Kinda just wondering whether there is something that goes click.

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Patience, grasshopper.

3k

If you find something out, let me know!

I currently sit (somewhere) in the 7-9k range, and for me ranking up hasn't had any of the eureka! moments that result in specific stone level increases. I just seem to be stronger over time (mostly).

Have you had them previosly, daal?

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KGS: schultz [?].

daal, it's a continuum:

I noticed that more and more of my opponents moves began to feel like a pass.
Like they just naturally expected me to respond.

IMHO, somewhere in there, the game becomes less about territories and more about strength and weakness.

Seriously, my thinking changed 180 degrees, somewhere in that range.

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

Maybe two clicks.

Why not start a new account as a 3 kyu? It may be a challenge at first, but see if you can hold on to that rank.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Oren got that answer in before I did .

It is really different for different people. Until about 6k-ish, I felt as though I was improving. Around 3k-ish, I feel more as though my opponents are slowly getting weaker. Until then, it was also easier to get epiphanies that quickly improved my rank from time to time. Maybe that will happen again, maybe not. But either way, I don't want to paint a bleak picture--I enjoy playing and improving now as much as I always have (although, as with everything, my interest goes up and down over time).

In general it's surprising to me how little goes click as you improve, but...

I specifically remember playing a game with Topazg (where is topazg?) when I was 5k. He told me that the low approach to the 3-4 didn't seem good and I should try the high approach. I replied - I kid you not - that I couldn't play the high approach because I didn't know any joseki for it. It's difficult for me to believe now that I would ever say or think something so obstinately silly. I'm pretty sure that attitude was long gone by the time I was 2k (about a year later). It speaks to a DDK attitude towards strategy - there are right moves and wrong moves, which some people know and other people don't. Now I improvise.

Up to 5k improvement was fairly quick and I figured out that if I, oh I don't know, played game after game into the middle of the night after going out drinking I could seriously delay my "improvement" (i.e., the rate at which my rank caught up to my win-rate). Seriously, in this case, meant "by one or two weeks". Past 5k improvement was much more of a slog, but I never really got rid of the prejudice that I had to be "at my best" when I played, even though it didn't matter at all any more. (That is to say, if I lost a bunch of games at 4k and dropped back to 5k, well, it wouldn't have mattered much, because I wasn't going to be 3k that month in any event.)

Looking at the handicap games I play with people around 5k/4k, the two things that make it hardest to believe I played that way once are (i) how uncompromising they are when they're ahead by 50ish points, and (ii) how they tend to worry much more about random misreads than bad style. I'm not sure if that means anything, though.

In all my time playing go this is the most obvious way that I've noticed a change in my playing strength. When I was just starting I would almost never tenuki and every move my opponent played was one I had to answer. The same was true to my opponents, so we basically just traded sente when a part of the board had finished yose. Now I start to read each move more deeply and evaluate if I can tenuki safely because I value sente more.

I still need to value sente more.

As for the specific ranks, I haven't reached either. My current goal is 5 kyu so I can let you know if I feel different when I go from 8k to 5k. Maybe there's a difference in those ranks.

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"You have to walk before you can run. Black 1 was a walking move.
I blushed inwardly to recall the ignorant thoughts that had gone through
my mind before, when I had not realized the true worth of Black 1."
-Kageyama Toshiro on proper moves

Hi Daal,

I am 4kyu, edging slowly towards 3kyu, so I guess I am near the middle of the 2k-5k range you asked
about, and also personally interested in the question. Always assuming one can ignore differences in grade strengths
between our two countries.

It seems to me that at the 5-kyu level, there is room for many different weaknesses in one's play. And each of us will
have his idiosyncratic collection of them. The important thing is to find out what the worst of your weaknesses are, and
then work on fixing them. That's why I post my tournament games in these forums for review, and indeed I am often
chided for different faults each time.

More positively, I have also noticed the same thing as others in this thread. When playing a particular opponent for
a second time in six months, during which time he or she has not kept pace with my (glacial) rate of improvement,
I do tend to see more mistakes in his or her moves. But that's non-specific, and probably doesn't help you.

