I ran into this video recently which I think can be highly motivating for those who may be frustrated by their lack of improvement for some period of time. Not just for Go, but for any skill. People spend so much time trying to figure out what's the best way to study this or review that with Go, but I think having the right mindset and the drive to do it all is just as, if not more important.

Anyways, here's the video: http://the99percent.com/videos/7061/Jos ... lf-Failing

I've found that one of the main pleasures I derive from go is not only studying the game, and slowly getting better at it, but also studying how to study. Improvement is a facinating subject, so thank you very much for the link.

Here are some thoughts I had when watching the lecture:
- "You can only improve if you keep the skill out of the autonomous phase", I guess interms of playing go this means consciously trying out new things in your games, learning a new concept through study, and then trying this out while playing. At any rate, this seems to confirm why there are people who are 'stuck' at a certain rank and just play hudnreds or even thousands of games, and don't really improve anymore. They are playing more on autopilot, than they are consciously applying new things in their games.

-"The experts in a certain area spend more time outside of their comfort zone and study themselves failing." One immediate thing that comes to mind is me always playing the same moves in response to something on the board, even though I know something else might work too, or be even better, but I can't read it all out, or I don't sufficiently know the folow-ups, so I play the safe move that I know works (more or less). Which is absolutely ridiculous, as you can only learn the correct follow-ups by failing a few times and learning why a certain continuation is incorrect.

Very interesting.

I must admit I tend to go along with Magicwand and I think DuskEagle said it once. In order to get better you simply play players who are much stronger than you and always strive to play at a disadvantage. If you look at win/loss rates of nearly all players, most players want their win rate to be bigger than than loss rate. Go here for evidence:

http://www.online-go.com/players.php

There are players who are bouncing around 8k and declare that they are not improving and yet, they hardly ever player anyone stronger than 7k. My theory is that a strong player will expose my weaknesses far quicker than a player of my own standard. I think this may be more about "outside comfort zone" than experimenting with a few moves.

There is a price to pay of course. Very few people can stomach a continuous stream of defeats. From the other point of view I have found very strong players extremely supportive - many quite like the opportunity to display what they can do. Although one or two are very touchy about rank.

Interesting video. I have not read his book but a search of the net leads here. From here we are pointed to the work of Anders Ericsson, who seems to be the main inspiration for Joshua Foer. In Ericsson's work there is a strong emphasis on "deliberate practice", which is a special term for directed, mainly self-study designed to improve specific skills in small steps with clear, rapid feedback. There is a lot more to it than that, but you will have to read the papers or books to get a better understanding.

A significant part of the seminal research was done with chess players. There are some interesting findings in there.

_________________
Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

Or perhaps here.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Although I can image clear rapid feedback in, e.g. Golf, Bowling, Basketball, ..., I have no idea how this looks in Go (or chess). Any hints?

I mean, while doing tsumego it's simply a matter of right or wrong. But when I try out some fuseki I do neither have clear nor instant feedback, or do I?

Cheers,
Michael

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Go is easy: don't play bad moves.

I just found my first chess paper. So let's check!

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

Thanks, Dave; were you one of the authors? (Could not find "David")

How about the idea that any training in go will directly improve your quality of life?

There are so many things happening on so many levels.

Not to mention that Go teaches you how to avoid bs and manage it when forced to deal with it.

There are many many people that I dont like that I am forced to deal with(95% of everyone I deal with at work?) and go teaches me how to minimize my time dealing with these people. I consider that invaluable in that Go teaches you how to win arguments and avoid them altogether.

I train in go everyday as often as I can, the results are worth the time.

That is not evidence. Most games on OGS are not paired by the players themselves, but you can be challenged in the ladders w/o option to deny the challenge or you have to play the whole league in the tournaments. Most players I know on OGS do participate to these kind of events - you have a rather limited number of possible games otherwise. That is as a 2k or 1k player you play mostly against weaker players, whether you like it or not. Tournament and ladder games are usually even = under-handicapped so you have to expect a top-heavy win percentage.

When I want to play a piece of music with comfortable ease, I first memorize it while playing it badly (it helps to not have to look which note is next and how to sound it), then I play it far too fast, several times. Nothing complicated, I just set the metronome to tick a little quicker and try to keep up. And it sometimes helps to go over the parts where I trip up most a few times extra (still while going much too fast).

If I keep it up long enough, playing at normal speed will seem laughably easy, and in fact is.

I guess the analogy with go is going to some place which offers a lot of games against opponents who are too strong for you, and always taking too few handicap stones against them.

Hm, though maybe it's an idea to go through a collection of tsumego too quickly. If I can solve most inside 90 seconds, try it in 60, something like that. The failure rate jumps up, but if I can still solve about half of them inside the time limit, I still get that partial success vibe.

There's nothing stopping people making direct challenges to very strong players or offering severe handicaps to lower ranked players. It seems that a majority players don't favour this approach and the desire to win at least half the time is very strong. That's fair enough. losing all the time isn't to everyone's taste.

What's stopping them is the fact that much stronger players aren't likely to accept the challenges are they? As for offering large handicaps to weaker players, I'm not so sure about how beneficial to improvement that is.

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"There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level." -- Bruce Lee

What do you think, people deliberately challenge only weaker players to make their stats look nicer?

If you are in the top10 of a ladder, you may have only one or two games with players better placed, while you are constantly challenged by 3-5 from below. If you join a tournament, you are 2nd or 3rd in a group of ten. join three tournaments, be in the ladder and have 5 private games with even players. And there you are, 5 games up, say 10 games even, 25 down, if you win 1 game up, 5 even games and 20 of the games down there you are with a 2/3 win rate, looking like a moron but doing nothing to deserve it. Many may prefer proper handicap or playing only even games (against similarly ranked players) if left with the choice. But luckily they don't have the choice most of the time, I believe it is one of the great features of OGS that most of your games against stronger players are under-handicapped. Add handicap to ladder and tournaments and you will have 50% win rates, but a lot less challenges and fun. I mean, you help players to overcome their ok plateaus by severely putting them out of their comfort zones but instead of gratitude you are accused of being lazy yourself

This may be because OGS has a culture all to its own but I regularly challenge people who are 7 or 8 stones better than me with a handicap of only a couple of stones. I rarely get refused.

Large handicaps to weak players. Well as I'm rubbish at handicap go and I've got to start somewhere. In fact many "weaker" players have just busted their rank through timeouts so it makes for an interesting game. My record at the moment is giving two stones to a Japanese 1 Dan player.... he's winning but his background comments are really useful.

I don't know if this has been posted yet, but Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, is always a real inspiration to me. Especially the part where he talks about the brick walls we all face.