:b173: raises the side question: Doesn't it suck that white didn't get to play :b173: as a ko threat at least?

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Wcm142 Randomly saying white tries throwing it in as sente back at 142.
$$ | . . . O . . O X X
$$ | . . . . . . O X .
$$ | . . . . . . X O X
$$ | . . . . . . O O X
$$ | . O . . . . . . X
$$ | 3 X O . O . X . X
$$ | . X O , . . . . X
$$ | . X X O . X . O O
$$ | . X O O . . . . .
$$ | b . . . . . . . .
$$ | . . X . . . . . O
$$ | . X . . O . . X O
$$ | a 1 O O . O O O X
$$ | . . X X . X X O X
$$ | . . . . . . X X O
$$ | . . . . . . . . .
$$ +-------------------[/go]

It does seem to kill locally despite 'a' and 'b' good moves for black, but at least a bit messily. It's interesting to read.

No longer convinced taking notes has meaning. My mistaken impression that I hadn't read/understood the books carefully arose because I had a period where I had more opportunity to read go books than to play, so I read far more than was useful to me at that point (roughly, the first half of 2011, when I was 10k-4k). Revisiting the books later, when my reading was appropriate to the content, I couldn't understand why it seemed like I was reading a completely different book. But the problem wasn't poor retention or carelessness. It was as though I read Baudelaire, loved him, memorized his best poems, and then later took language classes and realized that he was not a nonsense poet but a French poet. (Taking notes on "Opening Theory Made Easy", however, was helpful because it made it easier to memorize the twenty principles, mentally rehearse them during games, and slow down my opening.) -- However, since I just finished typing up the notebook that contained the notes in question, why not?

Introduction – Step One: Play 50-100 games; try to capture/cut enemy stones, try to save/connect friendly stones; keep an open mind, experiment. Step Two: barriers – when you stop improving and you play for fun. (The problem with “playing for fun”: it can cause desperation if you don’t improve over a two-months-to-two-years time frame.) Step Three: If you do not know what to study or how to study it, Kageyama to the rescue.

Ladders: Read ladders until they’re easy. It’s the simplest way to learn to read long sequences. If you really find it difficult, set the ladder up on a board at close distances and move it out a little further each day. If you get a headache, you need to see an optometrist. [My own side-observation: this is the same advice you’ll see in any field… if a basic task is too hard for you, break it down into something even easier that you can manage. If you can’t do ten push-ups do one, if you can’t do one push-up do it on your knees.] Reward one: confidence. “Habit is a frightening thing.” The speed with which your reading improves will reassure you. Reward two: ability to read out complex ladder blocks. (Two side points: if you catch a stone in a ladder, capture as soon as possible, ladder breaker or no ladder breaker. If you play a ladder breaker and your opponent captures, “Irresolution is a vice” – follow through on your threat.)

Nets: If you want to capture stones, hold out two fingers: “Can I catch it in a ladder? Can I catch it in a net?” Nets are always better than ladders (because the ladder breaker is effectively a free move). Tight nets work better than loose nets, even if the bad aji of the loose net seems to lead nowhere at first. Of two tight nets, pick the firmer one (the net that removes the most liberties). – Main lesson: Stronger players cannot afford to neglect elementary skills like capturing stones in ladders and nets. If they do decide they are too good to read, if they muddle along, and try to capture weaker players’ groups on instinct, then when they face stronger players they will come face-to-face with fuzzy reading and recoil in fear. Our brains can sharpen or degenerate, depending on whether we give them good practice.

Cutting and Connecting: Always play fundamentals unless you’re desperate. When you learn go, you start by learning the fundamentals. When you are strong, go back and study the fundamentals again.

1. “The cut is the only move.”
2. Forcing the opponent to connect before attacking the (heavy) shape is not a fundamental move if the cut is good. “Don’t peep where you can cut; cut where you can cut.”
3. Even a moron connects against a peep.
4. At the beginning of the game, don’t even look to see what your opponent’s threat was – connect the ko first, deal with the cut later.
5. Even if you can’t stay connected, block against a cut.
6. Don’t play to preserve territory, play to preserve the connection between your stones.
7. You can’t win just by living and defending territory. When your groups are shred into pieces but your opponent stays connected, you make fewer points per stone.

