Hello everyone!

I recently played a pretty nice game on the Internet (at least... pretty nice for my Internet lvl). I would like to submit it to you. I had the advantage in the early game, but it didn't last and I want to know why.



I don't know why I tried to kill top left when it was alive... Don't know what happened there...

#23 you answered a shoulder hit with an armpithit, also armpithit on a 4-4 corner stone is a bad approach

#35 I dont think it is good usually to jump further than the pincered stone, the stronger you are the weaker he is - if you show him weakness he will get strong himself, thus you pinvering stone gets weaker

#47 I would have jumped out, seems easier to handle than living at the side giving so many forcing plays to the opponent

In general it seems like he got to push you around, but you never really attacked his weak groups.

PS: Curious what other people think ^^

Thank you for your comments, but... I was white Helpful tips, however. Will consider them.

Ouch ^^ I just read "I had the advantage in the early game, but it didn't last" and deducted that you lost and thus were black should have looked at the names...

I'm sure that you don't particularly want a 4k's perspective on your game, so I'll try to abstain. But if you keep submitting games that you won, you won't get particularly useful feedback. A player's weaknesses are most manifest in the games that he loses.

Maybe not. Certainly the worst plays are those that cost the game. But the most intransient bad habits are those that we are not even aware of, because they don't cost us the game.

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Some ideas : )

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122 should be p14

128 is famous for not working ("crane's nest")

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6: Rather pushy. Not bad, necessarily, but right at the limits of reasonable agression. It is more often seen when white has a stone around K17.

12: This is not consistent with your previous moves. If you are going to attack black, you can't just give him easy eye space in the corner. B19 is thematic.

20: Black is alive with eye space in the corner, so your D16 stone means almost nothing. But D18 would give you some eye space.

36: This forces black to connect his stones. The whole sequence through 44 seems to accomplish little for you, and forces black to take territory.

47: You get lucky here. He attaches to a weak stone.

63: An example of a low 1-space pincer with some nearby help. It is much more reasonable under these circumstances.

72: Good.

82: Interesting move. It suggests that you will make shodan. ( Maybe K6 first, though.)

88: Thin. You should die for this. Fortunately, your opponent does not see a handful of opportunities later in the game to kill you with P6. If you want to play in this general area, try O6 instead.

94: What does this do for you? It doesn't even save M6, for black can disconnect any time with P6.

106: Aji keshi. Save this for a ko threat.

114: A fine attacking move.

122: If you play solid at P14, I don't see how black can live.

128: A textbook dead shape. See http://senseis.xmp.net/?CraneSNest

188: Good play.

239: He finally sees it! This weakness has been around since move 88.

240: Make the threat to connect in a way the helps you more. O5 secures life for your lower group, then he completes the cut with O6, and your upper group lives with M8.

245: You get lucky. He could start a ko for your life with P4. And you have almost no ko threats.

Summary: You got your early advantage primarily through exploiting his misguided plays around 47 and 49. You could have crushed him with better play in the upper right. A disappointingly large percentage of your moves in the last half of the game were spent coping with self-induced weaknesses on the right side ( primarily the result of moves 88 and 122 )

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Yes, but it's hard to internalize that a habit is bad if you can't see how it cost you the game. A game you won is a game where you made weak groups... but they never got attacked. You played too low... but your opponent played lower. You made horrible shape... but luckily you captured a stone. The only way for the reviewer to make a won game equally compelling is to invent a hypothetical alternative game where everything goes wrong, and even if he has the energy to do that, the winner will probably just be thinking "but I don't understand why I would have to play here in this hypothetical alternative world, what if I just play here?"

Perhaps I'm just speaking for myself, though.

Completely false.
The result of a game, won or lost, has nothing to do with the quality of the game.
You can win a game with terrible moves from start to finish, thanks to your opponent's even more horrible moves.
Conversely, you can lose a game with brilliant moves from start to finish, because of your opponent's even more brilliant moves.

