Life In 19x19

Posted: **Wed Aug 29, 2012 6:51 am**

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/

Posted: **Wed Aug 29, 2012 10:57 am**

Hmm, gochild attracted my boy's attention and he ended up doing 100 problems and playing his first game of 19x19. Fun. I just wish I was in a better position to teach him about go. I'm not even sure if 9 stone games are a good idea, maybe he'd appreciate territory more if he had to stake it out for himself from the start of the game? I don't know.

Posted: **Wed Aug 29, 2012 11:07 am**

Unless he's an incredible prodigy, I doubt you need to teach him much more than he'll pick up by playing handicap games with you. By the time he beats you down to a small handicap, he'll probably be something of a reader.

Posted: **Wed Aug 29, 2012 12:03 pm**

jts wrote:Unless he's an incredible prodigy, I doubt you need to teach him much more than he'll pick up by playing handicap games with you. By the time he beats you down to a small handicap, he'll probably be something of a reader.

Good point.

Posted: **Wed Aug 29, 2012 3:12 pm**

Reading and seeing. This is something Bill has brought up a couple of times, and I'm finding it to be very true in my games. I don't read out a lot of "good" moves, I just see them. I usually try to read them out to verify them just in case my pattern recognition is slightly wrong and I'm missing an atari somewhere or something but as I did problems today I found it again to be very true. I just saw answers normally, reading came second for nearly all of the problems. I need to practice my reading more, I find myself too often just answering problems on pattern recognition autopilot and not reading them out like I think I should be doing. This is something I need to watch in myself I think, I need practice reading, I know this.

Posted: **Thu Aug 30, 2012 1:48 pm**

Game versus a (rusty) 4k KGS friend:

Posted: **Thu Aug 30, 2012 3:51 pm**

Actually, better, a loss to a 7k friend.

Tough game, I found myself without much of a plan in the midgame other than stop him turning the centre into one big territory. The result in the top left was very favourable to white too I think.

Posted: **Thu Aug 30, 2012 4:55 pm**

Boidhre wrote:Actually, better, a loss to a 7k friend.

http://lifein19x19.com/forum/download/file.php?id=2009

Tough game, I found myself without much of a plan in the midgame other than stop him turning the centre into one big territory. The result in the top left was very favourable to white too I think.

The result in the top left was very favorable to Black.

Make multi-purpose moves.

Attack weak groups.

Posted: **Thu Aug 30, 2012 5:03 pm**

Thank you Bill, exactly the kind of analysis I needed. My passive streak is becoming a serious problem for me. As is my inability to judge a local position correctly.

Posted: **Thu Aug 30, 2012 5:36 pm**

Some more comments.

Posted: **Thu Aug 30, 2012 5:39 pm**

Actually, as an aside before bed: Playing passively is probably my single biggest problem at the moment. I think so myself when I look over games and have been told it by strong players. The issue is I don't even notice it, it's so engrained into my play. So I wonder why, I think partly it's personality, I'm a pretty passive person in general and partly it's due to habits picked up when playing while depressed, which might actually explain why I'm so passive as a person to be honest. What to do about this? One strong player suggested to me that I try out being very aggressive for a few games, just to try and break the habits and get used to attacking. I look at my groups coming out of the opening and well, they're secure, probably too secure. Is this a problem? I'm not strong enough to know really, but I look at games played by much stronger players and they play a lot more loosely in the opening. Is this a question of style or am I doing something fundamentally wrong here? This is a question I'd dearly like an answer to because if it is the latter then I need to rework my entire approach to the game.

So anyway, some goals for my next few games:

Be proactive not reactive.
Be aggressive not passive, invite the fight onto myself.

I think just focusing on these two things might help me more than any amount of problem solving, reading or just grinding out games would do. Now, the hard part will be actually doing it and breaking the bad habits engrained over the past few months.

Posted: **Thu Aug 30, 2012 5:43 pm**

Thank you again for the review Bill.

Posted: **Thu Aug 30, 2012 6:04 pm**

Boidhre wrote:Actually, as an aside before bed: Playing passively is probably my single biggest problem at the moment. I think so myself when I look over games and have been told it by strong players. The issue is I don't even notice it, it's so engrained into my play.

You play less passively than probably most players at your level.

What to do about this? One strong player suggested to me that I try out being very aggressive for a few games, just to try and break the habits and get used to attacking.

You might give that a try.

Another idea is to try to play multi-purpose moves. Note that a number of my suggestions are not very aggressive. That is, they are not very strong attacks, but they accomplish something else at the same time. You can play multi-purpose moves, regardless of your mood.

I look at my groups coming out of the opening and well, they're secure, probably too secure. Is this a problem?

Not necessarily.

I'm not strong enough to know really,

Welcome to the club.

but I look at games played by much stronger players and they play a lot more loosely in the opening. Is this a question of style or am I doing something fundamentally wrong here? This is a question I'd dearly like an answer to because if it is the latter then I need to rework my entire approach to the game.

You play more passively than you used to. Perhaps that was because you did not recognize the danger before.

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.

Posted: **Thu Aug 30, 2012 6:37 pm**

Do you know what's even more bizarre? The games I enjoy most are the ones with weak groups being chased and with running fights! Yet somehow I engineer things so there aren't such games. The mind is a funny, funny thing at times.

Posted: **Sat Sep 01, 2012 4:52 pm**

Got mauled in an even game tonight in Kaya's ASR league but I learned a nice bit I think. AS you can see my guesstimation method of counting sucks. All I knew was that I was losing by *a lot* and took a stab at around 40. Oh how wrong I was.

Edit: My opponent made a good point afterwards, I was spending too much time thinking of my own groups and not about his groups. Which I think is quite true in my general play.

Life In 19x19

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