Life In 19x19

Hello everyone! My name is Bjørn and I'm from Denmark. I have been hovering around 2D on KGS for the last year or so, mainly because I have had a rather big break from the game. Sometimes I'd come back to play a game or two, but then there'd be weeks between the games where I forgot about go.

My passion for the game has been reignited! And as such, I will try to emulate my previous rapid improvement that I experienced as a complete beginner to 1d on KGS (it took me only a year).
Before I unveil my uber incredible plan for epic improvement (which anybody can follow with me!), I will try to talk about my current go strength. It's hard to say definitely in terms of ranks, as online systems all differ from eachother and change overtime (KGS got stronger, Tygem got slightly stronger, IGS got weaker). Yesterday I made an account as IGS 4d and was surprised to win all my games. I played a 6d on 2h and beat him before the 100th move rather easily and found the 3-4dans much more tame and easily dealt with than tygem 4d. But enough about that, let's get into my study plan!

Inspiration

Summary: Tsumego is by far the most important thing for improvement in the low-mid dan ranks, but you can't just do them any old way. They used to say practice makes perfect, but that has been changed to perfect practice makes perfect! So do tsumego the right way. Read out all the variations. Don't read 1-2 variations that seem right and then look at the answer. In other words, don't be lazy! Use the problems as reading practice. The goal is not to solve the problems, but to read out all the variations. Find out why moves don't work and why they do and make sure to find all of white's strongest resistance moves and the refutations to those moves.

https://forums.online-go.com/t/repost-t ... t-hard/789

http://senseis.xmp.net/?BenjaminTeuber/ ... comeStrong

The Uber Plan

It will consist mainly of grinding problems and playing games. I won't specify a daily/weekly goal, but I want to study tsumego for atleast an hour a day and play atleast 1 game a day. If I do more or less that's okay, but that's the baseline goal. I will track my progress through the books in upcoming posts, and post the occasional game. I have compiled a list that I will go through. If you wish to grind problems alongside me then look below!

To get 1d:
Cho Chikun’s encyclopedia of life and death from http://tsumego.tasuki.org/
Graded Go problems for Beginners/Kyu players (can't remember the name, I think it's for beginners).

My plan

Part 1, the problems:

Graded Go Problems for Dan players Volume 1 (tsumego 5kyu-3d with majority in the 1-3d range)
Graded Go Problems for Dan players Volume 3 (tesuji 5kyu-3d with majority in the 1-3d range)
Graded Go Problems for Dan players Volume 4 (tsumego 4d-7d)
Graded Go Problems for Dan players Volume 5 (tesuji 4d-7d)

Graded Go problems for Dan players Volume 7 (256 opening and middle game problems 1d-7d)

Gokyo Shumyo http://tsumego.tasuki.org/books/gokyoshumyo.pdf
Gokyo Seimyo http://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/wo09/wo09_04079/

Genran http://senseis.xmp.net/?Genran DL for problems in SGF form http://dl.u-go.net/problems/xuanlan.zip

Guanzi Pu viewtopic.php?f=17&t=6971

XuanXuan Qijing http://tsumego.tasuki.org/books/xxqj.pdf

Not sure about the order of XXQJ and Guanzi Pu. Anybody know?

Part 2, play and review:

So as we all know, playing is quite important for integrating what you've learned and really ingraining it and remembering it. Reviewing my own games has always been something I've shied away from for some reason. I always preferred to look at pro games rather than my own faulty play. This has to change! I will try to review some of my own games and post them here for you to see and comment on. I might also try to submit some of them to the Go teaching ladder or Go-academy.org game review sites. But as I said before, my main focus is doing the tsumego in the right way and then playing while applying my reading skills instead of just blitzing and playing mindlessly as you sometimes do. My goals for play and review are simple. Play focused, serious games and occasioanlly review one of them and maybe send it to GTL or Go-academy.org.

