Life In 19x19

What have I learned since the last time I posted a game here for review? I'd like to think I've learned something, but I've been stuck in another run where things start going wrong early on and wind up going very badly for me. And the games seem to have me losing in different ways -- I look at them, and I'll be darned if I can find anything in common with why I'm losing.

Maybe having a positive attitude would help.

Next game, instead of thinking of how you might blunder, think of how you will take advantage of your opponent's blunders, instead.

They are the same level as you, so you can find their mistakes!

Fedya wrote:I'll be darned if I can find anything in common with why I'm losing.

Hi Fedya,

Next game, instead of thinking of how you might blunder, think of how you will take advantage of your opponent's blunders, instead.

I did try to take advantage of what I thought were my opponent's weaknesses, at and . Both of them backfired.

I go into games with a positive attitude, but it's tough to keep that when my mistakes start getting refuted pretty early on.

Like Kirby says, a positive attitude could help.

I would say that the game losing move is 104, and a negative attitude has a lot to do with that.

It is true that you are a bit behind, but at your level, not fatally so. It is also true, as you say, that your right side thickness has pretty much done its job, and will not generate many more points. Your main concern, as your move 104 indicates, is the strong Black framework on the bottom side. Your problem is that you invaded too deeply. Even though you brilliantly lived, your opponent got great thickness and sente, leaving you with little chance to catch up.

My suggestion is the capping play at H-06, or even H-07. Not only will that reduce the potential of the Black framework, it may well help to form central territory with the White group on the left side or the thickness in the top center. (At this point the proverb about not making territory from thickness does not apply. ) Before the capping play, I think you should play the kosumi at B-10 (which Black played with sente in the game). It threatens the Black group and Black will almost surely reply. Grab those double sente!

Then with perfect play Black should still win, but your opponent is far from perfect.

Fedya wrote:

Next game, instead of thinking of how you might blunder, think of how you will take advantage of your opponent's blunders, instead.

I did try to take advantage of what I thought were my opponent's weaknesses, at and . Both of them backfired.

I go into games with a positive attitude, but it's tough to keep that when my mistakes start getting refuted pretty early on.

did not backfire. Black let himself get forced into a low posture on the right side.

would have been better at C-16, to secure the corner and attack the Black group. In the top right it was not tesuji; the attachment at N-16 is tesuji. However, you did not come out all that badly there.

I have yet to see even one single game that is different in terms of the mistakes.

Ed:

I titled the thread as I did because it seems logical that I must be making the same mistakes over and over, or else I wouldn't be stuck at the same level I've been stuck at for what seems like ages. When I go through my games and think about posting one for review here, I get this image in my mind of you strong players tearing your hair out and shrieking with horror and wishing you could shake some sense into me so that I'd stop making the same !$%^@!^#$ mistakes.

However, the games all feel different. I can have a game where I have Black and play the Kobayashi and get pincered at and things go wrong from there. Or, I can have a game where I have White and face sanrensei, and my attempts to reduce go wrong. (I was looking for a game in which my opponent invaded my Chinese fuseki, but haven't been playing the Chinese recently.) Yes, they're probably the same mistakes, but I have difficulty figuring out how they're the same mistakes in two games that develop so differently -- and how not to make the same mistake again if, say, I were to try a diagonal fuseki.

Bill:

I felt after Black 23 that I had a heavy group in the bottom right, with a problematic cutting point at Q6. And even though I've got thickness after Black 35, I've also got a bunch of cutting points.

And I was counting, and somewhere around 103/104 I determined I was behind by a good 20 points. Which would be why I played such a severe invasion/overplay.

Fedya wrote:Bill:

I felt after Black 23 that I had a heavy group in the bottom right, with a problematic cutting point at Q6. And even though I've got thickness after Black 35, I've also got a bunch of cutting points.

Yes, you left some serious defects in your wall. But your opponent failed to capitalize on them. BTW, would have been better to extend from the bottom left corner, to attack the Black group. Use thickness for attack. (If Black had cut at Q-06, you could have done as you did later and give up two stones. )

And I was counting, and somewhere around 103/104 I determined I was behind by a good 20 points. Which would be why I played such a severe invasion/overplay.

I expect that you failed to evaluate your thickness properly. You were behind less than 10 points after komi. That is not a great deficit at the 7 kyu level.

The one thing I'd offer here is that thickness is only truly thick if it doesn't have those cutting points and defects. Be careful in thinking that you have thickness when there are rather awkward cutting points that worry you -- Thickness is hard to use if there's bad aji that would leave cuts and peeps forcing you to respond to things.

