How many times today did you take the necessary time to do so? If you did not, how do you expect to learn how to choose better moves, aka "improve"? (hat tip ChessCafe.com)

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

I hope to get to this level of proficiency. Before that, though, I'd like to be able to do the following:

"If I see a move that I think is good, make sure that it is good".

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be immersed

Excellent advice. It's one reason why I don't like blitz play, no time to look for the best move. This advice, to look for a better move, also counters the habit of playing by "feeling" only as well as the habit of responding immediately to your opponent's move.

In slow games with good concentration, I try to always do Local Move Selection and Global Choice. It was about two or three years ago that I started doing it. As a side effect, I can find better than good moves. Not the best though: in a recent game, I fell into a hamete trap without even noticing that I was in danger... It requires also awareness to find good moves in certain local situations at all.

After I see a good move?? Heck, I'm still trying to get the habit of looking for a better move after I've chosen a bad one.

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Help make L19 more organized. Make an index: https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5207

The more I play go, the less sure I am about whether a move is good or bad, because so much depends on what happens later. I often play bad moves and then later make them good, but also I do that the other way around.

The best I can do is try to judge relatively stable results and that's more than hard enough. I have a really hard time judging moves.

Maybe I can look for better plans, though.

See, I play more on instinct than anything else. I rarely focus and think things through. That's probably why I'm only a 9k, but I've managed to get this far based on how I play, so it'd be interesting to see how far I could go like this!

But, there are quite a number of times where I see a good move and just play it, not bothering to look to see if there is a better move. And then when I review the game, I see quite a few moves that could have been better than what I played. But in some ways, I think I benefit from that.

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Slava Ukraini!

I infer that the advice "if you see a good move, look for a better one" was borrowed from a chess site. Beguiling as it sounds, I actually think it may be misguided in go. The bigger board and bigger choice of moves in go makes a big difference.

A very common type of article in Oriental magazines is to list all the kinds of bad moves (slack, overconcentrated, knee-jerk, oversight, overplay, etc.). I've never seen it, but an article could also be written listing all the kinds of good moves.

But even better is a a recognition that a move can be good for several different reasons. Many of us play a move as soon as we find one good reason for it. We often get away with it because the big board means there may be more than one good move, and it often takes longer for the results to unwind. But that can always be improved on, but rather than looking a better move (i.e. a different one) we should more accurately be looking for more reasons why any move - including the one we tried - is good. As a working hypothesis, a move with two good reasons will usually be better than one with one good reason. Three reasons are better, and big fleas have little fleas that bite 'em, and so on ad infinitum.

I know one player who said that a realisation that he should always play a move for two reasons instead of one got him from 2-dan to 4-dan almost overnight. That has to be about the easiest change to your own go anyone can make (unless we let our brains and sloppy habits get in the way). Looking for plus one is also a handy way of looking at pro games.

"...As a working hypothesis, a move with two good reasons will usually be better than one with one good reason. Three reasons are better, and big fleas have little fleas that bite 'em, and so on ad infinitum..."

So let me get this straight, JF. You actually agree with the topic, right?

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

No. That's why I underlined the bit I did - I think inclusion of the original move in the re-appraisal mix is a very important difference.

Another point I could have made is that even a move played for a good reason is a bad one if you don't follow it up in the way that the reason requires. Conversely, and sometimes this may be why looking for a better move is not essential, if you do follow up your move in the consistent way your reason requires, it may well be the best move for you. We've all seen amateurs play flashy moves that would be superb if a pro plays them, but the amateur can't follow up consistently and the moves turn out to be trash.

Getting two reasons why a move might be good gives you two follow-ups. You still have to be consistent whichever follow-up you choose (or are forced to make).

I'm suggesting that for go the principle might be better re-stated along the lines of "if you see a good reason for a move, look for an extra reason".

ez4u to say

Numbers of good reasons do not equate quality of a move. It depends, besides other things, on hierarchical dependencies of reasons.

Definition of BETTER
comparative of good (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/better)

How do you look for something "better" without including the original? How do you improve your follow-ups without finding better (follow-up) moves?

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

Such apparent silliness is unlike you, so I'll assume there's some disconnect and try again.

If you normally play quickly and look for one criterion to evaluate a move (e.g. good shape) you may choose move A. When told to take your time and look for a better move, you can react in various ways.

