I guess this is a stupid question, but I often make the most hare-brained moves and I wonder what in earth leads me to do so.

Why is it that our basic instincts are so often utterly wrong? We read book after book, play game after game, and still in the course of a game we are bound at one point or another to do something positively stupid. Early in my go career, they told me "urgent before big" but despite seeing the principle demonstrated and explained, those big moves still sometimes prove irresistible. Later, I learned the concept of a jealous move, and that playing one is a bad idea. But does that stop me? Of course not. My instinct keeps yelling "That's too big!" and in I plunge. Then they said "pay attention to weak groups!" I do that - but mostly when the siege is already in full swing.

Instincts. I've got 'em, but they are the wrong ones for go.

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Patience, grasshopper.

I think there is a difference between instincts like those genetically wired, as in the case of wild animals, and those we call go instincts. Go instincts are learned from playing through hundreds of pro games or studying until things become unconscious. Many of our instinctual mistakes in go may come from genetic instincts such as safety (making small life, over concentrating groups, etc.), recoiling from aggression (playing too defensively), needing food (grabbing small but certain territory), etc. These genetic instincts might not be helpful in go.

"Instincts" call also come from playing hundreds of games as beginner without a teacher. Those are more likely the bad instincts which daal is thinking of.

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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).

Even without a teacher, if your opponents sufficiently strong you will pick up good habits from them. Playing over pro games also helps, especially if you use software that will let you guess the next move.

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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.

Maybe so. But I would say that you have developed some bad habits. Also, what you describe, making plays that you know better than to play, is called not playing up to yourself. Playing up to yourself is not easy for anyone. As bridge great Terence Reese said, a player who plays up to himself is hard to beat.

Psychologists used to talk about extinguishing bad habits, but a better word is repression. We plaster them over. In times of stress they have a way of resurfacing. As mentioned in another thread, relaxation can help. Take a deep breath, count to ten, whatever works.

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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.

Of course. But I was thinking more of someone who doesn't play many stronger players. Say, a 20k who only plays lots of games against people of around the same strength. Bad habits become ingrained and remain, even when you start to play stronger players.

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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).

daal, there is a difference between knowing something because somebody told you, and knowing it yourself.

Take your example: someone told you "urgent before big". Or maybe you read it somewhere. Doesn't really matter. The point is, during the game, you felt big was bigger than urgent.

Step 1.) Why did you think that way at that time? Did you count that you'd get more points? Did you read something out?

Step 2.) Okay, you know why you felt that way during the game. After the game, is your opinion different? Is it different for a reason you can see, or just because of the proverb? If you cannot see it for yourself, why is that?

It's hard to do, but I think it's worth investigating WHY you made a bad call during the game rather then simply saying you made a bad call.

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be immersed

One example: When I make a risky-looking invasion and - after a complicated fight - finally die, you may call that "bad instinct" (over jealousy etc.). However assumed that a stronger player might be faced with the same board position and playing the same invasion, he might find an important tesuji, which I overlooked and allowing him to escape.

Thus, my failed invasion might be actually played with "good instinct" but bad reading.

Your instincts are bad because your fundamentals are bad.

I think he's referring to the instincts that almost everyone seems to develop when starting the game and wondering WHY they're so bad in the context of this game.

I rather think it's the other way around.

The play of rank beginners is not random, but it has a large random element. But after players have gained some experience, it does seem that errors are far from random, that players prefer certain types of bad plays to good plays.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

If the eye space of a large group was reduced to a bulky five, I dare say you would play on the key point before taking another big point on the board. When we skip those urgent moves, it's most likely because we didn't really consider them urgent at the time. Sure, it's sometimes obvious in retrospect, but I'll bet you thought you could make life / stave off an invasion / achieve local equity when you decided to play elsewhere. And at our level, we're just beginning to (really) learn about how important efficiency is in go. Playing one extra move in a local fight that wasn't really necessary can have a huge impact on the outcome of a game - but can you really judge when that move isn't necessary?

We also are aware of the gap between what can be done and what we can do, but it's not always easy to tell on which side of the divide a particular move lies. Was that invasion too deep, or did I just fail to make life where it was possible? The opponent invaded my area of influence and lived - but was that because it wasn't really territory, or because I played a weak defense? Was that move too slow, or did I fail to take advantage of my territorial lead? Some of these errors of judgment can come out in a self review, but others can only be revealed when a stronger player offers feedback. This makes it difficult to really take the lessons we learn from our own games to heart; there is always a seed of doubt regarding whether our assessment of the mistake was correct.

A third factor (in my own games, and probably in many around my level) is an inability to accurately count / estimate the score. This can contribute to those jealous moves or cause us make silly moves that don't fit into a sensible strategic plan. This is exacerbated by the dominance of online go. Counting at the end of a game is a natural way to learn to judge the sizes of territories, but most of us skip that step more often than not. Short time limits also make it difficult to take the time to get an accurate count.

