I personally feel just when contemplating about it, that I dislike the idea of having different teachers. For teachers cooperating to bring home the message (with different style but the same message) this may be ok, but I myself actively acquiring teaching from different persons, I would not do that.

What do you say? Learning from different teachers is better or worse than having a single teacher?

My idea would be it is worse, because one teaching may interfere with the other despite both being perfectly reasonable taken alone. Odds are this is not an independent thought of my own, but an attitude acquired by overexposition to Hikaru no Go. (Akira telling Ochi not to hire a second teacher.)

For beginners, I'm fairly certain that it works best to have just one teacher, someone who has a feeling of this particular player's strength and weaknesses. There is often more than one way to explain a different concept, and they can easily get confusing. For myself though, I have the feeling that different teachers convey different ideas, which can be helpful. For example, I learned quite a bit from game reviews by a certain Dutch 5 dan, who is notorious for his stressing of general principles and the strength of honte. I also had various lessons by Yoon Youngsun 3p, and her teaching style is based much more on tesuji and reading. Personally, I think that that kind of lesson is excellent for keeping me sharp, and the mix of both, plus of course doing many tsumego and playing many tournament games, is probably best.

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My name is Gijs, from Utrecht, NL.

When in doubt, play the most aggressive move

Of course its better if you have one consistent teacher for a long time, but I don't think that should prevent you from asking others for help. I ask reviews from almost everyone I play, so they can all be my teachers.

I actually like to compare people who give me advice.

I was around 2-3d when I tried an experiment.

Posing as a kyu player, I played a game with a friend of similar rank as me, both of us on accounts of about 5-6k.

Then, I asked for some reviews in the KTL at different points in time, from people of different levels, from 1-2k to 2-4d, on the kyu account. Then I managed to get a 6d friend of mine to review it, then Yin Kuo 3p(a very nice pro who gives free reviews very often), then an 8d friend of mine, then Mingjiu.

The kyu and low dan reviewers tended to be the most verbose. They had the most to say about the positions, and also the most to criticize. It felt like their way of playing Go was the most rigid, and whenever I played something that was different, it was therefore probably wrong and all they had to do was concoct in their minds a reason why.

The same moves that were "slow," or "gote," or "not doing anything," were said by the 6d to be "normal," the 8d to be "a steady plan," and both pros didn't even comment on it.

You can then compare the upper level comments to each other.

The 6d was engrossed in tsumego and the like at the time, so whenever I made a mistake that stemmed from my reading being not good enough, he corrected it. He also focused on general, whole board positional mistakes, but those were corrected quickly. He took care to make sure to try not to give me bad advice, which meant that the review was shorter than most.

The 8d likes to focus on positional mistakes, and went pretty deeply into different variations that would lead to many different games. Not always the most sure about everything, just basically showed me lots of possibilities for more favorable alternatives. Rather than giving me a straightforward, this is bad, play this, review, it was more about exploring the games that could've been; it really showed his wide thinking.

Yin Kuo gives great reviews, he may show you alternative joseki that would've been more suited to the situation, and he makes sure to state when things are his own opinion. His review was somewhere between the 8d and the 6d, showing the whole board moves he would've preferred, and correcting technical mistakes too.

Mingjiu likes to keep reviews concise, with one or two key comments to focus on. After seeing a game, he finds the mistake that he thinks is the most key to the win or loss of the game, and tells you to take that mistake and solution home.



I feel like when you compare your teachers, you find their strengths and weaknesses, and overall, I don't feel like it's a detriment to have more than one of them, even if they're at different levels.

Did you ever reveal the ruse to the GTL people, Violence?

And did you get IRB approval for the experiment?

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Occupy Babel!

why?

the review was still valid. the opinions of the reviewers are still just their opinions.

its probably human nature to expect a certain level of mistakes from players who you think are below you, and we're so reluctant to openly share our thoughts about players we think are above us.

the "ruse" helps eliminate some of that nature in order to compare reviewers of multiple levels.

I like taking lessons from as many different people as possible. Sometimes, if I played a particularly knotty game, I like to have it reviewed by many people. Everyone has different teaching styles; everyone has different things they like to focus on. Everyone also has different playing styles, and would develop a situation in different ways. Sometimes two teachers have completely different views on a local situation, and it's interesting to hear the reasoning that leads to the different prescriptions. I also like being a regular student of the same teacher, because often they'll be able to keep better track of some of my ongoing problems. And the rapport you get from being a regular student is definitely worth something. But I don't think that this excludes the possibility of taking lessons from many people at once.