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Post #41 Posted: Thu Sep 29, 2016 3:35 pm 
Honinbo
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:) :study:

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Post #42 Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 4:02 am 
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I went through a lot of trouble today to look at a pro game and then write what I was thinking. It took me an hour to go through the first 70 or so moves, and after that I got tired of thinking. It took almost twice as long to write down my thoughts. I won't do this very often, as this doesn't seem to be a great use of my studying time, but I thought it might help anyone interested in my progress to better understand my weaknesses. Here is a game, which I chose at random from the Go4Go collection. The moves I would have chosen are all marked with an A.



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commented pro game.sgf [9.94 KiB]
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Post #43 Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 4:25 am 
Oza
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I learn 5 things from this analysis:

1. You are as good in predicting pro moves as I am.
2. You were very focused on predicting how the pro would play. Have you tried this in your game? "How would a pro play?" I think you thought of moves in this game you wouldn't tink of in your own;
3. Your self assessment of your capabilities is pessimistic. Count again how often you agreed with the pro and include the "obvious" ones. Celebrate success, even when it seems trivial.
4. When the pro surprises you with a move, I think I have a bit more conceptuality in the bag to explain it. For example, when White connects instead of decending at the top, I think he sacrifices a few points to reduce Black's sente potential at either top left or top. Aji is a big theme in pro games.
5. But again, it could be I have more confidence in my capacity to analyze after the facts.

Nice one!


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Post #44 Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 4:55 am 
Oza
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Knotwilg wrote:
3. Your self assessment of your capabilities is pessimistic. Count again how often you agreed with the pro and include the "obvious" ones. Celebrate success, even when it seems trivial.
Yes, this occurred to me too, but then I thought: There has to be some reason I'm not a pro :lol:

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Post #45 Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2016 1:00 pm 
Oza
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I've just re-read the thread about why some people don't ever reach shodan, and it's interesting to note that most of the suggestions focused on attitude. Winning is not necessarily a matter of better technical skills, but rather often one of staying focused. In baseball they talk about keeping one's eye on the ball. In go, the ball isn't moving, but then again, instead of one ball, you have hundreds of stones, and you have to keep focused on the changing shapes for a long period of time without any lapses.

I've been thinking a lot about my attitude when playing, and how to improve it. Simple things first. Here are two questions to ask myself before each move:

1) did my opponent's last move affect a connection?
2) if my opponent's touches a stone in a close combat situation, what are the resulting liberty counts.

I think if I can do these two things consistently, I will eliminate most of my blunders, and that should improve my win rate.

Another suggestionm, passed along by Koosh, also focused on the opponent's moves - he say to ask yourself if your opponent's move is bad, or if it is even sente. He also reminds us that most moves do have a purpose, and they should not be dismissed lightly. I suppose the question could be:

3) what was the purpose of my opponent's move?

There are also two other aspects of the game that I would like to pay more attention to, but I'm not sure how: sente and fighting spirit.

I essentially only think about sente when it is utterly obvious, and I think that making it a more conscious element of my game would improve my play. I unfortunately don't yet have a clear plan how to go about doing it. I suppose I could ask myself every move if I think that my intended move is sente or not. I'm curious how other people have internalized this important concept.

Likewise, I would like to improve my fighting spirit or as John Fairbairn says, focus. He writes about a related concept kiai:
John Fairbairn wrote:
Although kiai means a yell, ultimately it's from martial arts and is about matching your opponent's ki (spirit; Chinese qi) with your own. In both martial arts and go that often means matching a strong attack with a tenacious or stubborn defence. It simply means you don't let your opponent overwhelm you, physically or psychologically.


