point about breaks being useful for consolidating what you've learned is interesting, but I think it really depends on the length of the break you take. In my case I'm pretty confident that there was more degradation than consolidation taking place.

Tengen: My new playing style

I remember reading somewhere that komi is almost irrelevant to most kyu (or was it amatuer) players because their games are won or lost on a much larger scale due to mistakes in fighting. This seems pretty true of my games, and it got me thinking. Apart from the obvious stuff about how I need to learn to fight better, and to pick my fights better, it also made me reconsider what I should value when playing.

It seems to me that if the games are going to be decided by who wins the fights, rather than who is ahead on territory (except at the very end), I should be placing more emphasis on creating fights that favour me, and less on maintaining a territorial lead. With that in mind, I've decided to start opening with Tengen (possibly with either colour), because a stone that can be useful in fights that take place anywhere on the board now seems more valuable than taking a corner.

It may be a terrible idea, but I managed to end the losing streak I was on and have won both the tengen games I've played so far, so at least I've gotten off to an auspicious start.

Tengen: Results and impressions

.............Wins..-..Losses

As Black......6....-....1
As White......1....-... 2
Total.........7....-....3

Ten games is too small a sample to get any meaningful data, but this is still a good result, and more importantly, I think I got a pretty good feel for what it's like to play with Tengen. I'm ready to move on to something else now, but I like playing Tengen so I'll definitely be coming back to it.

There's also a lot of food for thought here, enough that I'm not really sure how to write it all without it turning in to an incoherent mess, but I'll have a go. ^^

General thoughts about Tengen

I think my idea about tengen being worth more than a corner because it can be useful in multiple fights was correct to a certain extent, but was also a little naive. It's generally quite easy to start a fight in which the center stone is useful, and if you start multiple fights it will end up working far harder than a single corner stone, but conversely, you have to keep starting fights in order to get value from it. I don't think you can afford not to make use of it, because if you don't you've effectively passed with your first move. That's worse than a simple reversal of colours because komi stays the same. Your effectively playing a reverse komi game, which means that you have to make the tengen stone do at least 13 points (komi of 6.5 + first move worth 6.5) of work in order to justify it. I assume I'm like most kyu players in that I rarely even think about komi, but starting the game 13 points behind is intimidating.

I remember a quote (which I'm paraphrasing and translating from a vague memory, so take it with a grain of salt) from Hikaru no Go :

"If the center stones comes in to play, black wins, if it doesn't, white wins"

At the time I thought that was either a huge exaggeration to make the anime more exciting, or might possibly be true at the top levels where games are regularly won or lost by a few points. After thinking about it some more though, I think it's almost certainly true for pro's, likely true for strong amatuers, and still only a slight exaggeration at SDK levels.

But is that really a problem? Didn't I just say it's easy to start fights that make use of the center stone? Unfortunately, it's not enough just to start fights, you have to make sure your starting fights that are in your favour, and that's a lot harder. It's no good saying "this ridiculously optimistic overplay would have been even worse if I didn't have a stone on tengen, so I'm getting good value out of playing there." A lot of my recent playing has been like that; I just start fights whenever I get the opportunity, and though that seems to work well against 4-6kyus, I don't think I would get away with it at higher levels so I can't say it's easy to make use of the center stone. Actually, maybe I should say that it's not easy to make good use of a stone on tengen.

One thing that did surprise me about crazy tengen fighting games is how often they were much closer than my normal games. Here are some stats from my October games list:

......................Tengen...-...Normal
Total games.............10.....-....12
Went to counting........3......-....3

Scores

Game 1..................4.5....-....22.5
Game 2..................3.5....-....19.5
Game 3..................5.5....-....11.5

Why I won when I won and why I lost when I lost:

On the surface, it just came down to fighting. Almost every game was decided by who made the most (or biggest) tactical mistakes, but as you might guess from the stats above, there weren't as many all or nothing fights as I expected. In fact, I think I won a lot of games simply because I my opponents gave up after losing a big group even though the game was still up for grabs. I don't like to admit it but my win ratio may be more a reflection of my opponents' ability to calmly assess the situation than of the quality of my go.

