Life In 19x19

Knotwilg wrote:I know of no person who became great in his art by lurking around on the Internet. There are some truly exceptional people out there, who became absolutely fantastic at what they do. If we want to mimic them, coming here is one of the first things to stop doing.

True, nobody becomes great in their art by just lurking around the internet but they don't become great by just practicing either.

I know truly great musicians and they all say one of the most important things is to listen to a lot of music. They also read about music and musicians. They do much of this on the internet.

I've been lurking about this forum a lot and have absorbed all kinds of seemingly useful information. I haven't been able to put much of it to good use yet but it's in the back of my mind and will probably manifest itself at some time.

Knotwilg wrote:I know of no person who became great in his art by lurking around on the Internet. There are some truly exceptional people out there, who became absolutely fantastic at what they do. If we want to mimic them, coming here is one of the first things to stop doing.

Net addicts like us are far too sociable to become great players.

It's posts like this that make me spend most of my day thinking about them. No wonder it's so damn addictive.

On a side note, there is a forum member who dropped out of the forum because it was getting in the way of his go progress (until he discovered Malkovitch games) but his sociability was apparently not curbed and now he has got a pregnant wife. Who knows how that will affect his go?

daal wrote: On a side note, there is a forum member who dropped out of the forum because it was getting in the way of his go progress (until he discovered Malkovitch games) but his sociability was apparently not curbed and now he has got a pregnant wife. Who knows how that will affect his go?

I like what you're suggesting here - internet forums as contraceptive? I think we can add a whole new dimension to abstinence-only sex ed...

swatters wrote:True, nobody becomes great in their art by just lurking around the internet but they don't become great by just practicing either.

Well, if lurking is at all beneficial, I believe it pales in comparison to practice.

swatters wrote:I know truly great musicians and they all say one of the most important things is to listen to a lot of music. They also read about music and musicians. They do much of this on the internet.

I'm sure they do. I'm less sure they need to do. Even great people waste their time.

Of course I'm exaggerating here and I do see the benefit of being social, even for sheer progress. The Internet is full of useful content, but ...

swatters wrote:I've been lurking about this forum a lot and have absorbed all kinds of seemingly useful information. I haven't been able to put much of it to good use yet but it's in the back of my mind and will probably manifest itself at some time.

... I'm afraid many students of any skill use this as a pretext for avoiding real work. Net addicts like myself are professional absorbers of information. Putting it into practice requires a lot of discipline. Most of that discipline involves avoiding to absorb even more.

OK, I'll admit I'm spoiling the fun. The question was: is studying memorizing pro games the best (most efficient) way to improve. Myself, I think not. In order of importance:
Play (!), Review (own games), New ideas (books, lurk), Tsumego.

Personally I prefer studying commented games rather than just memorizing a set of pro games. The commentaries usually give a lot of insights into what the pros are thinking about. Especially valuable are the variations a pro considers prior to making a difficult choice of move. I just don't have the reading power to see through the ideas behind the great moves and plain memorization does not take into account the particular situation. So it could backfire if I were to try out some pro sequence with little knowledge other than that a pro had played this way in a game I memorized earlier.

tchan001 wrote:Personally I prefer studying commented games rather than just memorizing a set of pro games. The commentaries usually give a lot of insights into what the pros are thinking about. Especially valuable are the variations a pro considers prior to making a difficult choice of move. I just don't have the reading power to see through the ideas behind the great moves and plain memorization does not take into account the particular situation. So it could backfire if I were to try out some pro sequence with little knowledge other than that a pro had played this way in a game I memorized earlier.

I honestly don't know if memorizing is of any use for improvement but if it is, then I believe it has little to do with rational reasoning of moves.

During the process of memorization, what really happens is that you subconsciously learn shapes, sequences and maybe a feel of direction. You are less concerned about the rational reasons why a certain deviation from the sequence gives worse results. You just internalize good patterns (without knowing why the others are bad). It's a totally different learning philosophy.

An analogy could be made to two different methods of learning a language. In one method you emphasize learning grammer (like studying variations of commented games and understanding why certain moves are played), in the other one you just learn patterns by repetition (more like a child learning the language).

Therefore studying pro games with commentary is a kind of study more similar to a joseki study or a tsumego study, while memorizing pro games is a completely different method.

That's how I understand it (without being sure of course). I got this impression especially from the words of a pro which was something like "by memorizing pro games, not your mind but your hands learn to find the correct move".