You are being extremely vague. Staring at a wall for 3 hours straight is also not a complete waste of time, it would help your concentration to some extent. That too would be somewhat effective. You can't possible be telling a player that is between 20k and 30k to start memorizing pro games. He would need the patients of a rock and a lot of free time to be memorizing pro games, playing games, and doing tsumego.




So in other words you totally agree with me, but you wanted to add some off topic info on the importance of studying pro games for SDK by making it sound like you are making arguments against what I was saying. Keep in mind that this topic is by a player who is a complete beginner not a SDK, and I made it clear in my post that I am talking about beginners, so what you said about SDK really doesn't have anything to do with what I said.

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Let me say it once more clearly for the starter of the thread: NO, unless you have too much time and too much patients, you should not be memorizing pro games if you have just started playing! If you feel like trying it out, go for it, but I would say ditch it until later if it starts getting in the way of playing games and doing tsumego.

The way humans, physically, learn go is by developing a pretty isolated module within the pattern recognition part of our brain that deals with go shapes and concepts. This seems to be the reason why people also tell to beginners that they should lose their first 50 games as soon as possible. To develop proper sense of patterns, you need to feed the patterns in to your brain, and I while I wouldn't recommend memorizing pro games to most players, I'd still say that to those really devoted to the game from day 1, it should be remarkably efficient way of learning go. It would mean that from day 1 you do have a sense of proper patterns, and this will in your own games manifest itself as intuition about proper direction, good shapes and such.

Anyway, I haven't seen more than maybe 10 pro games ever, and I've memorized none of them, so it's not like I'm trying to promote my own studying style here. I do realize that for a long time now I could've improved a ton by starting to draw influences from pro's, I simply lack the patience to actually study the game. I like playing it, but studying is too much effort. For those trying to study it, I'd still say that rote memorization alone is good enough to get better, although obviously you can improve even faster if you actually understand what's going on(though that part is probably reserved for EGF 5d and above)

Dante31, the original poster does not claim to be a complete beginner, so your shouty comments are a bit odd. The topic is about how to memorize pro games, so in fact, if anyone is off-topic, it is you discussing the "why" rather than the "how". Nonetheless, since you asserted that memorizing pro games without complete understanding was pointless, I felt the need to disagree with you. Yes, you threw in a small proviso, a few sentences into your comment, but your main point seemed so absolute that the proviso seemed rather irrelevant.

I have to agree with this statement. While I have made incremental improvements in reading, life and death, and such over time, all of my leaps of understanding since I became an SDK have come by seeing concepts in action in pro games and then being able to consider applying them in mine. The value of thickness, how to attack, how to play the biggest point and not follow my opponent around, how not to worry about that moyo because I can reduce it later, how to treat large points as miai even if they're locally sente... I think that it's an extremely efficient way to internalize concepts and shape, as well as the correct mindset to have going in the game.

The reading for a particular sequence is something that can be explained in commentary, and I don't recommend uncommented games at the SDK level as much as commented ones for that reason. However, tsumego and such are for reading practice. Games are for all the other stuff.

You are simply trying to twist the situation. You made a reply that has nothing to do with what I was talking about and I have pointed that out, now you are trying to downplay that fact and stressing that your reply is relevant to the thread. I am not denying that your reply is relevant to the thread, but it's still irrelevant in respect to what I was talking about.

I did make a mistake, I thought Octoberowl was the thread starter. Though that doesn't really change much, I didn't say you were off-topic because the thread starter wasn't a SDK, but because your reply was irrelevant to the post you were replying to.



The only problem here is that I have never actually said anything like this, you simply grossly misinterpreted what I actually said.

Here is what I actually said:



Notice that there is nothing that says how much you have to understand to benefit from pro games.

I am guessing your logic was: if he said it is pointless to memorize all the moves and not understand them, then he means for it to not be pointless I have to understand all the moves. And that is not what it says... in essence all this quote really means is: understanding is key to really benefit from pro games, not the act of simply thoughtlessly memorizing them.

Another way to say that quote is: even if you memorize all the moves, it is pointless if you don't understand them.

About the pattern recognition thing: the same thing goes for your own games. If you recognize the bad moves you will improve too. Perhaps it would be beneficial to memorize your own games. But it is so, what is the word, humiliating. And by memorizing pro games you get to see moves you didn't think of all by yourself.

We all have a subconscious part of the brain and a conscious one, though I believe the swanky terms are now something like System 1 and System 2. The really clever work is done by the subconscious part.

I had a good example of this a few weeks back. Unfortunately I can't remember the precise word, but I saw a two-syllable word on the side of a tradesman's van and said it in my mind's ear. I then stopped in surprise, because I realised I had read it with the stress on syllable B, whereas the word is usually pronounced with stress on syllable A. The reason was obvious as soon as I thought about it: it was a name, and we treat names differently. Now I don't recall ever being taught any relevant rule, or thinking about it, or imagining any situation where I would normally have it brought to my attention. I inferred therefore that, after years of hearing examples of trade names being pronounced differently from normal words, my subconscious brain had simply worked out the rule for itself and activated in this case. (We distinguish names from normal words in another subtle way - use capital letters or tamper with the spelling a little: Smith, Smythe, White, Whyte, Cook, Cooke, etc).

There are far better ways of illustrating the power of the subconscious brain (language in general, so that example is not really the point.

The real point is that many teachers already harness the power of the subconscious brain by making pupils take in masses of information through drills and repetition without explaining the whys and wherefores: activities like music and tennis, for example. After a while the right responses happen even in previously unseen situations. We know this method works.

