Hey everybody! I have recently been thinking about getting the Master Play series of books from Slate and Shell. I recently got Invincible, and I thoroughly enjoy it. Though these books are a bit over my head, it got me thinking about something. What is everybody's play style? Do you like building large moyo's? Do you like fighting? Do you try not to focus too much on one style? I don't know if there has already been a topic like this one. If there is, sorry. I just thought it was an interesting discussion.

I don't recall where, but I once read the professional opinion that amateur moves are too dominated by reading mistakes to have anything reminiscent of a "style".

Nonetheless people talk about the different styles of different go servers, so there must be something to it.

I like those one-liner quotes in GoGOD, though am not sure how informative they are since they are so terse. But they get me thinking that rather than describing one's own style, one should relate what others think, which is usually much more humbling. So some things my teachers have said:

"Ah, chicken-style!"

"You like to play yourself."

"You like gote too much."

"If you play this way it means you want territory. If you play this other way it means you want influence. Your move says you want everything."

Do you know about this test? http://style.baduk.org/

I took it again after some time and got the same result:

"Your style is flexible

Your Go style is flexible: you can play for territory as well as for influence.
Usually you make such decisions according to the whole-board situation or the playing style of your opponent.
You may force him to choose the strategy he hates. For example, if he likes moyos, you can play for influence yourself, just for making him angry.
Your Go style is actually the best one.
You may improve your Go by studying different things, but I suggest paying attention on yose and positional judgment."

I suppose that's as reasonable an assessment as any, but it's a little like a cold reading, I take it with a grain of salt. But I do think your opponent's moves matter. You can't just start out with this notion of "I'm going to play this way" because your opponent has something to say about that

Actually, I'm trying to change my style a bit and focus less on the attacking game. Attacking, as Yuan Zhou points out in has books and Guo Juan 7p has pointed out in her lectures, is fun. The rush of controlling the game, whether you kill or not, is hard to beat. But it is a hard style. You have to be very precise or you can wind up gaining nothing and the counter-attack can be worse than your attack.

In Yilun Yang 7p's workshop lecture, he talks about territorial openings, moyo openings and fighting openings (for black, of course.) I noticed that in a lot of his examples, a moyo game or a fighting game will degenerate into a territorial game if black isn't very mindful of his goal. I got a chance to ask him about this in person at one of his workshops. He looked at me very seriously, and said: "please, play a territorial game." I don't know what to think about that. One of the benefits of being an amateur is I can play how I like. But I can see where he is coming from...

I play the mosquito style. First I suck, and then I get crushed.

Well, I took the test. It seems like I can quit my day job.

When I was 4-5 kyu I got a go book as a birthday present. (My second go book, after Korschelt. ) It was a book of early games of Go Seigen. The ancient games in Korschelt had mystified me, but Go Seigen made sense to me, somehow. Influenced by his play, I adopted a fleet-footed style, building up large frameworks. A few years later, when I was living in Hawai'i, a visiting Japanese 2 dan told me that I had a thick style. That surprised me, but I instantly knew that he was right. It had crept up on me without my noticing.

A few years ago I decided to experiment with a territorial style, since I had never played it. I figured it would be worth some bad results for the sake of learning. It turned out that my results did not suffer at all. Go figure.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

its nice and vague like a horoscope

"your style is influence-orientated"

Sounds about right for me.


Your style is passive

You play Go like a mouse on our banner
Try to attack more! If you want to change your passive playing style, study game records of Yoo Changhyuk, Takemiya, Cho Hunhyun or Miyazawa Goro.
You may also try “Kill-all Go”: Take 17 handicap stones (free placement) and try to kill every group of your opponent.
If you cannot kill them all – make the handicap bigger.

No, it is not right for you. True, you make some overly passive plays. But when you don't, you play 10 stones stronger than yourself, at least in the opening. A lot of beginners make overly passive plays. I don't know whether you picked that up from your opponents or not. The suggestion to play Kill-all Go is a good one.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Overly passive play has been a problem for me in a plethora of games. Each game, I have to work past it and develop habits that are more aggressive to improve as a player. Go is no different in this regard. If I don't make a conscious effort to be more aggressive then I'll lapse back into passive play. In the test I was honest about what I felt like playing rather than what I think I should play and the results show the truth. So um, I'm trying to take your advice and invade more just as in poker I had to make the effort to be more aggressive with my raising and not just turn into a calling station.

If you are really interested in playing styles, you should check out Yuan Zhou's Master Play books. They make a lot of things clear.

Hmm, actually thinking about this you might have a point. I remember your advice to only play sdk and dan level opponents at the start and I think after not heeding it I agree with it. I think there's a passive streak in me anyway but it could definitely have been exaserbated by playing too many other beginners and not enough people willing to punish passive play to the fullest extent. Time for more teaching games maybe. Oren's been doing a fine job of teaching me the value of efficiency by crushing me over and over.

The above could be misread, I mean it in the sense of having beginners play each other can just encourage the growth of bad habits mutually.

But of course this is not to say that attacking in general is intended to kill a group. As a matter of fact, usually a good attack just threatens to kill something in order to make territory or build power (e.g. for a later invasion, etc), but doesn't actually kill the groups it addresses in the first place.

Having said that, it is of course important to be able to kill an unreasonable invader, but this is probably another concept. Maybe giving it another name would make sense, like "assasinattack"

_________________
If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

my favourite games are when i manage to build a moyo so secure that my opponent can't make an invasion and so big that he has to. when i was weaker, for some time i thought that territory is only good to sacrifice for more influence

_________________
Spilling gasoline feels good.

I might be wrong, but probably not.

- Strengths and weaknesses make that style. Somebody who knows plethora of different enclosure invasions has quite a different style compared to someone who has comparative advantage in yose skill, if both players are same rank. At professional level there are players who are known to be masters of shinogi, "killers" and strong attackers.

We talk about style when we mean a player's way of making choices in the face of uncertainty. No one can prove that Takemiya's approach is worse than other players', but few of them want to follow it, so he has a very distinctive style.

The other issue is that a style is not absolute. A good territorial player will attack when it's necessary, and won't play passively even when he plays for territory.

Now, when a pro looks at my game, what does he see? He sees some good moves, but a lot of passive play, and the occasional reckless attack. I think he'd say there's bad judgment and timidity going on, not so much a territorial style.

I have played early beginners who play every opening move at the 5-5 point or higher. Do they have an influence oriented style? I think not. They just don't know what their moves mean, they're not aware of the territory/influence tradeoff.

A style is not an error.

Edit: added a sentence to clarify the paragraph about beginners.

Edit: removed italics from the first edit notice. Considered adding a third edit to indicate that the second edit notice was really put there for self-parody. Weighed options. Omitted third notice.

_________________
Occupy Babel!

I scored "flexible" on that online test. It is generally thought that Cho Chikun's go is very territorial but when asaked what he thought of his own go, Cho said his go is flexible he didn't think he could characterize it in only a few words. I think it is necessary to be flexible because you aren't the only one controlling the way the game goes, but when you have the choice you may prefer to play for influence, territory, or some other way.

A direct response:

More general thoughts on style: