I've recently spent a bit of time thinking about the Enneagram and how it might relate to go. The Enneagram is a way of classifying personalities that has been around a long time but is currently very trendy, at least in my social circles. It suggests that people can be broadly categorized into nine types, though there are "wings" and subtypes that offer a bit more nuanced classification if one wishes to delve into it.

Unlike tests like the Meyers-Briggs that divide personality up into several axes and test them individually, the Enneagram takes a more holistic approach. The literature typically defines a basic fear, basic desire, and key motivations for each type. It is also highly focused on how the types interact with one another, so it is more concerned with relationships than tests that look at the individual in isolation. You can see a list of all nine types here (https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-descriptions/), and if you're curious enough to explore your own type there is a free test here (https://www.eclecticenergies.com/enneagram/test).

Like all personality tests and systems the Enneagram probably suffers from over-generalization, but I have found it helpful in thinking about my own tendencies. I am, as far as I can tell, a type nine--the Peacemaker. Type 9's can in fact be good mediators, but they also crave peace within themselves. As such, they can be prone to sloth. This is more than just laziness; it is a strong desire to avoid internal tension through withdrawal and inaction. This can certainly be apparent in my relationship to the game of go - I can use the focus afforded by the game to avoid other responsibilities. When I use the game in this way, my play and overall mental health both suffer. It also probably encourages my tendency to read a lot but avoid real disciplined study. This undoubtedly inhibits my growth in the game. On the other side, healthy nines can be serene, patient, and deeply connected with themselves and others. When I play go from this state, the rhythmic nature of the stones and exchange of self with my opponent can be deeply fulfilling.

But I'm not just interested in how my personality type affects my motivations for playing the game; I'm also wondering how it comes out in my play on the board. Personality type is not, of course, the sole (or even primary) determining factor in my play, but I do think it has an impact. Nines tend to be very instinctual, and while I can spend a great deal of time analyzing a position I have difficulty actually making a move unless it "feels right." In fact, if reading out a situation is at the edge of my ability, I can find myself giving up and playing the instinctive move without looking too deep. This is partly just a bad habit, but I think it can also be my slothful tendency showing through. I tend to want to play a balanced game, neither attacking too much nor being too defensive. I think my desire for a balanced approach may also be rooted in my personality; harmony is something I greatly value.

Thinking of go and the Enneagram together has also made me wonder if I can identify the "types" that are evident in some famous professional players. Perhaps this would give me an idea of who I should study; certain styles might be more compatible than others with my personality. I am no expert in the Enneagram and even less of an expert of the psyches of professional go players, but here are a few categorizations I think make sense:

Lee Chang-ho looks to me like a type five, "The Investigator." The five desires to be capable and competent, and to analyze situations deeply to protect themselves from threats in the environment. They tend to find one thing to study deeply and try to master it, and this seems to fit with my understanding of Lee's devotion to calculation and deep reading.

Kitani Minoru strikes me as a type eight, "The Challenger." This type looks to be self-reliant, and often has a deep need to go against the status quo. I think this fits Kitani not only because of his involvement in the Shin Fuseki movement, but also the way he changed his approach again as its principles were more widely adopted. I also remember a move in one of the Kamakura commentaries where Kitani remarked that the Meijin would disapprove in his self-commentary. It seems to me that he took great pleasure that his success came while flouting conventional wisdom, and his play always struck me as very stubborn.

Go Seigen seems like type one, "The Reformer." Type ones are always striving to improve things and often have perfectionist tendencies. They strive to overcome adversity, and will often choose to take the hard path rather than the easy way out. This trait seems evident to me in Go's life and in his play on the board: he seems like the person who would unfailingly play the "right" move regardless of how hard that would make the situation. Of course, his unparalleled ability meant that his definition of what was right was often different than those around him, but he was uncompromising in his principled approach to the game.

Ke Jie might be a type three, "The Achiever." Type threes are ambitious but also very image conscious and are often simultaneously successful and well-liked. This strikes me as describing Ke, and his involvement in fashion as well as go seems to speak to his concern with his image. So too did his initial reaction to the ascendancy of computers to the peak of the game: he seemed to take it harder than many of his contemporaries and wanted to avoid future match-ups.