Part 3, going through pro-games

There will come a time when I just have to do it. To see what the professionals are playing and just because I really enjoy it. So I will do the occasional pro-game. While going through the game (Most likely from http://www.gokifu.com), I will play it out on my board and ask myself where to play at each move. I will use it for reading practice like this, because often to find out where to play I must read out Life and death situations and whether a group is safe or can be attacked severely. This, imo, is the best way to learn from pro-games. Of course you have to be quite strong to really take advantage of this method of study. I've already tried it a little and was able to follow some games sometimes, so it can be beneficial for me even at my current level. However, the quantity of pro-games that I will go through will increase with my strength as that's most efficient. I feel like I have to atleast finish all the Graded go problems before making it a regular thing. But I have to play through some pro-games sometimes just for fun if nothing else!

Part 4, the experiment(s?)

Here I will post alternative study methods and interesting things I come across that might help improve my strength.

First thing I am going to try is something I saw posted here in L19 some time ago.
A Japanese professional player recommended solving go problems in your head right before bed. viewtopic.php?f=15&t=8427

I will do this using Cho Chikun's enc. The first volume of problems are pretty easy, and it goes without saying that you have to start with simple positions as imagining the whole tsumego in your head is much harder than just reading it with your eyes.

Part 5, Other things

Not very specific, but basically this is for Joseki studies, youtube lectures, high-dan games and whatever else! If you have any suggestions for me then don't hesitate to throw them at me.

Yunxuan Li: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN1eNE ... GDPp5n1scw
HayLee: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTji1k ... 5dB_Vxka9g
Lightvolty: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm3rx3 ... V7H_oAWFpA
Dwyrin: https://www.youtube.com/user/dwyrin
GoGameGuru: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9NQ7M ... p9XTebDjMA and website https://gogameguru.com/
Weiqi Master: https://www.youtube.com/user/weiqimaster/videos
LittleLamb: https://www.youtube.com/user/littlelambgo

First update. Today I did an hour of tsumego and I'm also going to do 8 cho chikun encyclopedia vol 1 problems in my head before I go to bed.

I played my first game on KGS in quite awhile and it was at the 2d level, but I am not sure my opponent is a real 2d. He was rather weak. It wasn't really a game where I can say I made any big mistakes, and it was a very comfortable victory for me. Towards the end, I had to piss so much, so I rushed it (but I had already won at that point so no problems). I took my time in the opening and middle game and I think it shows. if anybody can see something I can improve feel free to comment it. I'm just posting it to start things off. The next games I will post will be reviews of my own games.




Here's a few interesting problems I solved today. FYI I am currently at 169/300 of Volume 1 Tsumego.The upper left is my attempt at a smiley, but feel free to solve my smiley, lol.

OtakuViking wrote:First thing I am going to try is something I saw posted here in L19 some time ago. A Japanese professional player recommended solving go problems in your head right before bed. It would be nice if someone can provide a link to the article.

I think you are referring to the thread New Tsume-go technique

Good luck, BTW!

It seems everyone has his/her own prefered choice of doing Tsumego and every now and then there pops up a new method.

I once read Cho U suggests looking at the answers first and then solving the problems. Takes a bit of the thrill in my opinion. Likewise I find no thrill in brute-forcing every variation or sitting over a problem for more than a minute. Unless the problem is fascinating in some way, I rarely even try for more than 30 seconds.

Then again, my approach is to treat problems like words from a foreign language. I sort of memorise them, so repetition is the key. That way I easily exceed 100 problems a day and I still have fun doing it.

I guess bottom line is doing Tsumegos regulary. In which way you do them seems very much secondary to me.

Thanks snorri!

On problems, some may require extensive reading so they can take a long time. 5-10 min for example is not that unusual for challenging problems. Spending 30 seconds on such a problem then guessing a sequence and looking at the answer is in my opinion a brilliant waste of a problem. If, after looking at the problem for about 10 minutes you can't find the answer, then it is time to move on. Some also say check the answer, which can be good in some cases where you feel you are close but can't quite visualize the sequence. I'm not a hardcore 'NEVER LOOK AT THE ANSWERS' guy, but I like to give it a bloody good ol' bash before I do, and even then I might be inclined to move on to the next problem instead of looking at the answer. I find that if I persist then I can solve it. Even if I have to read every single candidate move out till the end aka 'brute force', I'll eventually make it. If not, I'm not strong enough and I can come back later

In the Tygem 2d-8d article i linked in my OP, the author emphasizes quality. He says that no matter if you're playing a game or doing problems, without quality it's useless. He goes on to point out the many players on tygem that have thousands of games under their belt, but seem to be stuck at a certain low dan rank. I think he's on to something here.