Knotwilg also defines the term fighting spirit:

Knotwilg wrote:
Fighting spirit embodies:
- not accepting defeat and finding ways to come back
- not expecting easy victory and keep putting pressure on the opponent
- critically assessing the opponent's play, in particular whether it should be answered (see how I avoid "sente")
- sometimes even deliberately ignoring his play in order to get the (mental) upper hand (see how I avoid "tenuki")
- not backing off in a fight because you don't know what will happen if you continue while backing off shows a clear loss
- overall the willingness to confront the opponent head on and not just desire either a cruising victory or a shameful loss


I think that my path to better fighting spirit is to remind myself that I cannot use my untrained eye to look at a go board. What I mean is that one's everyday emotions can be misleading, and when the situation gets difficult, when a group gets cut off or surrounded, I can't look at it with your man on the street eyes, but rather with my go player eyes, the ones that look for weaknesses in the opponent's position and search for the tesujis to take advantage of those weaknesses. Likewise, when my opponent is on the ropes, I mustn't assume that he will just fall over all by himself, but rather that he too will fight like a tiger and that I must beware of his claws.

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Post #46 Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2016 3:06 pm 
Oza
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One of the things I've been doing is going through pro games, and trying to develop the habit while so doing of asking myself the two above questions before each move: a) did the other guy's move affect any connections and b) if it touched a stone in a close combat situation, how many libs do each group still have? I'm not going to go to the trouble of posting my analysis of the game, because that takes more time than it's worth, but I did notice a few things about my play while doing this.

First of all, I got slow. I was looking at the game on my phone, a great game by the way, the 4th game of the Meijin title match between Iyama Yuta and Takao Shinji, and the screen kept going black because I was taking more than a minute to look at each move. Sometimes a lot more.

Second, I noticed that my comments in my previous post about my fighting spirit were on the money. I was constantly giving up stones for dead, only to see the players revive them (though sometimes they were only being revived to be sacrificed better). In any case, I am still looking at the go board with my man on the street eyes. I do however have a hypothesis about what I am doing wrong that needs to change: My attention is on the stones, and it ought to be on the gaps between them.

Lastly, I noticed that my concentration was shot well before the game was over. Aside from improving my mental stamina, I need to learn to use my time resources wisely.

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Post #47 Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2016 10:25 pm 
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Hi daal,

Congrats on your on-going self-diagnosis and self-discoveries! :)
Quote:
I got slow.
Perfectly natural and expected, esp. for these levels.
5-minute sleep time is vastly insufficient for pro moves. :)
Quote:
Second... were on the money.
Congrats. But, the conclusion seems off...
Quote:
My attention is on the stones, and it ought to be on the gaps between them.
To look at the stones at the expense of the libs is bad, but the inverse is equally bad and not the remedy: to see only the libs and miss the stones -- over-compensation in the opposite direction. The path forward is actually to deal with both the stones and the libs, plus more. :)

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Post #48 Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2016 11:30 pm 
Oza
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I guess stones shouldn't be ignored, but that's not the problem, because nobody ignores stones. When I say I should pay attention to the gaps, I don't mean liberties , but rather all the space between stones that are not Idirectly connected because this is where the weaknesses are. You are familiar with the problem of people viewing a moyo as their territory? my problem is similar. I see space that seems enclosed when I should be seeing gaps and opportunities.

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Post #49 Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2016 12:22 am 
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Ah, yes. :mrgreen:

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Post #50 Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2016 11:16 am 
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As usual, there are a pile of go books competing for my attention. For a while I had been reading Masao Kato's book about the Chinese Opening, and also going through a few selected sections of Youngsun Yoon's 100 Tips for Amateur Players, but I stopped, feeling that I wanted to work on something more fundamental.

In another thread, Robert Jasiek suggested that I study positional judgement, as it is a skill that is relatively easy to learn, and one that I have largely neglected. It turns out that I have two books about positional judgement - one by Cho Chikun called Positional Judgement / High-Speed Game Analysis and the other, a book of commented games called The best of Kido: The Art of Positional Analysis. The Cho book seems largely to be about counting, and it is relatively straightforward. The Kido book consists of games commented on by professionals, with an eye on positional judgement among other things.

My plan is to play through the games in the Kido book, first memorizing the first 100 moves, and then replaying it and examining connection and liberty issues and analyzing selected positions for positional judgement following Cho's method as best I can. I will also look at the positional judgement in the Kido book after having memorized the game.

