Hello everyone!
Another study journal. Been dabbling with Go for a while and I'm interested in learning more and getting stronger, so I'm here looking for help as well as provide some commentary on progress, which might help or motivate other struggling players.
WHO I AM
As for my background: I'm 33, self-employed, soon to be a dad (growing the next generation of Go players, right?), and live in Dortmund, Germany.
So far I've played about 15 games on the 19x19 board, on various servers and some against AI, and lost all but two of them. I've read Janice Kim's books up to volume 4, although I feel like I need to re-read them several times and the content doesn't stick as much as I would like it to (besides some of it being over my head). I've also watched a bunch of Youtube videos by the most popular uploaders/streamers.
ABOUT MY CURRENT PLAY
There are some things that have been holding me back:
1. I find it hard to find blocks of uninterrupted in my day. This makes it hard to find blocks of time to play proper live games. Correspondence games don't interest me as much. I need to establish more of a routine there and organize myself better. To some extent, I hope to be able to do just this with my study journal thread.
2. Winning doesn't excite me as much as losing demoralizes me. For some reasons, I seem to be very averse to losing and making mistakes. It makes me feel dumb and anxious, because I feel like I'm doing something wrong. It's a hard thing to do for me, but I need to remind myself that I'm not doing something wrong by losing, making mistakes and being a weak low-ranked player, but that I'm doing something right by applying myself, trying to improve and learning. Takes a lot of effort.
3. Good games typically consist of interesting and meaningful choices. Interesting usually means significantly differing consequences to choices, while meaningful means significantly differing choices, which result in these consequences. I feel like Go is exactly that, but due to my low skill and its steep learning curve I have neither the experience or reading ability to understand what intermediate consequences are triggered by my choices, nor how my stone placement choices really differ from each other on that large 19x19 field. I guess there's nothing here that can be done but being patient and studying and playing.
4. I get easily flustered and anxious when playing, especially when I'm being approached. The above figures into that as I feel like I don't know what I'm doing and what I need to do. Despite that reaction, I need to try and play, play, play. I know, 100 games and all.
5. I'm mediocre at pattern recognition and very, very weak at visualization. I understand that learning Go needs patience, if alone for the fact that all the practice and experience needs to rewire the brain, but I guess this could introduce a hard limit to how good of a player I can become. Nevermind, I'll try to become as good as I can and use it to strengthen those areas.
WHAT I NEED
If you would like to help me improve, there are two things I would ask:
1. Review my games. When I post them. But instead of commenting every move in a granular way, just look over them and, if possible, tell me what seems big or urgent in a conceptual way, illustrated by one or two examples from the actual game. There are a lot of things see in my play that needs to be improved, so I'm going to have specific questions regarding my play, local and global outcomes, and unintended consequences.
2. Play games with me. I typically work from about 5pm (CET) on, and have quite a bit of downtime there, where I could play, but it's not uninterrupted. so I need to accommodate an occasional e-Mail, phone call or other minor issues. Would anyone be willing to play games with long time controls without actually looking to use the full time, instead using it as a buffer whenever I need to turn my attention towards other things? I can be found on KGS, Tygem and OGS as Pandazilla. I also wouldn't mind scheduling games. Depending on the day I might be able to do that as early as 10am.
SEE YOU NEXT TIME
So much for the wall of text introduction. I was hesitant about posting this much (or at all really), but I figured some members might share my struggles and perhaps could find something to benefit from in here. I don't know how regularly I'm going to be able to update this thread, but I'll try to contribute as often as I can.
That's it for now. Thank you for your attention!
). 