The Stones Go Walking: “Go is the kind of game in which you are an expert if you can just keep on making ordinary moves.” Amateurs make “The most nonsensical moves imaginable.” Walking seems ordinary, effortless; it has a natural rhythm and momentum. The development of your stones should be like that. On one example of unnatural development: “Play the same move with no regard to the surrounding conditions, and this is what will happen.”

The Struggle to Get Ahead: “Try playing moves you understand, for a change. It will make the game twice as interesting.”

Territory and Spheres of Influence: There are basic fixed percentages of ingredients that go into soup stock; if you try to be clever you get caught out; if you don’t measure at all your soup will taste lousy. Likewise with territory and spheres of influence. If you ignore the fixed percentages of territory and influence and play willfully, your game will be off; if you don’t even know what they are, it will be a disaster. Understanding the difference between a territory and a sphere of influence is a fundamental. – View the board with detachment. The opponent can almost always steal “your” territory, and even make some of his own. You may even voluntarily give up “your” corner, if the thickness will help you attack on the sides. But even as you view your sphere of influence with detachment, you should be prepared to see whatever comes inside it as a target. Constructing large spheres of influence is more efficient than a cramped, territorial style, but not absolutely so. Specifically, you must watch for the balance of power and territory; where your opponent is strong, improbably deep invasion will work out very nicely for him, while you will struggle to attack, or to use the stones gained from attacking. – Using thickness properly when your opponent has emphasized solid territory requires chasing down his weak groups and invasion points, wherever on the board they may be. Essentially, the player with power needs to figure out a sufficiently ambitious plan such that the balance of territory is redressed, and then make sure that the power he has is sufficient to the task.

Life and death: It can be nerve-racking to play with L&D on the line – even if prudent play by both sides should avoid such a drastic outcome. Just don’t play as thought you’re sure you die in any event (with careless risks on all sides) or with desperate caution. Elementary life and death situations are not the ones with the shortest sequences, the most common tesuji, or the like; they are the ones where the fundamentals work. First tackle the eye space (expanding or reducing), then occupy the central point. If you are true to fundamentals, elementary problems unravel into their elements and anxiety and dread are averted. – Eye-space expanding moves have a double character: they bring life and are good endgame. If you obediently reply to every move because it is good endgame, the opponent lives in sente! You must as a rule only respond when the status is still unsettled, making your block sente. – Breaking through an encirclement is far better than having to live… and besides, the terror of dying is more harmful than death itself. You need L&D to have confidence in your invasions.

How to Study Joseki: “Moves that depart from joseki are usually bad and deserve to be punished.” “[Most players] exhaust themselves so much in worrying about josekis that [later in the game] they are in no condition to win.” The difference between the genuine value of joseki themselves and the clear futility of the joseki-centric approach to Go lies in the way amateurs study (“study”) joseki.

1. Learning the moves is not studying joseki.
2. The reason for a move is its meaning. If you can convince yourself you know why a stone is where it is, you have studied something.
3. Joseki moves that work locally may suck globally. Do not, for instance, choose variations that end on an extension (for your opponent) that also functions as a pincer against another corner. Do not start a fighting joseki in an enemy sphere of influence.

Good Shape and Bad: “If you do not feel the same tightening in your chest as when you close your eyes and picture the face of a lover, you do not love good shape enough.”

Proper and Improper: “Knowledge without love is a hollow echo.” “Quiet, beautiful moves” – they allow fierce fighting later and can’t go sour. General point – don’t forget that fundamentals apply to strategy as well as tactics. Thus the contact move bending over a stone is a firm move, but so is the cap; connecting stones is firm, but so is linking groups, etc. “Those who are forever trying to play efficiently place their stones as far apart as they can. This is why they miss so many key points.”

Tesuji: Study tesuji to feel the pulse; develop reading to make sure there is a continuation from the initial move.