I was watching a dan game and thought by myself "so which of these players is going to win this one?" Then almost immediately I noticed how meaningless that question was. The result is pre-determined, but we just never know what is it going to be. It's like coin flip, except the odds could be 50-50, 44-56, 38-62 or some such. I wanted to know the winner so that I could emotionally attach myself to one of the players (underdog / bandwagon effect).

Clearly this is a bad attitude. What enjoyment could possibly be devived from actualized chance? It's like bypassing everything the game is about and just going by the numbers. Yet how often do we see players who are afraid to play because they fear losing? If they ever get a sudden burst of excitement about trying some new strategy, the game has to be played on "drunk account" and on "free" mode.

The baseline ability (=rank) won't go away no matter what. It consists of game knowledge as well as analytical and visualization capability of our brains. On the other hand, will it increase? Is this another wrong-minded question and there is indeed purpose to play irrespective of performance?

There are clearly some gaps in your reasoning.

(More seriously, I'm having some trouble figuring out what you're trying to say).

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Occupy Babel!

Paraphrasing, I read it as the attitude reducing Go from a game of interesting strategic and tactical game to a number crunching exercise made up of ranks and wins / losses, and commenting that this was a bad thing.

If that was how it had been intended, I thought it was a really excellent post

1. You have certain ability in Go. Rank is derived from this ability. Your ability (rather than rank) means you'll win about 50% of games against same ability players.

2. 50% rule is a fact. If you win or lose a lot you'll get matched against stronger or weaker opponents respectively, so that winning chance will even out to 50%. Trying to get better in order to win more is thus meaningless.

3. Enjoying the game because of progress or winning seems strange to me.

It kind of depends on what you enjoy about the game. For example, one of the things that I like about go is feeling like I am learning new things. As a result, it is satisfying to finally master a technique you have been working on, or to handle a weak group well with sabaki, or any other difficult technique. I agree that I should certainly focus more on enjoying games, win or lose. Lately I've been losing a lot of games against stronger players, for example. There are many ways I can lose to a stronger player, such as getting into a complicated situation where I am more likely to be outread. In that you are saying that I should enjoy these losses because they are still go, I agree that I should be focusing more on the simple pleasure of the game. However, changing how one thinks about things at a base level is not easy. Additionally, it is also important to not lose the joy of learning new things, as mentioned above. Similarly, it is harder to enjoy a game where I know I made a lot of mistakes.

All in all: yes, it is definitely possible to be too competetive and focused on winning. Yes, I would prefer to enjoy losses more, as long as it didn't prevent me from also enjoying things like learning and winning. Do you have any suggestions for how to change paradigms like that?

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Someday I want to be strong enough to earn KGS[-].

If all events are "actualizations" of a certain set of prior probabilities, and enjoying "actualized probabilities" is a bad attitude, then if I enjoy any event I have a bad attitude.

... am I following your train of thought properly?

I disagree with the OP.

To say that the result is pre-determined... to me, just entirely undermines the effort that the players put into the game.

If everyone played the game so dispassionately, then sure, why bother rooting (sorry, not sure about this spelling, but no time to verify) for anyone.

(I know he said more than this, but I will have to wait until later before I can respond more, but this is what I had most wanted to say, anyway)

When you flip a coin the "result is predetermined" in the same way, with the same probability each time. But I still hope to win the coin toss, and feel pleased when I do. Probabilities are meaningful across broad populations (of games or people) and shouldn't be interpreted as suggesteding there is something predetermined about individual events.

I disagree that it is simply an exercise in probability. Yes, over time, you will probably win about 50% of your games (though on KGS I apparently have won 2/3 of my games all-time ( ) - so if you're improving, it very well could be more than 50%). However, that does not mean an individual game is simply a chance event.

Like you said, the only reason why your win rate will stay around 50% your whole life is that it becomes just plain boring mainly playing people who you are fairly certain to win against. It is only because we seek out games against players of equal strength that our win percentage stays at 50%. If every time you played your opponent was randomly selected from the set of all Go players, your win percentage be quite different depending on your skill.

However, because we do seek out players of equal strength to ourselves, I agree that win percentage is a rather meaningless statistic. Thus, I do not base my enjoyment of the game in it. Instead, I get enjoyment from,

• Playing a game
• Winning a game
• Improving

I do not improve to increase my win-percentage, because as you said that is meaningless. I want to improve because I love to learn, and because it increases my hypothetical win percentage in the "random opponent" model (i.e. I become stronger than more and more people).