Looking for someone who shares my own type, I settled on Iyama Yuta. His games have generally had a harmonious feel to them to me (though he can also throw around a lot of groups that are right on the edge of life, as recent threads have discussed), and his desire to keep peace with the Japanese system and seeming lack of ambition on the international stage may be an indicator of his Peacemaker tendencies. (I think he takes way too much criticism on this front, but I'm trying to tie what little I know into this typology. )

That turned out to be longer than I expected, but I'd love to hear any thoughts you might have on the topic. Have I completely mis-typed some of the professional players? How does your own personality affect your relationship with the game of go and/or your play on the board?

Hi Jeromie,
I think that you will be very interested in this lecture by In-Seong Hwang 8 dan. In Seong runs a go school and reviews a lot of games from his students. He eventually classified the style of his students into 7 categories.

The Philosopher : good at theories, knows a lot of things... but that don't work very well in practice.
The Honor Student : good at fundamentals, makes good shapes and a lot of points, but lacks experience and fighting spirit.
The Politician : good at negotiations, focuses on the score, but cares too much about reputation, and lacks reading ability.
The Boss : keeps giving pressure, have the hard work done by the opponent, but lack of balance ability, and not good in calm and territorial games.
The Detective : good at finding tesuji, but focuses too much on local and don't mind about making points.
The Street Fighter : good at battles, lots of practical power, but lacks knowledge, plays too fast and lacks global vision.
The Don Quixote : the performance depends on the day. Creative, but don't know what will come next. Often looking for excuses outside the goban.

At the beginning, In-Seong presents his go school. The description of the seven types of go players begins at 6:40.

I turn out to be 7w8 which is Enthusiast with a tendency towards Challenger. This seems to be quite in line with my MBTI "The debater" - which is why you will find me on Internet Forums.

I'm not so sure that who you are in life is reflected by how you play Go. Myself I am pretty cautious with financial investments, while I'm very adventurous on the board, to the point of reckless. But on the other hand, I'm much more of an intuitive go player than one who reads out many variations, which corresponds to the N in ENTP and probably reflects some superficial enthusiasm.

I've seen the most generous team players in my professional environment turning out to be selfish maniacs on the soccer field. I know a professional mathematician who can't seem to make it beyond 8 kyu and creative minds who play the dullest kind of Go.

And then again ... below, say, 5d, there is one predominant type of play. The sloppy type.

(did you notice how I went into the discussion with Enthusiasm, to quickly Challenge the idea?)

jeromie, if you are looking for other Peacemakers, you may be interested in exploring the games and commentary of Hane Naoki. I recently read and enjoyed his book The Way of Creating a Thick and Strong Game, in which he repeatedly mentions and illustrates how he likes to play solidly and calmly instead of getting into big fights, trusting that his thickness will pay off later.

I’d avoided that book because of th translation issues that were brought to light in another thread, but I just looked at the preview in SmartGo Books and I rather liked it. I think you’re right: this is a great example of a Peacemaker style of play (whether or not that fits Hane’s personality off the board!).

At a surface level, that’s true. Being nice in one area of life doesn’t mean you’ll be nice in others. But at a deeper level, it’s almost axiomatically false. Who you are when you play games is just as much a part of your personality as who you are at work. Unless the game in question is both intellectually and physically trivial, your approach to learning and playing the game will in some way reflect who you are.

I think a lot of this comes back to motivations. Why are you nice at work? Is it because you like keeping the peace? Because it’s the best way to get ahead? Because it’s what is expected of you? That underlying motivation may translate to your play in go (or soccer) even if the expression of it does not.

This isn’t to say that I think personalities can be reduced to a number, or that how you interact with people in one area of life is how you will interact in all areas. It’s possible that different activities draw out very different part of your personality. But all those pieces are still a part of who you are.

Interesting.
Mere amateurs have many flaws in their games, speaking for myself of course. Relating an enneagram type to one's style of go would be a bit presumptuous, I think.
Out of curiosity, I did this test. I can understand my test results for the most part. That's the problem with such tests. They are almost like horoscopes: one will always find some elements or aspects that seem to be correct.
On the other hand, I don't mind being in the Go Seigen category

At some level, what you're describing, jeromie, might be true. For moves where intuition is required and you have to make a tough decision - and the answer isn't clear... then your personality and/or emotional state may influence the decision you make.

