Life In 19x19

Hey everyone, I just got into go and played my first couple games and I have to say, i'm struggling. I've lost all 3 games I've played so far by resignation after losing pretty big clusters of stones in fights and it just seems like I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to aggressive plays. I'm just wondering what would be the best way to improve? I just feel like if I keep blindly playing and losing I won't learn much. Where should I go from here?

Hi dkuro,

Welcome to Go.

As you'll see from the replies that follow,
you'll probably hear 10 different opinions from 10 different people.

If you have not finished 100 games yet,
I strongly recommend you do so as quickly as your time allows you.
The board size does not matter much; you can complete more games on the smaller boards like 9x9, 13x13, etc.

I remember as a raw beginner, I found the 19x19 quite daunting at first.
But if you enjoy the 19x19, go for it.

There are websites and books available for beginners like yourself.

You may enjoy The Second Book of Go by Richard Bozulich.

If you stick around long enough, you'll quickly find out
Go is extremely deep. And it requires a lot of patience and hard work --
if you want to improve.

Generally speaking, the younger you are when you start Go,
the better and faster your growth curve will appear.

The "best" way to improve depends on your environment --
example: your age (again), time, tuition, hard work, availability of helpful people, etc.

Generally speaking again, even for the most exceptional cases,
Go is a very long journey.

The first ten games you will be constantly confused and surprised by everything.
The first 50 games, you will start to see a pattern.
After that you gradually start to hold your own.

Don't dwell too much on individual games. The first few will be awful.

Now, if you want to do some training, too, there's the wonderful world of tsumego.

The most popular English language books I know of are the Level Up! series (if you've just started out, the first two books are more than enough) and an enduring staple is Graded Go Problems for Beginners (the first one has plenty to chew on, but there's three more in the series which are each a lot harder than the previous one).

There are phone apps too, but I don't really know which one to recommend. I know some of them have beginner problems in them. If you feel a bit unclear on some of the rules, http://playgo.to/iwtg/en/ is pretty nice. It only shows the bare basics, though.

There's really no rush. Just keep in mind that it's normal to have trouble at first. As you keep playing, you will build up a mental inventory of potentially good moves to choose from. It's a rough start, but it gets a lot better.

Finish your 10 games then ask around or watch some other stronger plays.

Now play your 100 games

After that start studying theory, tsumego, and play 1000 games

After that you should be around 1 dan level, and then you should already know what to do.

But guess what? Now you got to play 10000 games :O

Wait... this has no ending!

You are dooooomed!

EdLee wrote:You may enjoy The Second Book of Go by Richard Bozulich.

I definitely did, at the point where the OP is now.

Parts of it were a little beyond me, but the majority was immediately helpful, especially with the feeling of bewilderment having no idea at all where to play next on a mostly-empty board!

You are experiencing what every new play does.

Imagine you are suddenly transplanted to a country where you do not speak the language. You would feel totally lost. After a few days you start to recognize a few words. After a few weeks you even start to recognize a few phrases. But it takes months before you can understand a whole sentence and a year before you are confident in your communication skills.

It is the same with go. But don't stop. Your familiarity will slowly increase and after 100 or so games you will start to seem patterns. After another 100 you will start to be able to understand what is going on.

Place those 200 games quickly and you will be like the person in the strange land who can finally communicate.

dkuro wrote:I'm just wondering what would be the best way to improve? I just feel like if I keep blindly playing and losing I won't learn much.

As a raw beginner, you are in the fortunate position that you learn from every game. Consider a baby learning to talk. If she knew that she had to learn complicated grammatical rules and a vocabulary of 50,000 or more words, she might lose heart. But she just listens, tries to talk, and learns a hell of a lot very quickly.

Play and learn. Go over your games afterwards, preferably with your opponent.

Welcome to the wonderful world of go!

I suspect, as most beginners, you were taught the first rule about surrounding to capture. The thing is, capturing is not the goal of the game. And more importantly, since each player takes turns, it becomes really difficult, if not impossible to capture your opponent's stones (without losing yours first).

Think of your first few stones, as fence posts. Then try to keep your fences connected as you surround open land. Your opponent will try to spoil your plans and break up your fences as he tries to keep his own fences connected. You have to be clever and outsmart him keeping him disconnected first.

Be careful of your weak fences. Keep them mended. Watch for holes in your opponent's fence and keep pushing on them. If you can repair your fence at the same time you poke holes in his, then you'll be able to gain an advantage quicker.

The goal, of course, is to surround and control more open area than your opponent. When your fences are strong, don't keep filling in your land with useless and unnecessary fence posts. It takes away from your own open land.

Hey all, thanks for the advice. I've just been playing games since then but it gets frustrating because I keep getting destroyed. My games usually end up getting into a local fight that spreads across the board upon which some big group of mine gets isolated amid the chaos and dies which forces me to resign. Do you think it would help at all if I studied some pro games? I feel like my opening game is where it starts to go down hill so I think i'm gonna study different variations of openings

dkuro wrote:Hey all, thanks for the advice. I've just been playing games since then but it gets frustrating because I keep getting destroyed.

Go has a good handicapping system such that each side wins about 50% of the time. You do not have to get slaughtered all the time. The handicap is basically letting Black play more than one stone on his first move.

Since you are a beginner and learning rapidly, the handicap should change frequently.

Good luck!

If you see a group go down again, just abandon it. Try to avoid making the loss so big. Playing more stones into a bad situation usually just helps your opponent.

If you don't see how to fix something, at least stop spending on it. Sometimes you just have to take the loss and try somewhere else.

dkuro wrote:Hey all, thanks for the advice. I've just been playing games since then but it gets frustrating because I keep getting destroyed. My games usually end up getting into a local fight that spreads across the board upon which some big group of mine gets isolated amid the chaos and dies which forces me to resign. Do you think it would help at all if I studied some pro games? I feel like my opening game is where it starts to go down hill so I think i'm gonna study different variations of openings

No, not yet. Log onto one of the real time go servers and watch the games of people who are about five to nine stones stronger than you and see what they do.

DrStraw wrote:

dkuro wrote:Hey all, thanks for the advice. I've just been playing games since then but it gets frustrating because I keep getting destroyed. My games usually end up getting into a local fight that spreads across the board upon which some big group of mine gets isolated amid the chaos and dies which forces me to resign. Do you think it would help at all if I studied some pro games? I feel like my opening game is where it starts to go down hill so I think i'm gonna study different variations of openings

No, not yet. Log onto one of the real time go servers and watch the games of people who are about five to nine stones stronger than you and see what they do.

yeah, I think studying pro games at any level is always helpful. You can begin to get a feel for the flow of the game just by replying the games.

xed_over wrote:

DrStraw wrote: No, not yet. Log onto one of the real time go servers and watch the games of people who are about five to nine stones stronger than you and see what they do.

yeah, I think studying pro games at any level is always helpful. You can begin to get a feel for the flow of the game just by replying the games.

He said he had only played two games. Watching people closer to his own strength is much more useful.

dkuro wrote:Do you think it would help at all if I studied some pro games?

It can't hurt.

At this stage in your go career, just playing over pro games at 4 or 5 sec. per move can be inspiring, and can give you ideas.