What is the purpose of a go problem? Is it to memorize a certain position so that you can find the move instantly in a game? No! Why? Because there's just way too many positions to memorize. You could spend your whole life trying to 'memorize' tsumego and it would be almost useless without actual reading power.

I believe the ultimate purpose of go problems is to increase your reading power by 'solving' the position. To solve a position, you must know the variations that spring forth from your killing move. You must read out all the refutations for white's tricky replies. Maybe you've missed something, and your move causes white to get a ko instead of unconditionally killing. So I believe with go problems and games that QUALITY triumphs over quantity and that this is the way to go.

Now with that said, I do believe there is something to be said for solving alot of easy problems that are below your level. It will help you solidify your go strength and your fundamentals, however, it won't push you higher. Only through challenging yourself can you grow stronger. Also, I find it much more fun to solve adequately challenging problems. If they are too easy or too hard, I find it difficult to keep motivated and in the end you have to do what you find fun! Games are about having fun, and for me 'fun' in go is about challenging myself and improving.

Alright! So anyway, today I did 1h18m tsumego while listening to classical music on youtube. I'm currently at 193/300 in GGPFDP vol 1. I also played a couple of relaxing games, but there's nothing noteworthy to share. I played 4 hours of the witcher 3 aswell! Haha That game is really awesome btw.

OtakuViking wrote:On problems, some may require extensive reading so they can take a long time. 5-10 min for example is not that unusual for challenging problems. Spending 30 seconds on such a problem then guessing a sequence and looking at the answer is in my opinion a brilliant waste of a problem.

Of course, I take problems which are both suited for my level (mostly a little easier) and for this method in general, so standard/common shapes.

OtakuViking wrote:In the Tygem 2d-8d article i linked in my OP, the author emphasizes quality. He says that no matter if you're playing a game or doing problems, without quality it's useless. He goes on to point out the many players on tygem that have thousands of games under their belt, but seem to be stuck at a certain low dan rank. I think he's on to something here.

In my opinion, the flaw in this argument is that he assumes everyone who plays, wants to get stronger. I know quite some people who literally just play. They make it to 5k and sometimes even to 1d with very little to no studying or Tsumego solving, because they find it boring. They pick things up along the way, just because they play douzen of games almost each day but naturally this isn't enough when you reach a certain strength. So they keep this level, despite having thousands of games on the account.

OtakuViking wrote:What is the purpose of a go problem? Is it to memorize a certain position so that you can find the move instantly in a game? No! Why? Because there's just way too many positions to memorize. You could spend your whole life trying to 'memorize' tsumego and it would be almost useless without actual reading power.

I believe the ultimate purpose of go problems is to increase your reading power by 'solving' the position. To solve a position, you must know the variations that spring forth from your killing move. You must read out all the refutations for white's tricky replies. Maybe you've missed something, and your move causes white to get a ko instead of unconditionally killing. So I believe with go problems and games that QUALITY triumphs over quantity and that this is the way to go.

I believe Go is much more about remembering than about reading. My view on this changed a bit over time. Nowadays I even think, that sense of direction is more important than reading.
It starts with that you actually shoudn't consider every possible move because most of them are not even sensible and will drain both your time and your stamina. There are obviously points to read in every game, fighting comes to mind. But sensible candidate moves are actually quite manageable in any given situation. The important part is validating that they work of course. And then whether or not the result is good for you, which has more to do with experience (remembering).

In a nutshell: For me spotting the vital points fast is the important aspect. So I drill shapes over and over again. Validating is very important as well but obviously comes second. And since I actually solve the problems I repeat over and over, I do get my fair share of reading practice ^^

OtakuViking wrote:I played 4 hours of the witcher 3 aswell! Haha That game is really awesome btw.

My PC can't take the ultra settings so I wait

On temporary hiatus for a week or two due to exams. Tsumego books replaced with 'study' bleh.