This lets me continue my plan to increase my awareness of connection and liberty issues while also learning a new skill and immersing myself in professional play to boot.

Here's the first game. It was only 97 moves long and then white resigned. It was actually pretty easy to memorize.
Attachment:
IMG_20161013_200559461.jpg
IMG_20161013_200559461.jpg [ 75.39 KiB | Viewed 8094 times ]


For extra credit: The reason white resigned was that that dead looking black group can live, thus cutting off all the lower right white stones. It's white to play. Can you see how?

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Post #51 Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2016 4:06 am 
Oza
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I often speak of not being able to judge the outcome of a situation, and am pointed to positional judgement. Today I came across an example in Cho Chikun's book on positional judgement that might make my meaning clearer. In what is apparently a modified version of one of his games (I found a similar game in GoGoD, but Cho seems to have simplified the bottom right for his book) Cho asks us to consider the proper reaction to a theoretical black invasion at the bottom left 3-3 point:

Attachment:
Cho1.jpg
Cho1.jpg [ 133.28 KiB | Viewed 8125 times ]

He then shows two possible reactions, one good for white, one bad.
Attachment:
Cho1a.jpg
Cho1a.jpg [ 132.59 KiB | Viewed 8125 times ]

Attachment:
Cho1b.jpg
Cho1b.jpg [ 146.98 KiB | Viewed 8125 times ]


So here is what I'm talking about. I am able to read out the first outcome, and although I can't read the second, I can guess that the jist of blocking on the other side leads to white getting an outside position with b getting a small life on the bottom. What I am not able to do is to say that one is clearly better than the other. How to learn this?

Here is Cho's reasoning:
Cho's comment is that the first variation betrays a weak attitude. White is forced to reply to black's moves, and still has a possible invasion to deal with. In the second variation, Cho says white's lower side is ruined, but he is reconciled to this as black has had to struggle for life. Although I don't doubt the truth of this, I also don't understand the reasoning.

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Post #52 Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2016 6:55 am 
Judan

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daal, if it's any consolation, making that judgement is not easy for me either. Though I will say I have been trained in "fighting spirit" to by default think the first variation is submissive and consider it lower down the pecking order of "likely goodness" than the descent (of course in some situations it could be best, but less often than descent). First of all a few things you need to know/see when judging these results:
- in the first black has the clamp atari as a large gote endgame move to take a chunk of the the corner from white (how much that chunk is can depends on the ko that follows), so white's corner is considerably smaller than it might appear;
- white can play 1st line hane threatening to take the 2 stones which prevents the clamp, but black needn't answer (and the taking or saving the 2 stones is another big endgame move next);
- the descent opens up black's left side territory, in this game the group is still essentially alive so it's not so much about making it weaker, but in other situations attacking that group later can be very important (though I have a tiny niggling feeling about if it is actually 100% alive if white later gets strong in the centre and then plays 2-10 on left). About 5 points difference here;
- in second white's corner is totally alive with about 8 points, in first it's not actually alive and you can't say it has 8 points;
- in first maybe black can invade the lower side so you can't call that solid points, note the 6-2 point threatens to pull out the 3-3 stone and that can help living. Black's checking extension on the lower right is important here (and the strength of the group it belongs to).
- in the second white gets a solid wall which helps the centre a bit, e.g. linking up to white's group there
- in the second black has maybe 5 points on the lower side, but it's not alive yet, but neither is white's 10-3 stone which could get separated (has no extension to right but a solid black group there). This is actually one of the most important aspects to me and the weakness of that white stone is what makes me uneasy to say this is clearly good for white.

P.S. In the variation where white descends after the peep black can also kosumi instead of 3rd line crawl (which allows white to take back the corner) so that he gets the corner and white blocks on the relatively small lower side. I wonder if this might be better for black, it really depends on what happens with k3 in Cho's sequence. Also instead of the atari black might think about this attachment: move 41 in http://ps.waltheri.net/database/game/61584/


Last edited by Uberdude on Fri Oct 14, 2016 7:36 am, edited 3 times in total.

