Thanks to jts' recent off-topic on chess, I was tripping down memory lane (forty years since I was an active chess player) a couple of weekends ago. I ended up at ChessCafe.com, more specifically the Novice Nook column written by Dan Heisman. Dan is a long-time professional chess instructor who has obviously thought long and hard about what goes into playing competitive chess and what is involved in improving. Many of his insights and lessons carry over well into Go (or any other "mind game").
In one of his earliest essays, The Secrets of "Real" Chess, he describes his "three levels of thinking" (I've substituted Go for chess and edited down to just the flavor of the original):
"FLIP-COIN" [Go] – A move is played quickly and without serious thought. The winner of a game where both players are playing Flip-coin [Go] is almost random, and thus I named it after a coin flip...
"HOPE" [Go] – "This is not when you make a move and hope your opponent doesn't see your threat. Instead, Hope [Go] is when you make a move and don't look at what your opponent might threaten on his next move, and whether you can meet that threat on your next move. Instead, you just wait until next move and see what he does, and then hope you can meet any threats..."
"REAL" [Go] – You select candidate moves and, for each, you anticipate and evaluate all your opponent's main candidate moves... One goal of Real [Go] is to anticipate each of your opponent's moves – if you have a good opponent and he makes a move you hadn't even considered, that is not a good sign!...
I found Dan's description of "Hope" [Go] struck right at the heart of my own way of playing. Whatever else has changed over the years in my strengths and weaknesses, I know that I have become less inclined to fight my way through a proper assessment of the position and much more willing to play a "good" move that catches my fancy and then wait until my opponent's reply to "sort things out". Similarly when I see a problem and can not immediately find a solution, I far too often just say, "Let's play this reasonable move here and try to find a final solution after their next play." Needless to say, as often as not that next play by the opponent turns out to be the final nail in my coffin! Ahhh, if only I had buckled down on the previous move...
How about you? Are you a "hoper", someone with reality firmly in hand, or just one of those coin tossers?
I guess your experience is often enough a reliable judge of when your opponent might be holding that final nail, and in those situations you probably do buckle down.
