Life In 19x19

This is something I have been wondering lately. As we improve, does the amount of bad moves we play decrease or are our moves still bad, but not as much?

Not that this changes much, but by "a professional would classify as bad" I mean moves he would certainly discard; if he is doubtful, then it might be playable.

I picked 76-100 as a sort of typical number in a game with around....200-300 moves. This is probably a bit lower than it probably is, but that's the number that struck me.

However, if a pro were to look at my games, it might be every move.

I put 21-30, reasoning that there's a lot of joseki, middle game sequences and such that are forced. Imagine that you invade in a 3 space extension when you shouldn't. It might still be that the second through fifth moves are all the best you can play once the first one is on the board.

But when I think about the endgame, I'm not sure it isn't higher.

This question is interesting. I think that there may be a number of moves that may locally be joseki or "ok" toa pro, but given the whole board, I doubt very much that hardly ANY of my moves would be good to a pro.

As an amateur, I think way too locally. As such, a pro may look at some of my moves an think, "yeah, that i a local joseki", but still think it is junk given the global situation.

Pro moves across games, of course, diverge, but I suspect that they vary much less than those of amateurs.

uPWarrior wrote:This is something I have been wondering lately. As we improve, does the amount of bad moves we play decrease or are our moves still bad, but not as much?

To answer this question, it seems you ought to take rank into account in the poll in some way.

I put between 100 and 150. my first move (komoku) is the only one I am sure about

I wonder who voted for 150-200 - I think on average we play about 100 moves per game :p Seems like more than a few people got confused, judging by the fact that the mode seems to be 76-100 wrong moves XD

I voted for 1-5, because the pro reviews I've had, that's about all they mention that are really bad (they are quite polite, afterall)... any more bad mistakes and they would just politely move on to the next review.

And I've even had a few moves that they've remarked are actually pro moves!

Kirby wrote:

uPWarrior wrote:This is something I have been wondering lately. As we improve, does the amount of bad moves we play decrease or are our moves still bad, but not as much?

To answer this question, it seems you ought to take rank into account in the poll in some way.

I really wanted to, but can't see how.
I was hoping the comments would somehow help me answer that question.

Very interesting question, but very hard to answer unless one actually asks a pro to review every move. Like the comments above, I've had pros review my games, and typically they point out 5-10 bad moves, depending on how much time there is. I've guessed that the real answer is 3-4 times that, but its really hard to say.

The definition of bad is also interesting. Is it "game losing"? Is it just not optimal? If the latter, does it matter? To a pro, a less than optimal move may in fact be game losing, but to us amateurs, probably not.

I put 11-20

probably on the lower end, but unclear.

Most of the time, you have one move that is bad judgement but the following moves are consistent with it (I.E. the only continuation).

The only thing I can imagine getting someone up above 60 is if they are not tenuki-ing from a currently lost position.

So I just went quickly through three of my lessons with my teacher (a pro). I am not convinced I play my best against him (currently I am a strong 4 dan AGA and have accounts ranging from 2 dan to 4 dan on KGS). Maybe I will go back and look at some of his reviews of games I play against other people, and see if there is a difference.
Games last an hour and review lasts an hour.

I evaluated his comments on moves as Bad, Slack, Good and Great. For poll purposes, Bad and Slack are both "Wrong".

Game One: Bad 5, Slack 19, Good 6, Great 1. 105 moves by me total.

Game Two: Bad 4, Slack 25, Good 10, Great 1. 105 moves by me total.

Game Three: Bad 5, Slack 19, Good 9, Great 0. 91 moves by me total.

These seem about average for me, I could search and find some where I do considerably better, but sadly they are statistical outliers.

So either I'm equally good as HKA, or I'm underestimating my number of bad moves. I know what I'm gonna believe.

I have thought about this from time to time as well.

I think that I read somewhere that pro's think they make a mistake about every 3 moves. I could be wrong about this but if it is true it is hard to believe that any move an amature could make could be right.

On the other hand sometimes I feel like even if I make the "right" move it could still be wrong because the reasoning behind why it is played could be flawed thus making the correct move still wrong.

Look at An Younggil's commentaries at gogameguru. It becomes very implausible that professionals are making mistakes that often.