Ever had those games where you make this nice wall? And then at the end of the game, it's still a nice long chain of stones making no territory anywhere, just sandwiched between opponent stones? The above is almost always the reason why ... it looked sort of thick-ish, but it wasn't really.

Another of my pet irritations is the proverb "Don't make territory from thickness". If you make thickness and your opponent makes territory, you better hope that the thickness you make ends up making more territory than the territory you gave him for it, or you'll lose. The game is won by the person with the most territory at the end. I think if people stopped quoting that proverb, a lot of these issues with using thickness would not be so mystically out of reach.

Obviously, the trick is "make that thickness get you more points by the end of the game than you had to give away to make it", and that's no easy trick. But as long as you're remembering that, at some point, that thickness needs to have given you lots of territory, I find it a bit easier to plan around what to do with it.

As a rule of thumb, "make a really big area of potential territory, that's hard to invade deeply because you can then use the thickness to attack severely" works well enough. Then the details are in the specifics, and often the basic fundamentals as Ed says. But ... getting those just right is decades of work, starting with a plan is the important bit IMO.

However, as Bill said, chin up, you weren't anywhere near as far behind as you felt like you were

EDIT: If you want, I'm happy going through one of my "teaching" games with you at some point on KGS which sort of was based on this theme and ended up feeling like a rather good example - if you're interested, just let me know when you're around on KGS typically and I'll try to meet you on there

The only thing worth noting in this game is that in your opening you fight for outside influence when you have no use for it.

You mention thickness in your comments about the game.

Thickness should be used to attack your opponent. Typically by driving your opponents stones into it. So you need thickness and you need your enemies stones in a position they can be driven into your thickness.

Your enemy however will likely not want his stones attacked, and if he sees a giant wall of stones, he probably won't put any stones in a nice place for you to attack.

So before building thickness you need to think how it could it be used to attack your opponent first, then build thickness, then attack.

Look at the board at Move 67 what can white attack with the thickness?

Nothing much, pretty much all of Black's groups are secure and settled. You can't attack anything he currently has on the board.

So your thickness here isn't really useful, (but if you can make a wall in the upper right, you end up having a big potential territory in the middle. If black invades or reduces this you can push his stonez into your walls and make use of them.)

However when White invades the 3-3 black gets to split White's groups, and play right in the middle of Whites thick area, Black's stones are connected to a live group, so they can't be attacked and they end up completely neutralising white's thickness and removing white's middle potential.

This is the worst of both worlds, white made thickness, then threw it away.

You really need to have a plan when you play a game and stick to it. If you build a lot of influence, or thickness, you need to use it, if you abandon it, then everything you gave up to get it is sacrificed as well. In this game; 24 Stones sacrificed when white invaded the 3-3 point, that is nearly half the stones played so far, and as white and black take turns its nearly all your stones played so far. <Insert frowny face here>

So the first thing I would recommend you do is work out some general plans when you play a game, decide whether to go for influence or territory, and stick to your decision.

--------------

By move 60, the board is pretty much settled, where can white attack? Where can Black attack?

This is a hard game to play, because the opening went on too long, all the groups are really solid.

How much territory did you make by attacking, and how much did you make by playing to surround territory?

I would say you want to play lightly in the opening, aim to make a few light groups in the first 20 moves, then, aim to strengthen them by attacking your opponent.

Playing the opening until turn 60 is too long.

The longer it takes before you start attacking, the harder it is to attack successfully, you end up with a game where you end up having no good moves.

Where do you play at move 62, Black just played the slowest move on the board. A two point jump at F14? Is white's corner group dead? No, then it doesn't need to run to the centre. You're not attacking or putting pressure on black at all, You're not surrounding territory.

Can you see a good move here?

If not why not?

If you can't see a good move, then you probably played a bad move, the turn before, or a few turns ago, or 10 turns ago... Or more...

The opening should create a board in which you have good moves to play, in which you have options, in which you can play to further your overall game strategy.

If you just play, making solid groups, joseki's when you can, you end up with this kind of game where you have to make everything happen. Instead you should have a plan, an idea of how to play the opening, and how to exit the opening, and enter the middle game.

--------------

At move 8, you make a decision to play lightly, I like this decision, then you create a giant heavy group with bad shape in the lower right.

