Sounds a lot like real life. Reminds me a lot of the following well-known story about a lute player) who was discouraged with his meditation practice and went to the Buddha to ask for instruction.

“What happens when you tune your instrument too tightly?” the Buddha asked.

“The strings break,” the musician replied.

“And what happens when you string it too loosely?”

“When it’s too loose, no sound comes out,” the musician answered. “The string that produces a tuneful sound is not too tight and not too loose.”

“That,” said the Buddha, “is how to practice: not too tight and not too loose.”


Wow. This is seriously some amazing stuff. Is this translated and available on the Internet? Guess one can still improve if one put their mind on it.

It was pretty cool to get all these depictions of different aspects of life where Go would crop up - home, school, go salons up through the pro camps and international events. It was pretty cool to see them fit all that stuff into what's essentially a fantasy shonen "sports" drama.



Eh, there's a time and a place for both. With my life and schedule I don't have much time to go on a full-scale Baduk Binge and then recover from it. If nothing else the emotional stress it causes can be hard for me to manage alongside the things that can come up trying to keep up with being a husband and a father. At this stage in my life I need Go to help me drive my anxiety in the other direction.

Marty Lund

Just take things one step at a time. Sometimes too much of a good thing, even Go(!) would be bad. Glad to see how you're managing both Go whilst being busy with family life. Must be a tough juggling act.

These stories are quite fascinating. Thanks for starting this thread!



Regarding this, I think that a lot of the tips that others have made regarding bad habits are great. I especially liked the golf analogy - it's good to play with good form! But I wanted to just give a warning from personal experience... After I started go, I heard similar advice about bad habits. I didn't want to get stuck into the "bad habit trap"! While I think the fear may have some merits, I also feel that my fear of playing badly, and of gaining bad habits, deterred me from playing go much at all!
I would only want to play in the "optimal conditions", after sufficient amount of study, etc., etc. But after awhile, I realized that if I continue to fear having bad habits, and let it keep me from playing, I would never play go at all.

To come back to the golf analogy, having good form is great. It's hard to unlearn bad form, so you might as well try to have the best form you can. If you have the resources to have a golf teacher, then that's great. Go for it. But don't let fear of bad form keep you from playing golf. Bad form is not good, but not playing golf, in my opinion, is even worse.

I guess, as with many things, the idea of balance is useful. My advice would be to try your best not to learn bad habits, but don't let it deter you from playing and learning.

_________________
be immersed

Yes, it's nice reading these stories Thank you ALL, for making me feel so welcome! I didn't think I'd receive so many replies and sagely advice.


Sagely advice! I'm keeping both of these in mind. I think I'll try to be mindful when playing a Go game and try to understand where I went wrong instead of blindly going onto the next game. Probably this would keep bad habits at a minimum.

I heartily second your idea of trying to understand your last game before playing the next one. Review your own games or get them reviewed. People say, "Play 100 games quickly." It is true that at the start you learn a lot just by playing. But if you play a lot when you are playing badly, you get a lot of practice playing badly. And if your opponent also plays badly, he or she won't punish your mistakes or be able to explain what is wrong with them. To get to 4 kyu I played fewer than 200 games. I didn't do problems or study books much, either. What I did do was to play stronger opponents and go over our games with them afterwards. (Not that I am disparaging doing problems and studying books. I just did not have much study material available at that time. )

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

This seems to be an excellent approach, so I'm going to try and bug some higher ranked players on KGS in the near future...

I guess playing against other beginners is somewhat like the adage, GIGO (Garbage in, garbage out). It's not meant to be disparaging, but probably all beginners would just play more or less 'blindly', so it's the case of the blind leading the blind and the one-eyed man is king.

here's my story from an older thread...
viewtopic.php?p=121262#p121262

Thanks! Jumping over to read it now!

I swear you just wrot my story, timeline and all. Thanks for starting this thread!

_________________
Brandon
Hailing from the Heart of Dixie (ROLL TIDE!)
- Constant companion of the empty triangle and guardian of the dumpling

Nice to meet you too.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B The one eyed man is king
$$ ---------------------------
$$ . . X . O . O . X . O . . .
$$ . . X X O O O . X . O O . .
$$ . . . X X . O X X . . O . .
$$ . . . . . X X O X X X O . .
$$ . . . . X . X O O O O . O .
$$ . . . . . . . . . . . . . .[/go]

Adapted from http://senseis.xmp.net/?canceledit=EyeV ... turingRace

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Amazing! Gotta come back to this when I've played Go a few rounds...

Good advice Kirby. I can second this with a similar story from my experience. As I was learning the game, I spent a considerable time reading theory and strategy books, rather than working on my reading skills. I'm absolutely certain that this held me back, and remains the fundamental handbrake that prevents me from progressing much further. On the other hand, had I focused mostly on problems, I would probably have gotten bored or frustrated, and abandoned the game, and that would have been a much more significant barrier to my progress

My first contact with Go in my childhood came in form of a game set from "Ravensburger" consisting of a cardboard and plastic pieces. It was a really basic setup and by opening a door or window or by a sneezing fit the board position could be easily manipulated to your own advantage . At that time, the internet was not yet existent and it was almost impossible to find someone to play (my sister and parents tried a few times but then they started to hate that game...).

Much later - at the age of 40 - I accidentally got into a game store where "real" wooden go boards with glass stones were offered, and for some reason I can't remember I got a spontaneous instinct to buy one set. From that time on my activities on strategy board games gradually shifted from chess (I was playing regularly in a chess club at that time) towards go (no chess club anymore, nowadays).

As a former chess player I'm still too much focused on killing, and members of our local go club regularly point out my bad habits, bad shapes and impatience. I hope getting over it eventually by experiencing bad shapes the hard way - e.g. trying out doubtful strange things and analyzing afterwards, when it fired back (which happens rather often...). IMHO the differentiation between good shape and bad shape has mainly to do with reading - good shapes are just formations which work better in most cases. It seems a kind of 'object oriented' approach, if you memorize a vital point in a certain formation you can stop your reading at this point and rely on the functionality of the already implemented "class method". However sometimes there are interferences between different "objects", I have e.g. a few examples from my tournament games where at some point an empty triangle was the only move due to certain liberty issues. I'm not sure if it would help me to just memorize a bunch of good shapes without understanding the reading behind.

I have no specific "goal" as I cannot guarantee a fixed amount of time to spend on Go. However I enjoy the chaos which is regularly fabricated on the board, also I met already quite a couple of nice people on tournaments and in the local club.

But... but... you're already a SDK, 5kyu, if I'm reading this right. So, it's already quite an achievement. Especially when you officially started at 40. Did chess help you a lot with your progress? It seems the way you played was probably more aggressive due to your chess mentality during the transition.

Originally, I got quite confused with all the SDK and DDK terms. I was thinking, what has software development got to do with Go until I just realized it referred to Single Digit Kyu... dumb me...

You're focusing too much on rank.

You might be right. I'll try to get around going to an actual Go club to make some friends and play some games for fun first...

It's too easy to get trapped in agony over small fluctuations in your rank either way. Best just to play the game and let your rank take care of itself. Just have a read of the online go anxiety thread!

That and you'll soon find your handicap with specific players might not match what your ranks say at all.

You're right. It's just that the rankings also is useful is showing whether I'm going in the right direction or moving backwards... I'm beginning to see why most of you encourage either getting an experienced player to guide oneself or going to a Go school. That way, there's someone that can let you know whether you're doing it right or picking up BAD HABITS along the way.

I'm not quite ready to 'GO' back to Go school yet, but guess it's inevitable, like it or not.