I am KGS 1K since over 2 years now and I hit a wall especially with improving my reading ability. I am doing a lot of tsumego of various levels of difficulty but I am not making progress or maybe very very slow progress.

Is there a method about improving reading ability rather than just doing a lot of tsumego because it does not help me that much anymore. When facing Dan level tsumego (Chinese or Korean ratings) it is too hard for me. At best I can solve japanese high Dan tsumego (graded go problems for Dan players 1 and 4) but they are often easier than 1K - 1D Chinese tsumego that you can find on 101weiqi.com or others Chinese or Korean sites.

How did you Dan players improve your reading ability to be able to read high level tsumego like the 4D+ on 101weiqi, or some of the difficult Shikatsu Miyoki tsumego or anything of that level ?

If you have any tips or books you recommend...

Thank you

1) improve your understanding

2) learn the theory of tactical reading

3) learn dynamic reading (with changing aims)

4) learn strategic reading

5) learn more techniques, tesujis of tactical reading

If you ask in the books forum, I may tell you suitable books.

Maybe read some books on fundamentals?

There is a good book about it http://senseis.xmp.net/?LessonsInTheFundamentalsOfGo

Take your time when studying the book, one chapter a day and use a real board.

Take a month brake, literary don't study, play or think about it.

At your level, it is likely that one problem with reading is not knowing good candidate moves. This can be remedied by improving your fundamental knowledge. Nearly every amateur has gaps in fundamental knowledge.

As for reading improvement, I can heartily recommend this book by Segoe: http://senseis.xmp.net/?TheBookToIncrea ... rengthAtGo

Good luck!

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Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

My friend told me that the difference between Kyu and Dan is:
Kyu and some new Dan players ability to play are not stable. It means sometime you play as a lower kyu cause Kyu usualle play by sense not reason. So don't be scare if you thing some time you move is very silly.(Me too LoL)

So first of all before you play a move you must calm down and tell yourself to play by reason.

Second, do tsumego is not help to play by reason but study kifu is another way to improve ability to play by reason.

Could you quantify: 'a lot' of tsumego. One person's a lot might be another person's not enough. Also, how often do you play games? Do you play blitz or long games?

Do you have a complete mastery of all the standardL&D positions, and all the standard tesuji? Can you solve all the diagrams on the two James Davies books on sight? If not then perhaps you are not ready for tsumego at the level you are attempting, simply because the key points do not junp out at you and you waste too much time on points which have a low probability of working. At a high dan level this may not be true as the problem will require original thinking, but at the low dan level they will often be solvable with standard moves looked at from a different perspective.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Thank you everybody for your answers.

Dante, by a lot of tsumego I mean around 20-50 per day, nearly everyday. I do more or less depending of the difficulty of the book I am reading. Right now I am doing this one: http://detail.bookuu.com/2456748.html I do around 80-90% right depending of the chapters but I guess I don't solve them quickly enough. It is intermediate level, at least 5-1 Kyu (KGS). The first book is much easier but even if I am able to solve most of the tsumego of the 2nd book, the third book is still too hard, I can solve only 10-20% !

DrStaw you are right, I am attempting tsumego which are too difficult for me. After doing the Graded Go Problems for Dan Players (4th volume) which is a supposed to be a High Dan book I thought I would be able to solve others High Dan Tsuemgo but I was very disapointed to find it was not the case. I might try the Segoe's book that Bill recommended.

Robert, I know which book you are talking about and I might order it as well. To have a method about reading should be very helpful. I think 2 keys to improve reading ability: to have a systematic method and problems with a progressive difficulty. In most books I have the difficulty is not well adjusted, easy problems are too easy and hard problems often too hard. So, after I solve the easy and medium I miss a bridge to solve the harder problems. Switching from a book to another might help but still...

How many moves can you read ahead at 1k?

I can solve problems where you have to read 10+ moves but in a game I think that I do not read more than 2-3 moves most of the time. I play relatively fast games on KGS (10 to 25min per player) so there is not much time to read. It would be better to play with 1 hour or more but on internet it is difficult. Even if you are relatively good at solving tsumego if you do not take the time to read in games it will not make any difference.

Is this difficulty internal (self-imposed) or external (insufficient time in your busy schedule) ?
All my serious games (online or IRL) are on slow time settings.
My KGS and IGS games typically average 1.5 to 2+ hours (4 hours very rare; less than 5% ? )
US Open is 90 mins. initial for each player, plus over-time.
I have to be patient and lucky enough to meet like-minded people online.
Despite today's McBlitz Go, they do exist.

Well I'm sort of around your level. Maybe two ranks weaker. I can't typically read 10 move problems accurately. I typically do problems around 5 moves. I also can only read like 3 moves ahead in the game due to the pressure and I typically make mistakes all the time in reading what my opponents next move will be.

I'd say if you can read 10 moves well and only 2-3 moves in a game then my first instinct is to say you need to try and read more in a game. Use more of your time. Even with 10-25 minutes times there is still byomi. As long as that's 30 seconds then that should be more than enough to read further than 2-3 moves ahead. I noticed in the AlphaGo match even though Lee knew where he was going to move, he was still thinking ahead and trying to use all of his time to play the game. It's something I want to focus on as well as being able to read further and faster because I'm a slow reader as well.

The only other idea I had was to somehow set a timer that beeps every 10-30 seconds and try to read every problem as fast as possible. This would stress your mind a bit being under time pressure and force you to push yourself. But I'm not sure where I would get a timer like that that I can set to go off regularly.

I don't know if anyone else has any other ideas on reading faster or reading longer besides the basic do more problems.

EdLee I meant external. If we are at the same level +/- 1 stone, we could play long games together. I can play 1 long/serious game once a month, in the weekend. If others are interested we might be able to schedule games here. I would like to play 2k to 1D KGS player in long games (1h+ per player). It could be interesting to play the same player(s) 1x per month and see how it goes. If one of the player lose 2-3 games in a row, we could decrease or increase the handicap and we could also explain here how we made the progress, what we changed in our training methods, the books we read, etc.

Temp, I decided to restart my tsumego book with a time limit of 3min per exercise, aiming at a minimum of 10 exercises per day. If I cannot found the solution I will skip the exercise and count it as wrong with a mention for "time out". My rate of success will drop but it might give me a more accurate idea of my reading level. Plus, once you do a book again, you can really know if you made progress because sometimes when doing a problem for the third or fourth time, I still make a mistake despite doing it right before but I might have rush to the solution within 30 seconds or less compared to 5-10 minutes to solve it the first few times.