So see you in a bit

I still have 1 exam left, but I don't really need to study up for it so I am returning to my go study schedule and ramping it up for the summer!

I've managed to squeeze in the occasional tsumego, so I am currently 273/300 in vol.1 of GGPFD. I must say I'm looking forward to the tesuji volume that's coming next. I haven't done tesuji problems in a very, very, VEEERRRYYY long time, so it'll be damn good. I must remark that I'm not just going to go through the books 1 time. The problems and solutions of the GGPFD series are simply too good to not grind out a few times and I did misread a few problems. Not sure when I'll start 'reviewing' the books, I'll worry about that later.
Also, a thing I am noticing as I do these problems. I can physically feel my reading getting better and I can actually, measurably tell that I'm getting better because I can see further in games. If this continues, I'm going to be improving ridiculously fast. I'm not a genius or anything, just spending alot of time on the correct activities to get stronger

Another thing that I will undertake is to review more of my games and regularly post them here. I'll begin with the game below. I think the main thing that went wrong for me was the fight in the middle. I could've taken control of the game and cruised to victory if I had taken the key points shown in the review below. Instead I capped him, actually forcing him to attack my group. I guess I thought the game was too easy? haha

Progress update GGPfD vol 3 (169/300). It's been fairly easy solving these problems so far and the first 70 or so were tesuji concerned with joseki patterns so that was very easy and dull. To be fair I have worked with this book before. Gonna burn through it quickly and get on to the next level. Not sure if I should go do the advanced tsumego book or the advanced tesuji book. I also feel like I wanna review the 2nd part of vol 1 again.

I also want to share a great video about improvement with you. Yunxuan Li is currently one of my favorite Go Youtubers. He doesn't have alot of videos yet, but they are great quality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy7-aD2zRtI

Now with that out of the way... I think I might use this study journal not just as a simple progress reporting device to keep me in check, but also as a platform for documenting and sharing my thoughts regarding the game.

So after completing volume 1 I experienced a dramatic increase in my go strength and at first I couldn't figure out what it was. After doing the first and most easy part of vol 3 and experiencing a drought of victories on tygem I felt like this was an illusion, but then today I realized something. This happened when I solved a tesuji problem correctly for black, yet I failed to see the best failure variation for white. In other words, I only read out the worst variation for white. This was in stark contrast to how I laboured to find all the possible moves and refutations for sequences in volume 1. Then I examined my online play during this drought of victories and came to another conclusion aswell.

My play was mostly automatic and I was following my opponent around the board letting him do what he wanted, following his plans. A lazy way of playing, just like my reading of the tesuji problem was lazy. In the games where I did well, I expended effort not just on finding my next move but on what my opponents counter would be. In the bad games, I didn't do this. All I focused on was where to play next. The deeper game was lost on me. Depth had been lost, the quality of my games had gone down to an unacceptable level.

Clearly I am not the only one suffering from the aforementioned reading issue, but I think that we often don't realize just how far reaching the implications of having 'lazy reading' is. Having experienced the difference for myself, I can say that it's atleast 2 stones, if not more like 3 or 4. Regardless, there is an insane difference between being in lazy reading, automatic play mode and being in 'serious/quality reading' mode.

In order to improve at Go, quality is needed. Not just quality in terms of solving tsumego properly, but also having quality games to review. You have to play to the utmost of your abilities to push yourself to the next level. Let's say that in lazy reading mode, you're at maybe 85% of your full strength. Alot of the mistakes you find in those games stem from lazy reading and if you eliminate those problems, your play might go up to 95%. But in order to improve, you need to be able to push yourself beyond 100% strength in the review. You need to be able to look at a position and get an epiphany and say, oh! That's what I should have done! That's what a quality game and quality review will do.

If you're reviewing one of your 'lazy reading' games, you often don't even need to sit down and go through the game to know what went wrong. You'll know during the game, and right after the game without even opening the game up and going through it. This is what I was trying to imply with the percentage idea. Since you were playing below your own true level, it means that you'll be able to spot your own mistakes easily, and these mistakes are mostly worthless because of the fact that you wouldn't make them in quality games.