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Post #53 Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2016 7:24 am 
Oza
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Let me see if I can make the judgment myself. I only looked at the picture.

Typically the 3 moves to consider are blocking at the 3rd line on either side of the stone, one making an empty triangle, or descending to the second line and keep the stones disconnected. The "empty triangle" block pays attention to the corner but leaves aji, the other block allows for a reduction in sente but strengthens the bottom and the descent puts pressure on the left side.

Looking at the overall position, White has more territory (3 corners) but a weakish group in the middle and an open position at the bottom. Black's territory looks not as big but he's strong overall (thick). Black's 3-3 invasion looks like a probe before invading the bottom.

Considering all this, I would go for the "soft" block which creates extra strength at the lower side. Now let's have a look :)


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Post #54 Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2016 12:09 pm 
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I would have picked the first variation too, daal. And I don't understand why the second one is "better" either.

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Post #55 Posted: Sun Oct 16, 2016 6:11 pm 
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Courtesy of Baduk Cap and Go Eye (Any errors are my fault)...
Position 1. 'Dude's 2-10 is B-10 here and his 6-2 is F2.
Click Here To Show Diagram Code
[go]$$Bc
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . X O O O . . . . . . . . . O . . . . |
$$ | . X X O X O . . O . . . . . . . O O . |
$$ | . O O X . . . . . , . . . X . X X O . |
$$ | . . O X . X . . X . X . . . . . . X . |
$$ | . O O X . X . . . . . . . . . . O X . |
$$ | . X X O O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . X O . . . O . . O . X . . . . X . . |
$$ | . . X . O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . X , X . . |
$$ | . . X . . . . . O . . . . . . X O . . |
$$ | . . X . . . . . . . . . . . . . O . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O . . . |
$$ | . . X X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . X O . . . . . . . . . . . . O . . . |
$$ | . X O O . O . . . , . . . X . , O . . |
$$ | . O X O . . . . . O . X . . . X O . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X X . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

Position 2
Click Here To Show Diagram Code
[go]$$Bc
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . X O O O . . . . . . . . . O . . . . |
$$ | . X X O X O . . O . . . . . . . O O . |
$$ | . O O X . . . . . , . . . X . X X O . |
$$ | . . O X . X . . X . X . . . . . . X . |
$$ | . O O X . X . . . . . . . . . . O X . |
$$ | . X X O O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . X O . . . O . . O . X . . . . X . . |
$$ | . . X . O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . X , X . . |
$$ | . . X . . . . . O . . . . . . X O . . |
$$ | . . X . . . . . . . . . . . . . O . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O . . . |
$$ | . . X X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . O O . . . . . . . . . . . . O . . . |
$$ | . . . O O O O . . , . . . X . , O . . |
$$ | . O X O X X O X . O . X . . . X O . . |
$$ | . . O X X . X . . . . . . . . . X X . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

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Post #56 Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 7:18 am 
Oza
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ez4u wrote:
Courtesy of Baduk Cap and Go Eye (Any errors are my fault)...
Position 1. 'Dude's 2-10 is B-10 here and his 6-2 is F2.
Sorry Dave, I don't understand your post at all...

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Post #57 Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 7:48 am 
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ez4u used Baduk Cap and Go Eye to transcribe your pictures into diagrams.

When Uberdude referred to "2-10", it means B10 on the diagram, and when he referred to "6-2", it means F2.


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Post #58 Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 12:40 pm 
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I too figured ez4u was trying to suggest figure 2 is better than figure 1, and left it as en exercise for the reader to figure out why. (I still don't see why.)

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Post #59 Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 1:28 pm 
Judan

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I didn't think ez4u was making any judgement on the positions, just helpfully converting them to diagrams (and yes he translated my coordinates correctly).


Last edited by Uberdude on Tue Oct 18, 2016 1:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post #60 Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2016 4:26 pm 
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OK, It's Cho who says the second one is better, and pretty much leaves it as an exercise for the reader.

It's like Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go, which I find as Kageyama generally saying, "Do things this way... except when you shouldn't." Oh, and you have to figure out when you shouldn't. Good luck.

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