zac wrote:
Do you, or anyone else for that matter, have experience with kyu level players that have spent a reasonable amount of their study time on pro games and their experiences? Do you have any recommendations, or can you point me/us in a direction on how it would be best to study pro games?
From about 30kyu to 8kyu or so it was my primary form of study. Later on I really had to change the ratio in favor of more concrete study L&D, tesuji, and endgame.
I don't believe it's the most efficient way to improve, but it is fun.
As you say, many pros and strong amateurs feel it's not really efficient until you get pretty close to pro strength, but opinions vary. Janice Kim 3p at one time recommended spending most of one's study on professional games, but I think that may be because the method she suggests for L&D is so tiring one can't do it for long.
Here are some benefits of pro game study even for kyus:
1. Exposure to a variety of moves / ideas. It's helpful to break out of just playing by basic instinct to understand that many more moves are possible than you may be considering.
2. Better shapes.
3. Better ideas of sacrifice.
4. Improved willingness to tenuki / sense of sente and gote.
5. Better endgame (but requires very tedious study to understand why pro endgame sequences are the way they are.)
6. Better notions of big points in opening.
7. The fun of recognizing things you've seen before when following current professional games.
8. Better feeling for the variety of styles. I think players who haven't seen enough pro games have exaggerated ideas of, e.g., how territorial Cho Chikun is. Pros do have different styles, but not so much that they really play bad moves to fit their "style." Ultimately they are trying to win at leas a little bit.
9. Better feeling for lines of play / longer sequences that are self-consistent.
10. Better feeling for how choices earlier in the game affect how it turns out later. (E.g, what looks like territory now might change later, etc.)
11. Better feeling for timing of forcing moves.
12. Better appreciation of aji.
What pro games are not so good for is preparing you for punishing common amateur mistakes.
Advice for study:
Play through each game at least twice, once thinking from Black's point of view and once from White's. People may think that they can take into account both sides at once, but that's not so easy. (I credit this idea to Bi Jang, Korean ex-insei.)
Think about a few candidate moves before you see what they pro plays. If a play appears that you'd never play in a million years, be very surprised. Try to cultivate this idea of being surprised. It's a chance to learn.
If you have time to go through a game multiple times, do so focusing each time on only one aspect of the game. Just go through only thinking about sente and gote, and how that changes hands. Then again only thinking about liberties. Then again only thinking about how thickness is used. Then again only thinking about sacrificies. Etc., etc. for any concept you want to work on. It's too hard to think about everything at once. Maybe only very strong players can do that.
Another piece of advice I like I got from James Kerwin 1p. It's about positional judgment and I think it's pretty insightful. The idea is that if you are replaying a pro game and you are wondering who is ahead, the answer is that it's even most of the time, at least to your level of understanding. So it really helps you understand what an even exchange looks like. I think what he said was that if you can play as well as the losing player in a pro game, you're already stronger than the vast majority of amateurs, so unless you have a commentary that says that one side made an enormous mistake, you should just assume the position is even for your purposes.
Have fun!