Basically what I'm getting at is that in order to improve you have to play to the best of your ability, then go and find something that could be improved, pushing yourself beyond that 100% I talked about earlier. Some people say that you become 2-4 stones stronger during a review and that's what you must use to push yourself beyond that 100% Also what I am implying is that it's difficult, if nigh-on impossible to push yourself beyond 100% during a review of a lazy reading game where you played at 85%. Yes yes, maybe you're getting tired of my arbitrary percentages, but the point I am trying to make still stands.

Without Quality, studying will grant you very little. The same can be said for playing and reviewing your games. Without quality these activities are unlikely to lead to improvement. That's my discovery. It's like a validation of the theory that I encountered in the inspiration links which you can find in my first post. The -how to get tygem 8d- post specifically insisted on Quality games and solving tsumego the right way, reading out ALL the variations and making sure you have the strongest moves for both sides.

(As a sidenote, my KGS rank is currently very weird. I'm 4d? and a few days ago I tried to get a game on KGS to fix this because I keep winning all my games and bumping my rank up. I don't believe I am a real 4d on KGS yet, so it's weird. Anyway, I played a 2h game against a 2d and he escaped after I took a firm lead. This was one of my quality games, but it still surprised me. Especially because there's no way I went from being a weak kgs 2d to a real KGS 4d in a week or two of tsumego practice. A rather surreal experience to make a 2d escape a game... but I am sure my rank on KGS will stabilize... eventually...)

So it's my birthday today, yay!

I finished vol.3. The most useful problems in the book by far were the endgame problems. There was a comment in the book that since the endgame is by far the largest part of the game it would make sense for strong players to be good at the endgame. Conversely, getting good at the endgame would mean becoming a stronger player. I've felt the above being true in my games. I've won a couple of close games by 1.5 moku or 3.5 moku recently, just by playing a better endgame than my opponent and catching up at the end.

Before continuing my updatezorz, I want to mention that wbaduk has just released a collection of classical tsumego works, stuff like Gokyo Shumyo, Shikatsu Myoki, Xuanxuan qijing etc. They even showed a recommended order. I also did some reading up on Gokyo Shumyo, which just made me want to work through it more and more. However, I have decided that I will stick to my plan of finishing the GGPfD 4d-7d tsumego and tesuji collections before moving on to the classics.

So far so good, I'm playing games, doing atleast 1h of problems a day, often quite a bit more than that. I've also become a stable 3d on KGS and would have higher rating if ppl stopped escaping from me. I prefer tygem. People there are generally more polite imo, lol. Also, I feel like tygem got stronger and KGS got weaker recently.

Below is a game against another strong tygem 4d at 10m 3x30sec byoyomi. As I said, I prefer 20-25m or longer. Also, since it's converted from gib to sgf it doesn't show that komi is 6.5 or that I won by 3.5 in the end.

Belated happy birthday : )

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

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By the way, you can try MultiGo (http://www.ruijiang.com/multigo/) to convert your games, it works better than CGoban.

Thanks! Now that I see the extend played on an actual board I can see that it's probably the correct choice. I considered it briefly in the game and then stubbornly refused to give an inch because it would be like accepting defeat or smth... Danger of being stubborn. I was lucky that time.

Thanks for informing me about Multigo, I have been looking for an alternative for cgoban since I don't really play on KGS that much anymore and multigo looks really awesome for what I need

Also, as an aside I've decided to go through Gokyo Shumyo before continuing on with the GGfD series after reading alot of comments online that the latter part of the tsumego volume got really hard for them. Besides, I have a physical copy of Gokyo Shumyo that have been lying around longer than the GGfD books just begging to be blasted through. All the text is in chinese, so I won't be getting alot of hints either, which is a bonus in this case since alot of the beginning Gokyo Shumyo problems should be a bit easy for me (and indeed I have found this to be true). Easy doesn't mean they are bad though! I am already recognizing alot of real game shapes and the problems feel good to go through. So far so good, I'll try to amp my time up to atleast 2h daily since I was already kinda doing that much with the first volumes of the dan series anyways.