One way is Procedure A: to use the same criterion as for move A but make sure your eyes rove around the board more. In chess terms you may have found QxN, which is certainly good - but a slower look might have revealed QxR, which wins more material (same criterion). In chess, material is such a dominant criterion that it may not occur to amateurs to try any other criteria. Go may not have such a dominant criterion, but it has a kind of equivalent: the local/global dichotomy. When chided for an insufficient move, many players are apt to think things like, "Oops, I've been fixated on this corner - must look at the whole board." The result is that they do look everywhere, but still just look for one criterion. In such a simplistic case there is an acceptable paradigm: A = good, B = better.

But this may well be a flawed use of the extra time. Even in chess, a better use of extra time may be to add criteria to the evaluation. At any rate, I think it's almost imperative in go.

Now let's assume you do this in Procedure B You have quickly selected move A, but your teacher says, "Whoa - isn't there a better move?" and you dutifully try to marshal as many factors as possible. But, given human habits, there may be a strong risk that you will still follow the basic procedure above and rove around the board looking for different moves from move A. With the extra criteria in your mind you may well find a tasty move B which feels better than move A. But what you are doing is comparing move B with several criteria against move A with one criterion. That's not fair to move A. You have not actually included move A in your re-appraisal. IOW it has been excluded. In this case the paradigm A = good, B = better is not really valid, because the A = good portion has not been re-tested.

The ideal is Procedure C: you add new criteria but you examine all moves, making sure you re-appraise move A as well. You consciously include it.

On paper it may seem obvious that we would want to use Procedure C, but in practice I suspect either Procedure A or B would be more likely. B, I suggest, is especially likely when you are given the advice "if you see a good move, look for a better one" by a stronger player. Your instinctive reaction might be that your move A must be bad otherwise he would not have said anything, and so you exclude it from your re-appraisal. That might by excusable in that scenario but it's a terrible habit to form. Therefore, for go, the advice could usefully be re-stated. Another attempt might be: if you have one good reason for a move, look for two.

If you think you would always use Procedure C anyway, then you obviously don't need advice.

Can we leave it there?

Despite John's quibble with the phrasing, I find the topic's advice to be practically useful in the same way go proverbs are: I often see a "good" move (loosely defined) such as playing a direct connection that prevents a huge struggling group from getting cut, but if I stop and think, I sometimes see a "better" move, like a hanging connection or knight's move. Sure, sometimes it turns out not to be "better" because, for example, I end up giving my opponent valuable forcing moves, but the solution to that is to read more (or get stronger).

I read the advice in the title as "don't stop your search prematurely." I'm not quite sure I'm following John's objection, despite having read it a couple times-- John seems to be reading "if you see a good move, look for a better one" more restrictively than I am? "Better" is extremely vague...

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

Can't go back on an argument once you've started, right?

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be immersed

I think that this is a good point. In addition to hierarchical dependencies, there could simply be the fact that some reasons are more important than others. For example, you might have one reason to play a particular move: to save my 50 stone group. But this single reason could very well outweigh other plays on the board for which you can come up with multiple reasons.

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be immersed

John's objection seems to me less a contradiction than simply another tack on what we should be doing when choosing a move.

and

are both wise suggestions, and both point to the fact that our human deficiencies - particularly not taking the time to do our best - limit our abilities as go players.

The more that we are aware of the possibilities inherent in a move, the better it becomes. Ez4u's original comment points to the fact that when looking for a move, if we find one that's good - be it for one or several reasons - we shouldn't start shouting "mission accomplished" and plonk it down. He says we should keep looking to see if there might be a better move. This implies a comparison with the "good" move and does not suggest exclusion. On the contrary: looking for a better move most often means trying to find a way to earn added benefit to what your good move already accomplishes.

Ez4u sees a common mistake in our thinking - that we decide too quickly. If however we don't just play the first good move we find and continue our search for a great move, but then fail to adequately compare a second choice with the first, then this is simply another mental error which does not negate the original advice.

In short - the common enemy is Micky Mouse.

Kirby wrote:

you might have one reason to play a particular move: to save my 50 stone group.

I hate it when I do this.

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Patience, grasshopper.

As a kyu player I often fail to assess which move is better. That's why I mostly agonize to choose between two or more moves. How can we judge which move is better?

As for finding multiple-prupose moves, is there somewhere a list of purposes available which to look out for?