In my case, I think I change perspectives, depending on what color I'm playing. If I'm the one that could potentially get captured, I see from perspective of inner stones (those are *my* stones). If I'm the one that's trying to capture, I see from the perspective of the outside.

Either way, I usually "visualize" both inside and outside.

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be immersed

I don't think so.

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Patience, grasshopper.

What I really hate are colliding ladders that rush towards each other.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
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Go is such a beautiful game.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B Can Black capture? Yes!
$$ ---------------------------
$$ | . . . X X . . . X X . . . |
$$ | . . B O O B X B O O X . . |
$$ | . B W W W W # O W O W B . |
$$ | X W W B B W O W X B W W X |
$$ | X O B . . X O X . . B O X |
$$ | X O B . . . B . . . B O X |
$$ | X W W B . . , . . B W W X |
$$ | . B W W B . . . B . . B . |
$$ | . . B W W B . B . . . . . |
$$ | . . . B W B B . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . B W X O . . . . . . |
$$ | . . B W W X O X . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . B . X . . . . . . |
$$ ----------------------------[/go]

Or was that a joke?

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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.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B Can Black capture my heart?
$$ ---------------------------
$$ | . . . X X . . . X X . . . |
$$ | . . X O O X X X O O X . . |
$$ | . X O O O O X O O O O X . |
$$ | X O O X X O O O X X O O X |
$$ | X O X . . X O X . . X O X |
$$ | X O X . . . X . . . X O X |
$$ | X O O X . . , . . X O O X |
$$ | . X O O X . . . X O O X . |
$$ | . . X O O X . X O O X . . |
$$ | . . . X O . X O O X . . . |
$$ | . . . . X X O O X . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . X O X . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . X . . . . . . |
$$ ----------------------------[/go]

Whether we're done depends on what one sees as the objective of the problem.

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Patience, grasshopper.

I stubbornly follow the spots with my eyes, playing it out in my mind. Can be hard for me to visualize stones there, but just looking at the spots as I play out the ladder sequence in my mind is enough. Working with the Gokyo Shumyo ladder problems has helped me alot in this regard. It's not easy, but it's doable. I don't visualize them in colour, but invisible stones are better than no stones. I do this for when there's no other stones around. When other stones like potential ladder breakers start to appear, I focus harder to make sure I visualize the outer stones and their liberties to avoid traps.

I used to silently talk myself through the moves (Black, White, Black, White). It is very easy to get lost that way. I now visualise Black and White for usually better results.. When I lack vision, I may end up "mentally pointing" at the board rhythmically (da-dap___da-dap___).

If you want something of a shortcut while still doing the reading, you can read until tengen and treat it as equivalent to the opposite corner star point.

Takes me around 25-30 seconds to read that out.

Just keep trying to visualize it. It will take few months of solving tsumegos but then eventually you don't even realize that your reading has improved.

I agree with this completely. Kageyama is talking directly about ladders, but what he is really saying is that you need to learn to visualize stones in order to read properly, because without it you're just playing best guesses. The reason he says ladders specifically is because there are no branching variations to keep track of, so you are practicing one skill only, with a clearly defined start and end. The fact that they come up frequently in play is an added bonus. You'll notice that he's explicitly telling you to eschew crutches, because speed isn't the thing to practice, it's visualization.

If he instead said it more generally, it would to apply to joseki and other things as well. In that case you would also have to be generating candidate moves and keeping track of different variations, which are separate skills (though also worth practicing).

The other thing that he's saying implicitly is that you should know if a move works or not before you play it, and if it doesn't work, you shouldn't play it hoping it will.

Oh, well. So much for my game!

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I never said I was good at following all his advice, mind. But, looking at the original titling of Ama to Pro, I think the implication is that this is how you should think to think like a professional.

And yet you could probably give me nine stones and still win.

I also follow the path of the inner stones while letting earlier inner stones fading out as they lose importance. However, I imagine every inner stone giving a little kick to the place where the enemy stone is going to be which helps to switch to all stones at the end of the ladder. I often retreat a couple of stones at the end to redo the ladder there with full visualization.

I wouldn't say that I visualize more than a couple of stones at a time, but I have pretty reliable results on reading ladders with a little twist at the end in my games.

I am aware of many short-cuts, but I don't find that they give me better results, although I *always* "estimate" whether the ladder will work before reading it out and my intuition is pretty good, too, which is nice for the fast blitz games I like to play.

Generally, in life and death, I mostly remember which places are filled with stones and try to retrieve the information if I need to know whether a liberty is already filled. I doubt that one can actually increase the number of items to visualize simultaneously (ok, maybe by one or two with lots of practice). What you need to do is to learn patterns and then visualise five patterns instead of five stones and ladders may not be the best object for this skill.

I have read about a study of chess players where it was shown that very good players and beginners remember about the same number of pieces on the board *if those pieces are distributed randomly*. The gap opens when the grandmaster can remember "The left upper corner is the typical result of opening XY, the right side is like the game of A and B except for the bishop, and the left lower corner is like recent game G.".