Edit: I have been looking at this game for a few days now and I just keep thinking how cool Yoda Norimoto's play is. I have noticed a strange familiarity when replaying his games. Among alot of professionals, his moves seem to me to be very sensible and easy to understand quite alot of the time and while comparing myself with him is an obvious travesty, I feel a certain similarity in our styles of play and certainly in some philosophical aspects. I looked up his sensei's page http://senseis.xmp.net/?YodaNorimoto and I copy pasta the following ::: During his Kisei match against Yamashita Keigo, the referee Hane Yasumasa 9-dan said of him: ‘Yoda dislikes being attacked the most of all professionals. The word “flee” is not in his dictionary. Instead, there are entries only for “live” and sacrifice” :::
I feel exactly like this. I really, really hate running my groups away aka 'fleeing'. I'd much rather live and recently I have been trying to train myself to also sacrifice when appropriate. In short, I will probably try to study more of Mr. Yoda's games. A great Go master he is, yeees.

at T14.

mitsun wrote::b77: at T14.

Yes indeed. I was surprised black didn't capture.

Update: I'm almost done with the first part of Gokyo Shumyo (Life (生之部) - 103 problems).
I've been laying out the problems on my board and found that to be a quite pleasant way of solving the problems. A change from looking at a book diagram.

Here's something I read about Gokyo Shumyo on Sensei's library:

In Killer of Go, Sakata Eio explains the importance the Gokyo Shumyo and studying tsumego:

It is necessary to cultivate one's skill at solving questions at a glance, in other words, life and death problems (tsumego). It is recommended that amateurs assimilate the "Gokyo Shumyo" (...). It was published more than 150 years ago, but it contains basic life and death shapes, and is invaluable in game situations. Unless one first fixes the complete Shumyo collection in mind, one will not attain the qualifications to make one feared as a "killer". However, even a fairly strong amateur will have trouble solving all of the problems in the Shumyo correctly on the spot. If not, that's quite all right. After some days pass, one must take up the challenge again, and then yet again later, until in the end one masters the whole anthology.

One of the things to glean from this quote and some others I've found on the internet about solving tsumego, is that you must practice over and over again. Solving a book of problems 1 time is not enough, one must continously solve it. This is similar to the technique used by Korean insei's afaik. They grind alot of problem sets over and over again.

Anyway that was just a little precursor to what I want to talk about in this post.

Breaks and Brain Fog:

I've found that in order to absorb information in go and grow stronger, it is important for me to also remember to take breaks and not work myself to utter exhaustion. I doubt this is a problem for most people, but since I can be a little obsessive sometimes I often end up spending a long time on various Go activities day in and day out... until I can't do that anymore, until I exhaust myself so completely that I am weaker than when I started. This isn't due to the training being ineffective, but rather the fact that I've overworked my brain so much that 'Brain Fog' has formed, making it impossibly hard for me to concentrate and focus on a game. I just click away and don't read at all. Needless to say playing this way is not only fruitless but actually damaging, so instead of continuing to press and grind and work hard, it's better to take a break from Go. That also allows whatever information you've absorbed to sink in. You might've experienced this before. You take a break from the game, maybe a week or two and when you come back you find yourself playing very well, sometimes even better than before the break. Information takes time to 'soak' into the brain. That is what I have learned. However, such long breaks are usually not needed. In my case, I had to take a break of about 3 days for the brain fog to clear. After the first day, I felt it lessen, but not clear completely. I think this is because I haven't given myself off-days where I don't study go. Even insei have a break every week, right? A day off to relax and recuperate. I'll liken it to over-exercising. If you go running every day, eventually your body won't be able to recuperate enough for the next day and you'll find yourself being slow and eventually It'll be almost impossible to run. You have to take a break every now and then. If you exercise a muscle group like the biceps every day, what you're doing is breaking it down and not giving it enough time to recover. With go it's like pouring water into a large cup. Eventually the cup will overflow. You have to stop just before that happens, take a break (which in this metaphor would involve drinking the water to absorb the information). Then you can continue filling the cup. But you have to remember to allocate time to 'drinking in' the information.

That is all for now. Slow and steady is the way to Go. Consistency is always the key to mastering something, so instead of going hard and fast and then exhausting yourself, it is better to go slow and steady. Of course that doesn't mean I'll slack off. It just means that I have to remember to take proper breaks