Boidhre wrote:My concentration is improving a bit as my body adjusts to the lower dose of Trileptal. I played *really* badly last night, very passively, very unimaginatively, quite similar to how I play when depressed actually which I found interesting. This morning I was able to fit in an hour of tsumego without any concentration problems so I'm hopeful the worst of the concentration problems are over. Next week I drop to 300mg Trileptal and then two weeks later 0mg. It'll probably be fairly rough but hopefully not as bad as the drop from 1200mg to 600mg.
In go news, was working on problems from wBaduk this morning. They're quite interesting. I'm doing the pre-Intermediate Easy problems following the advice of doing many easy problems rather than few hard ones. I'll go back to Get Strong at Tesuji this evening, again working on the easier one and two star problems. I'll try and get some games in at some point too but this depends on my wife and the kids and all that.
My experience with Go problems is that the primary purpose is to infuse some good instincts into your first guesses and subsequent ideas. When I did get into doing them, the most effective method I had was taking a set of 100 problems, and give yourself 30 seconds for each. Then do another set the same way. Repeat those two sets for a whole week doing it the same way, and keep a track of how many you get right each time.
Then do a different pair of sets of the next week, and so on, and repeat the cycle in the next month. After 3 or 4 months, you should almost solve the problems simply by seeing them and knowing what to do - that's not quite learning by wrote, as there are enough different problems (there should be 800 or so in the first month alone) that you'll be recognising shapes, not problems.
There are all sorts of connections and funny 2-1 point style corner liberty tesujis that I rarely miss now because of this. Obviously, it won't help my fighting or strategic assessments, but my L+D and tesuji competence has gone up and, more importantly, stayed up.
I found labouring for a long time over difficult problems fairly fruitless (apart from the enjoyment of engaging deeply with a complicated puzzle), and would personally recommend against it. Even in the Japanese Insei school at the Nihon Ki-in, according to a certain 6d Finn that spent a few months there recently, they were typically given 20 problems and 20 minutes to solve them all - they were a step above the sort of thing I'd be trying to do in that time frame, but clearly the principles that applied were the same.
GoChild is excellent and well well worth becoming a member of : http://gochild2009.appspot.com/
This is not an easy question to answer, and there is a lot to learn about the strength of groups. In any event, you do not need to rework your approach to the game.