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

Tell that to this guy:

At the technical level, the claims about ability and performance are false. You can play better than your ability or worse, depending on concentration, motivation and the like. You can even consistently fail to play to the level of your ability because you don't pay attention. So it's possible that someone loses to players of the same rank fifty percent of the time over many many games, but it really is true that his abilities are better than theirs.

You can put your foot down and insist that a player who wins more than his ability would indicate is impossible, and that this would just indicate that his ability was greater than we thought. But you can also insist that one six foot man is shorter than another because the first one slouches. Doesn't make it so.

We tell people that their ability just is their rank, because it's so often an act of self-deception to say "I'm ranked 4kyu but I'm really better than that." But when we do that, we're telling them a convenient myth.

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Occupy Babel!

I like to play craps and millions of people agree with me.

I have always found this 'enjoying to learn/improve' argument(s) weak.
Why? Because most of the time when I ask the person if they would still enjoy 'learning' if they never improve, they look confused and seem to realize than they would not. By the same token, when I ask people if they would still enjoy to improve if everybody around them improved at exactly the same speed - I get the same reaction.

My gut feeling is that we do enjoy learning and improvement, but only in context of measurable progress, i.e. pulling ahead and beating people we were losing against. So, in the nutshell, what we really enjoy, most of the time at our basic primal level is to prove our superiority over weaker players, and then overtake stronger players to prove our superiority over them too. Seems ugly, in our politically-correct and 'civilized' world, but still...

This is what I think.

PS>
Of course, there are exception. World would be a boring place if we were all the same, yes.
So no offense to anybody in particular.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

I would still enjoy improving even if everybody around me was improving at the same rate, because there are still lots of other people in the world I would be getting stronger than. But to your main point, yes, a large part of why I enjoy improving is to be stronger than others. I know you don't endorse this view, and maybe in the future it'll change, but it is my reason now.

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

I feel my ignorance in go when I watch a game of professionals, or much stronger players. I do not feel my ignorance when I play people of my own strength or thereabouts. At least I don't feel it that acutely.

But when I wish to learn and become stronger, I think about wanting to understand the professional games that I watch.

P.S. Wanting people to not compete and indulge primitive notions of superiority isn't political correctness, it's hippy-dippy BS. Perhaps you dislike both, but they're very different things.

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Occupy Babel!

I'm confused by what you mean. If I spent all day with a history book open in front of me, but couldn't tell you anything about the material in the book at the end of the day, I wouldn't say I had learned anything. If I spent all day staring at a bunch of geometric proofs but, a week later, couldn't tell you why a²+b²=c², I wouldn't say I had learned anything.

Likewise, if I spent a lot of time reading go books, leafing through tsumego, and kibitzing on KGS, but didn't improve as a player, I might - in a self-important mood - call what I was doing "studying", but I wouldn't call it "learning".

So if your question is "Would you enjoy spending lots of time studying, and never learning anything?" I would answer, "No, that would be ridiculously frustrating." But that can't get you to the conclusion that people don't enjoy learning!

Preemptive reply to possible quibble:

- I think being focused on winning and being focused on learning are contradictory. For example, if you're usually playing with influence-oriented style, your understanding of the game might be improved by playing territory-based game and vice versa. Someone who only wants to win plays moves that they are 100% sure about, like familiar joseki. I remember few stones ago when I started playing odd pincers just to understand them better and taking the kind of attitude that approaches don't necessarily need to be answered. Big thing about improvement is to challenge your own dogmas.



- Yes that's the logic. What we ought to enjoy are the things beyond winning.

- What I find fascinating is how little one's attitude actually matters. Over the past year my rank has been somewhere between 1.5k - 0.5k . I've played on all days of week, all times of day, all states of mind. If you'd wake me up at night, I'd probably still throw a game at 1k level. There's no use trying to cheat the odds. Only playing at the very best condition and circumstances might give you another half a stone in strength, but conditions and states of mind are ephemeral. True progress is elsewhere.

I have always found the old mmorpg categorization of killers, achievers, explorers and socializers was a good one to highlight the differences between people.

Explorers and socializers doesn't really fit your description at all. Socializers would very much prefer if everyone improved at the same (slow) pace as them as it would give more opportunities to have fun socializing. As for the explorer, progress is tracked by the experience itself more than the final result. The main reason for an explorer to want to gain rank is so that he can get to play more interesting games.

Glad to see you wrote "primitive notions of superiority". Unfortunately these primitive notions are ultimately responsible for most of the wars humankind has had to suffer, so hoping to rid ourselves of such notions is a noble idea. I've been fortunate to meet many strong professionals and been impressed with their attitudes regarding superiority. Though they may be strong go players most of them don't consider that that makes them superior people, they are quite humble in that respect.