No. As Jeromie points out, if one's go culture is restricted to online games, counting tends to be an un(der)developed ability. Essentially, my perception tends to be skewed, and because I find counting too time consuming and difficult, no correction takes place. My perception of size in real life does not transfer well to my perception of the size of go territory. My personal experience with this matter was that after reading a book by Robert Jasiek, I started to believe the proverb of "urgent before big" based on his examples, and although I remain unable to verify in hard numbers in my own games, blind faith was what got me from 6k to 5k.

Most of this I guess I answered above. When I review a game afterwards, I can often recognize where I did something I knew I shouldn't do and can see how it led to a loss, but what I'm saying is that the impulse to play these type of moves remains strong. as Bill says, bad habits are hard to eradicate, particularly when they are as Gowan says, "genetic instincts."

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Patience, grasshopper.

I think what daal needs to do is make a "leap of faith". It's one thing to learn what kind of things one should do, and another actually to do them.

I remember a certain player I knew several years ago. He was forever stuck at about 7 or 8 kyu. Time and time again, I would tell him that one should not play - for example - the diagonal attachment in response to a knight's move approach to a 4-4 corner if the intention was to hold on to territory. (As you know, the idea of this move is to make the approacher heavy in order to attack him.) He never could summon up the courage to try a different idea, sticking instead with what he knew and trusted, even after what he knew and trusted had been exposed as faulty in many games with me (or other stronger players).

It's difficult for me too. I'm working on my fuseki skills, using Yang Yilun's book on fundamentals, and there are certain situations that are difficult for me, such as when the move that I ought to play based on his advice appears less enticing than the move I want to play. But I have to overcome my bad instinct and make what I think is the principled move; if it turns out that I am wrong, then at least it gives me something to learn from. It's only when you are willing to change your thinking and your actions that you can change your strength for the better.

So, you have to trust in the new ideas that you've learned or been shown, and give them a try, even if it means going against the ones that have brought you up to your current level.

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Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here:

I have thought a bit more about this question, and I think that overlearning is important. That is, we need to practice eliciting the impulse to make a certain type of bad play, then inhibiting that impulse and making a better play. And do that again and again. If we can do that while playing, in the heat of battle, that's fine. But if we could do that it wouldn't be a problem, would it? One way, perhaps, is to review our games more than once, so that we face the problematic situation again, and reinforce choosing the better play. Another is to play over pro games and note where we have the impulse to make the bad play and see where the pro played.

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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.

I think it's a good question.

I suppose instinct is the move that you'd play without thinking. Or at least it's one of the moves that pops to mind, the "first feeling" that comes from the subconscious. One of my problems is that often I don't trust this move and grant it less credibility than something I've tried to crunch consciously out of principles. If I play the other move and it turns out badly, and later in in review my instinct move is pointed out to be correct, I have mixed feelings. On one hand, it's great that at least my instinct served me up a good move. But who is the demon that rejected it and can I have a talk with him?

It's not as simple as that, though. The ghost in my machine is not exactly Sai, and sometimes does serve up idiotic moves, which is why blitzing through ever game is not a great idea. Then the analyzing demon comes in handy, but it has its own problems and one may as well ask "why is our calculation so bad?"

One piece of advice I was given was to play more concretely. The vague move that looks so pretty in your imagination has to have some value you can justify. (But don't hate it just because it is pretty, I guess. )

I do not believe in instincts. I'd rather say that some of my first considered move candidates are bad and the reasons can be:

a) insufficient knowledge,

b) the correct / better move is non-obvious and requires effort of decision-making before it becomes apparent.

I agree with this. Anki is a good way to handle it. As far as I can see, use of Anki in go seems limited to tsumego and joseki, but I think the most powerful use would be for whole-board positions. The ideal position to input would be e.g. of the type where you would have played an invasion but the pro played a reducing move, but positions from next move collections might do almost as well. Apart from memorising the right move, I think it is safe to assume that your subconscious will be noting all the salient aspects of the position on your behalf, though it would surely do no harm to help it along with some "deliberate effort" type thought.

I suppose it's this kind of knowledge that people aspire to when they decide to memorise pro games. But gluttonously memorising a whole game is boring, hard and not cost effective. Picking out the juicy bits is surely the mark of the epicure.

This seems to be a good formulation of something chess players will be familiar with. When computer chess first began, engines with one-ply search were abysmal. Even when some attempt was made to add an evaluation function, the result was little better than a random-move generator. But as soon as two-, or better three-ply trawls were added, the improvement was remarkable. Presumably his was because so many obvious captures were scooped into the net. Moving up to five-play was enough of a further improvement to make programs commercially viable.

Even though captures are not such a big factor in go as in chess, my experience is that forcing yourself to do a three-ply search on your candidate moves can offer at least two-stones instant improvement for most amateurs, and a five-ply search will get you winning tournaments.

There is, though, one very common trap that people fall into (and that includes me): virtuously doing a five-ply search on a half-dozen candidates and not liking the results for any of them. We then tend to let the eye alight on some other move and play that instantly. New candidates have to undergo the n-ply search as well. That is the commonest case of bad instincts that I know about.

This may be why your instincts are wrong.