But at the other end of the spectrum, there is often a correct way to play in a situation. Maybe there's only one best move. In such cases, it doesn't matter what your personality is - the move you should play is the move that's correct. And to some degree, identifying these correct moves will have to do with how strong you are at go, how much you've studied, and how much you've put into the game - not with how your personality is.

So the model I'd use is that our personalities may impact our play in areas where we are uncertain of what's optimal. But in areas where we know the best play, this knowledge should override any sense of emotion or personality. And becoming stronger at go will likely lead to more scenarios where your moves are based on the understanding that they are good moves, rather than a style you feel compelled to play due to your personality.

In short, the stronger you get, the more situations you'll identify that become "intellectually trivial".

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be immersed

The great bridge writer, Victor Mollo, said something like this: Given a 50-50 guess, a weak player will make the wrong guess 75% of the time. (It's funnier in bridge.) Yes, knowledge, technique, and reading skill are not much affected by personality, but one aspect of personality, attitude towards risk, does affect the ability to find the best play.

Most people are risk averse, and you can see the lure of the "safe" play to many kyu players, so that risky but correct plays are not even considered, even if the players could read them out correctly. At the opposite end of the spectrum are risk taker and seekers, who are often impulsive. They are smaller in number than the risk averse, and often more successful. (Risk takers are not necessarily more successful than other people, but the lucky ones are very successful. ) In go they are attracted to overplays and greed. Avoiding those traps requires not only skill, but a certain sangfroid. Some combination of courage and sangfroid is ideal.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I'm risk adverse in my life, but I'm a risk taker in my go games.

I would be wary to deduce anything about personality by looking at his go style.

You are more likely to buy household essentials from the empty shelf.

And fancy gadgets from the full one .

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On Go proverbs:
"A fine Gotation is a diamond in the hand of a dan of wit and a pebble in the hand of a kyu" —Joseph Raux misquoted.

I’ve thought about your post a bit, and I don’t think this trend would decrease the uniqueness of a player’s style at higher levels. A go player’s style is some combination of their unintentional errors, their decisions to knowingly play a suboptimal move in a particular situation, and the choices they make when there are two or more moves of approximately equal value.

As a player grows in strength, the occurrences of the first category should decrease. This may mean there are numerically fewer stylistic decisions during the course of a game, but those that remain are more meaningful. I can understand the argument that you can describe the style of all amateurs below a certain level as “bad” (though I still think there will be significant variation in the kinds of errors people make), but I think it’s evident that professional players have different styles.

The one way that style would truly disappear as a player got stronger is if we are all searching for the one true game and our games are measured by their distance from that game. It’s tempting to feel that way now that we have strong computers that can evaluate our moves, but while AlphaGo and company are very strong they haven’t come any closer to solving go in an absolute sense. That is still FAR beyond the computational ability of even the fastest computers available to us, and I’m not sure that would lead to a single best move for every board state. Certainly deviations from the best move, if there is one, may still be interesting in a practical situation and would still constitute a stylistic choice. (You can see this in the variations in chess openings, where computer evaluations have been part of the game for quite some time.)

None of this indicates personality is necessarily tied to style. In fact, for a computer program, it is obviously not. But for a human, your inclinations about how much to study, what to study, what kind of game you prefer, etc. seem like they would have an impact on which move you’d pick when faced with two otherwise equal choices. In fact, I think go at the professional level is *more* likely to reflect personality since the noise of errors doesn’t overwhelm the obvious (to a stronger player) mistakes.

Most of your made sense to me, but it's not clear to me that fewer stylistic decisions imply that they are more meaningful.

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be immersed

It's not that fewer decisions necessarily makes them more meaningful; it's the type of decisions being made. I consider a thoughtful, well-informed decision to better reflect a person's style than a poor move made because that person reached the limit of his or her reading ability. Moreover, those thoughtful decisions have more impact if they aren't followed (or preceded) by a host of mistakes. At my level, my choice of opening is nearly irrelevant compared to what happens in the mid-game fighting.