In short: find, bribe or adopt a good teacher if you want to break out of your current level.

A 5k has heard about strategic concepts, fighting aspects, counting territories and blunder rate, but does not understand them. A 2k starts understanding them.

Different people at the same rank may have different weaknesses. Nevertheless, I can share what shot me quickly through the 5-2k range. I started watching a bunch of shygost's lectures on YouTube. While I find him too dogmatic about some things, he really emphasized to me the importance of taking care of your weak groups and targeting your opponent's weak groups. Suddenly all through that level I started seeing people leave weak groups everywhere and for a time it seemed every game I played ended with me killing something.

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

Completely agree:)

For me the only "click" between 10k~4k has been that I see where eyes will be possible, or not, much sooner.

I'm also much more afraid when loosely surrounded and much more confident when loosely surrounding.

It's a bit hard to remember the exact thinking that caused the jump, since that realization has since been replaced by others. But I believe it came from responding to invasions, I realized that an invasion could be leveraged against the surrounding positions, something to the effect: "I don't actually need to help my opponent self-destruct, and my assistance might be counterproductive"

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

I recall three discontinuities. All involved my making better use of skills I already had.

The first came with a realization that all experienced players have, that my focus was too narrow. So before making a move, I started taking a second or two to look at the whole board, just look. That second or two was worth four stones, from 11 kyu to 7 kyu.

The second came when I was in a ko fight and made a ko threat to kill a group, only to discover that it actually killed the group! How many groups had I neglected to kill? (I can't say how much that insight was worth, but it was part of my advancement from 7 kyu to 4 kyu.)

The third came when I had been a 3 dan for over a year and a half. I was concerned about my slow progress. Then I remembered something that a 5 dan, a former insei who briefly took me under his wing, had told me. I was a shodan and he told me to play as a 2 dan. He said that the difference was really quite small. I had not followed his advice at the time, but I decided to play as a 4 dan, at least in my head, and win more games. In six weeks I had moved up a stone.

There is a Japanese saying, "Call upon your strength and it will come."

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I second this. I never was a 5kyu, i made a jump from 7k to 4k in around half a year. I can't say that something clicked or so. I was only playing at tournaments at that time for around a year, starting as 7k. Then i came back to a go club and after a game they said "You are not 7k, probably 3k." - Well i settled for 4k and could establish that at tournaments some month afterwards.

What made me jump? I don't know, but in retrospect i can say, that the above statement was also true for me. As a 7k the game was about territories, expanding my own, defending and trying to reduce the opponents territory. As a 4k and to a bigger extent when i became 3k and now 2k its all about strength and weaknesses of my group.
Of course making territory is still important, but making a weak group strong or attacking an opponents weak group became more important.


I observed something similar with myself. When i was a 4k, the 2k seemed so strong. Their play wasn't that much different than mine (i could see that), but way more efficient. But i learned, in my slow climb from 4k to 2k, that the first step in becoming xK or yD is, loosing the fear of that rank. If you are a 2k and think "1ds are so strong" you will have a hard time defeating them. If however you think "They make mistake like i do, they are just a bit more efficient with each move and probably make less blunder than i do", then you have a better chance of actually seeing their mistakes in the games.

I know that a lot of people, especially weaker (in the DDK-range or even sometimes in the weaker SDK-rang) search for that "special knowledge" the stronger player have. That one go book, or the one theory, that will make "click" and push them up several ranks. That may be possible in the DDK-range, rapid improvement from understanding some key concepts. But in the lower SDK-range and probably also in the dan-range i don't think its possible anymore. Improvement in that space probably comes from being a bit more efficient, reading a little deeper, and making a bit less mistakes.
That doesn't mean, that there isn't any theory left to study. But i think theory alone isn't sufficient in that area anymore. This may also be one reason why improvement becomes so slow, once you reached the lower part of SDK.

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Magics way up the hill (personal study journal)