In this game you make a lot of decisions like this, you decide to do one thing, then do something different, by having a game plan or just working out a play style you like, you can play more consistently.

--------------

Move 18: a bad move, you just hit the head of your own two stones, how many liberties does this group have? 3. How many liberties have you gained for your R5 stone? 1. After this P6 cries out to fix your shape, you might think it gives away sente, no, Sente was lost when you made a bad group at R5, now you're just trying to reduce the damage.

You played a lot of bad shape moves like this in the game, your walls had a lot of weaknesses, you also comment on this in your game review.

Not only are you playing bad shape, you know you are. I'm not angry... I'm disappointed.

--------------

If you want some goals on how to improve.

Work on having an overarching game plan or strategy:

How you will play the opening, to give you a good middle game, etc. and/or choose a play style you like.
You need to play in a consistent way.

Revisit the basics:

You probably have a lot of go knowledge in your brain, but its probably all other people's go knowledge, you've read books, you've watched games, you've memorised sensei's library, maybe you even know some josekis.

Now you need to take that knowledge and make it your own, really understand it, understand why you learnt this stuff. If someone says, you should do this, or you should do that, or something something something, don't just accept it. Take their knowledge, and shake it up and look at them from all directions, until you can say, why they are right, or maybe, why they are wrong.

Your play style shows you have a lot of stuff in your brain about Go, but its not been parsed and sorted and fully integrated into you, so you have an odd style where you play one way, then another, then another.

You are playing other people's go. You need to work on creating your go.

--------------

Oh and as a post script, it was suggested you try and take advantage of your opponent's blunders.

Don't.

If you rely on your opponent being stupid to win, you'll never win against a better player.

Focus on your Go, focus on playing only good moves, your opponent's bad moves will hoist [him/her/it:self] on [her/its/his] own petard. Do you know what a petard is? Do you want to hoist someone on one?

No, just no, step away from the petard.

Now fly my pretty, go out there, and become the best evil winged monkey, the go world, has ever seen.

-------------

Love, Luck and Lollipops

Ai Ichigo.

Oh and as a post script, it was suggested you try and take advantage of your opponent's blunders.

Don't.

If you rely on your opponent being stupid to win, you'll never win against a better player.

I disagree with you: You must be cognizant of your opponent's mistakes.

The win/loss of a game of go is decided by the mistakes players make. Naturally, you should try to avoid making mistakes yourself, but this is not always enough. Namely, there are two classes of mistakes that your opponent can make:

1. Mistakes that punish themselves. In this case, you can play normally, and your opponent's bad move will punish itself. This is the class of mistake that you are probably thinking of in your argument.
2. Mistakes that require punishment. Overplays are a classic example. Often, an overplay left unpunished can reap great benefits for your opponent if you don't punish it. There are a number of trick plays in joseki that will give an uneven result if you don't punish them. You must recognize these mistakes by your opponent.

Trying to play good moves is something you should always strive for. But you must also catch your opponent's mistakes.

Otherwise, you will find yourself overplaying to catch up. When your opponent plays good moves, don't overplay - just be patient. When your opponent plays bad moves, punish them.

Where do you play at move 62, Black just played the slowest move on the board. A two point jump at F14? Is white's corner group dead? No, then it doesn't need to run to the centre. You're not attacking or putting pressure on black at all, You're not surrounding territory.

I thought that if I let Black play E17, either I'd wind up with just one eye in the corner, or I'd have to let Black take D16 and kill the stones at E16/F16. I also didn't want to be sealed in the corner.

If you can't see a good move, then you probably played a bad move, the turn before, or a few turns ago, or 10 turns ago... Or more...

This makes me wonder how much I'm screwing up early on, because it generally seems fairly early that I have difficulty finding good moves.

Where do you play at move 62, Black just played the slowest move on the board. A two point jump at F14? Is white's corner group dead? No, then it doesn't need to run to the centre. You're not attacking or putting pressure on black at all, You're not surrounding territory.

[...]

You played a lot of bad shape moves like this in the game, your walls had a lot of weaknesses, you also comment on this in your game review.

Not only are you playing bad shape, you know you are. I'm not angry... I'm disappointed.

I only realized after playing out the sequence that it was a bad shape move. At the time, I thought I was punshing my opponent's mistake! (Along the same lines, one of the difficulties I have with reading is trying to figure out what my opponent is going to play next. I can read out a sequence that looks as though it should be good for me, and then my opponent will play a move I didn't consider, leaving me to try to figure out how to respond.)