One thing that happened in a few of my games was that thanks to the stone at tengen, I found myself in situations where even if a weak group died, I could still get a result I was happy with because my other stones connected in the center and gave me great influence over the rest of the board. If I could recreate this situation deliberately it would make tengen a very powerful move.

Another thing worth mentioning is that I suspect the kind of opponents I had difficulty with were the same ones I used to find the easiest to play against. When I first came back to go I decided that the style of go I wanted to play was a solid style that gave me a good base from which to attack my opponent and/or punish them for attacking me (somewhat like the one skydyr describes in the intro to his study journal, the willow way). After getting some practice on Tygem I found that the easiest opponents to play against were those that liked to constantly start fights, because my solid moves always payed off against them. I haven't yet played tengen against someone like that, but the first Tengen game I lost was against a 7k that consistently outfought me throughout the game. I don't mean I couldn't overcome the handicap because she played better than your average 7k; I mean she played better than I did. It's possible I messed up because my neighbours were watching baseball, but if she's two stones weaker and better at fighting than me, it seems reasonable to assume that she's one of those fighting players that I used to find easy to beat.

Rather than dismiss this as a rock paper scissors situation, I think it's more useful to consider the possibility that an opponent with good reading was punishing me for starting fights that weren't in my favour. It's also important to try and apply what I learnt about solid play when playing a moyo game. Maybe not when sketching out my moyo, but definitely when dealing with the planned for invasions. Maybe a good way to profit from the tengen is not to start fights, but rather to threaten fights that would be in my favour, and so force my opponent to back down. It's unlikely to result in such big payoffs, but Keep doing that throughout the game and it's easy to imagine that the tengen will eventually make back it's cost.

How to play against tengen:

I haven't yet had a game against tengen, so this is pure speculation, but on of the things that I worried would be difficult to deal with was an opponent attacking the center stone directly. This worried me because it's pretty much guaranteed to result in something like this.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$c This is a label for the diagram.
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . 6 . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . 2 3 7 . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . 5 1 4 . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . 8 . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

As far as I can tell this is an equal result, which means black's choice to play in centre has yielded nothing. That doesn't matter if white does it as when the rest of the board is empty, or when you both have two corners; the game basically just goes back to normal, except there's some stones in the middle of the board. The problem is what if white waits until all the big opening moves have been played and then approaches the center? Black has already payed the price for playing tengen, but white's approach means he hasn't really gotten anything out of it. I think a properly timed approach to the center stone could be devastating when playing against tengen. It reminds me a bit of a 3-3 invasion, except I can't see a way to defend a tengen stone.

What I learned that can apply to any game:

- It helped break my bad habit of approaching 4-4 stones and then making a 3-3 invasion regardless of what my opponent played.
- How to catch up by starting fights.
- Losing a fight isn't always as big as it seems.

A note to beginners: The point of playing tengen

I doubt any of you read this far, but I seem to remember I used to play tengen a lot as a beginner and completely misunderstood what it was for. (I think) It is:

- A ladder breaker
- Somewhere to run to if you have a weak group
- Somewhere to chase your opponent to if they have a weak group
- Useful for reducing your opponent's moyo
- Useful for creating your own moyo

It does not:

- Claim the middle as territory

Thanks to anyone who actually read this.

There is a book about playing tengen by Yamashita Keigo that is interesting. It has chapters covering tengen played first hundreds of years ago, during shin fuseki period, used for manego and finally Yamashita's own days of experimenting with tengen. However, he no longer uses it, so he must feel it was disadvantageous.

It will probably never be translated which is unfortunate.

Thanks Oren, I'll look in to it.

I think playing blitz games might have had a negative effect on my playing so I've decided to stop playing them regularly. To try and undo some of the damage I'm going to play and analyse a bunch of slow games. Here's the first of those.

http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewto ... f=4&t=7003

I just moved up to 4k!

The comments I received on the game I posted were really helpful and I'm sure they're the reason I moved up. I never thought reviewing a single game would make so much difference.

P.s. I really like the rating system on KGS. Making me win consistently to move up means I feel like I've actually earned my rank.