The role of the conscious brain is limited to "will" - saying "I must do these drills tonight and not skip them even for a day, and if I really want to be good I must do a double dose."

There is good reason to believe this works in go, too, because this method is the one normally used in the Far East. Trying to understand the theory with your conscious brain first does not speed the process up. It interferes with the subconscious and so slows the process down. It may even be harmful. Think of trying to learn music by reading about the rules of harmony before you even plonk on your guitar, or how painful your progress is when you keep stopping your teacher to ask things like "should I say A sharp or B flat?".

That is not to say that theory has no place. I suspect it is useful as part of a later consolidation process. But mass absorption of fundamentals comes first.

In Oriental martial arts as taught to Orientals, the usual pattern is for a teacher to say "copy me" and then for pupils to do a move by imitation. Eventually a complete form is memorised. The subconscious has taken in all the data and sorted it in some suitable way so that it can be activated instantly - you can perform the move, though crudely. At that stage a typical westerner would think he knows the form and would ask to go on to the next stage. Teachers have to make a living and so unfortunately acquiesce. But in the traditional format, the pupil would not be allowed to ask. He would be told what to do next, and this would often be to repeat the same form, again and again, refining out the crudities. For example, the same moves would be repeated but with the proper breathing patterns now superimposed on it.

One advantage of this process is precisely that the fundamentals are repeated over and over again. The typical western pupil does not give anything like the same attention to fundamentals. In fact he is often unaware of what the fundamentals are. How many people here could write a few pages (as I have just seen) on the two-step hane or the crosscut, as opposed to giving just one or two examples of what they look like?

There are even fundamentals that haven't even made it into the ordinary western orbit. Yesterday, for example, I was struck by this example:



In each position, Black's reply to White's triangled peep is also shown triangled. The general rule is that when peeped at, you play on the side of the peep away from strength. If the opponent is strong on both sides of the peep, you play on the outside. You could be taught the wider theory that, when in the presence of strength, you must be prepared to sacrifice, etc. but your subconscious brain can do all that for you, perhaps more slowly but making hidden connections to other elements and creating analogies for other cases, so that the process becomes much more efficient. You can end up actually doing something useful, as opposed to answering an exam question by parroting what the teacher told you.

This example, incidentally, is due to Yasunaga Hajime who offers a wealth of such cases. I think I recall that he presented in English a few when he was involved with the original Go Monthly. This particular example is from a Japanese magazine, though, and is part of a disquisition on peeps. Obviously it is at a crude level and must be refined with further experience.

The relevance to the thread is this: if you forget about memorising pro games but simply play them over instead (though effortfully), your subconscious will memorise the bits that matter, and also sort them out for you in the most useful way, and in ways that will eventually surprise you. Magically, it will do the equivalent of realising when a word is name. The first step is to use your conscious brain, your will, to tell you to do the work. Later on it can play a further part by telling you to repeat the whole process so that you can refine your stored knowledge.

Although this does involve using the horrid word "work" to tell yourself to do something, playing over a game is surely much, much more enjoyable than trying to memorise every move. For that reason, it eludes me why this question of memorisation comes up so often.

John's post reminds me of a description I once heard of a clown school in Switzerland, in which the juggling students were required to spend the first year using only one ball. Anyone can toss a ball or three from one hand to the other, but if you spend a year doing it with just one ball, that ball will do exactly what you want. It seems obvious to me that this precision would be far more difficult to achieve otherwise, and is an invaluable skill when faced with complex patterns. How this applies to learning go, I'm not quite sure, but as an example, really knowing inside and out how a certain jump can be cut and under what circumstances, is something that could be trained in a similar manner.

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Patience, grasshopper.

I am reminded of a story told to my wife when she was receiving acupunture. The doctor was born in Hong Kong but educated in the USA as allopath. When he returned to China to learn acupuncture his western training came through and he kept asking questions. He was told, point blank, by his Chinese intructor that if he had to ask questions he would never understand.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Actually the proper way to learn the 3 ball cascade (i.e. starting into juggling) is to start with just one ball and keep at it for an ungodly high amount of time. Of course, no-one does it for long enough (on its own) and you eventually pick 2, three and then spend a lot of time crouching. But the day you get a cascade is great

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

When I was eight I got a magic set for Christmas, which included three hard rubber balls and a booklet on how to juggle. The first lesson was to throw one ball straight up in the air and catch it with the throwing hand. So far, so good. The second lesson was to do it with your eyes closed. That was the end of my juggling career.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

In any domain, whether Go, juggling or playing the guitar, there is the balance between what's right and what's enjoyable. Extremely motivated students are capable of doing what's right, provided they have a teacher who tells them. Most of us require some kind of positive feedback, whether it comes from solving problems (close to the right thing), reading books about the opening (marginally productive) and replaying pro games (close to irrelevant, despite John's plausible remark about the subconscious).

A teacher should recognize the student's reservoir of motivation and feed it accordingly, even if that makes the learning path less efficient in itself. The joy of juggling three balls for a few iterations will surely reinforce motivation for those students who'd give up after a week of desperately trying to juggle one ball blindfolded.

This is something I've long underestimated as a (low level) club teacher and started understanding when learning the guitar in a correct but utterly boring way. Nowadays I include the conditional phrase "if you want to improve". Otherwise, Bill's "study what you like" is the best possible advice for self study.

If you don't like memorizing pro games, there's indeed no urgent need to find out how to do so.