Life In 19x19

Opinions/comments welcome

Some comments for the first douzen moves because after that you repeat the basic mistakes:

In a nutshell:
Don't play the shoulder-hit or a angle play for attacking a lonely stone.
Keep your stones connected and seperate your opponents stones.
Territorily: Corners > Sides > Center

Generally I would advice solving more Go problems (Tesujis).



Playing against such weak bots is not really good because they often play very bad moves. I would recommend to play the dan-level-bot on 9H, there you can practice to keep your stones connected, seperate your opponent's stones and the right way to attack.

SoDesuNe wrote: Playing against such weak bots is not really good because they often play very bad moves. I would recommend to play the dan-level-bot on 9H, there you can practice to keep your stones connected, seperate your opponent's stones and the right way to attack.

I presume by "9H" you mean a 9x9 board with dan-level bot? Unfortunately I have free version of MFoG which does not allow level-changes (18k is default and can't change). If you have any recommendations on a Go program that is free that offers what you suggest, would be appreciated. Thanks

tynan wrote:

SoDesuNe wrote: Playing against such weak bots is not really good because they often play very bad moves. I would recommend to play the dan-level-bot on 9H, there you can practice to keep your stones connected, seperate your opponent's stones and the right way to attack.

I presume by "9H" you mean a 9x9 board with dan-level bot? Unfortunately I have free version of MFoG which does not allow level-changes (18k is default and can't change). If you have any recommendations on a Go program that is free that offers what you suggest, would be appreciated. Thanks

Don't worry about it too much just yet. Just keep working on your basics like SoDesuNe said:

* avoid shoulder hits when trying to attack
* keep your stones connected, and your opponent's separated
* don't let your opponent steal away the easy territory from you, leaving you only the hard territory (corner, sides, center)

Concentrate on these and in no time you'll be looking for stronger opponent's to challenge you.

tynan wrote:

SoDesuNe wrote: Playing against such weak bots is not really good because they often play very bad moves. I would recommend to play the dan-level-bot on 9H, there you can practice to keep your stones connected, seperate your opponent's stones and the right way to attack.

I presume by "9H" you mean a 9x9 board with dan-level bot? Unfortunately I have free version of MFoG which does not allow level-changes (18k is default and can't change). If you have any recommendations on a Go program that is free that offers what you suggest, would be appreciated. Thanks

Ah, I'm sorry. I meant you should play against stronger bots on 19*19 and taking 9 handicap stones.

I can recommend GnuGo as a free, open-source and decent bot. Last time I checked it was around 6-kyu in strength. Maybe it's stronger now. GnuGo: http://gnugo.baduk.org/
You will need a graphical interface for GnuGo, something like GoGui should work: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gogui/

Then again you can also play on KGS (www.gokgs.com), to meet real players and find also a couple of good bots.

A couple things that struck me that you may want to look at are these:
http://senseis.xmp.net/?HighAndLowMoves
This goes into what the purpose of stone different distances from the edge are.

http://senseis.xmp.net/?LAmeDuGo
This talks a bit about broken shape, which is something to avoid.