For many amateurs, especially at kyu levels, the weaknesses and bad habits are glaring
and manifest themselves everywhere -- in won games, lost games, or jigo.

The result of a game is independent of the quality of the moves -- so even top pros can lose.

Whether and how much we can learn from a game, won or lost, depends on the teacher
and on ourselves -- how much effort we put into the review and study, how open-minded we are, etc.
It should not depend on the result of the game.

Yes, sometimes people work harder on lost games than won games, but that's due to emotions.

If we can be completely objective (not easy to do), we can learn just as much from a won game.Nope -- see above.

As a matter of logic, this is true. But just thinking about statistics and probability, you'll realize that a player's worst errors will show up more in lost games.

Edit: "A players worst errors"? I'm aghast.

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"Manifest." Clear, distinct, unmistakable, patent, open, palpable, visible, conspicuous. Not "existent"



Okay, good. If it's glaring, then it's manifest. But I don't think you can seriously believe this. Take a simple example. Say I make a fundamental L&D error in a game. You would say my kyuishness has "manifested itself." If my opponent kills my group, my weakness is manifest. All you have to do is show me the right move to get my attention. If my opponent screws up and I live, the weakness is latent. If you tell me my group could have died I'll believe you, but I won't feel the error in my gut unless you also show me the killing sequence. You take a latent blunder, and make it manifest. In the losing game, it's already manifest.

Or take your favorite example, broken shape. If a player invites a broken shape and the opponent fails to break it, it's easy enough to paste a diagram showing what the broken shape looks like. What's hard is to persuade someone that broken shape brings disaster down upon your head, when no in-game disaster ensued. Not that they won't believe you, just that they won't actually understand what you mean. If the shape was broken and the broken shape successfully exploited, then ... well, it's glaring.

Practically every move I make is a mistake. Only a few of them are glaring.





Again, I can't believe you actually believe this. Bill Spight has a game that he posts when he wants to make a certain point about thickness. It's a great game. You can develop your understanding of thickness by playing through it, but what makes the game special is that it's actually a game in which Black uses thickness in interesting ways. She makes the subtleties of thickness manifest. You can say the same thing about games where the players fight a complicated ko, or where a player comes back from behind in the endgame, or where the winner kills a big group. I'm sure you could learn about the nuances of ko by studying a game where Black backed down from the big ko, or about thickness in a game where neither player was particularly thick, or about attack in a peaceful game where all the groups were stable... but it would take a lot more effort (and open-mindedness) to learn the same amount, because these possibilities are latent in the variations, not manifest on the board.

I assert you don't have the statistics theory, the statistics data, or the probability theory to support your claim.

@Edlee: The claim's intent was clearly "a player's worst mistakes are _more likely_ to show up in lost games", would you dispute that statement?

jts, nothing you said supports your claim:You gave one example of a game-losing, glaring, L&D mistake.
You gave another example of a broken shape that is not a game-ending mistake.

The problem is, how do you jump from these 2 examples to your general claim?

As with hyperpape and illluck, do you have the statistics data to support your claim?

Yes, I would. Please show the statistics data.

Maybe it'll help make my position more clear if I rephrase the claim as follows:Please provide any evidence -- theoretical or statistics data -- to remove the "magic" component of the claim.

Hint 1: I know from my own experience that my worst mistakes are just as likely to be "manifest" in a won game as in a lost game.
I have seen many games where the winner's worst mistakes were glaring (even to the winner himself);
conversely, I have seen many games where the loser's worst mistakes were very subtle and unclear even after they were pointed out by a pro.
Perhaps jts, hyperpape, and illluck -- you had vastly different experiences from mine?

Hint 2: My guess is this common misconception came from the emotions toward lost games (thus, ignorance),
and not from any vigorous theoretical framework or hard statistical evidence. <--- This is my main point.

Isn't the probabilistic argument fairly clear? In any game both players lose points by playing more that are worse than perfect play - the end results (ignoring issues over whether the usual komi is correct) then depend on whose total errors are bigger. Thus, on average, you either make more mistakes in a loss than a win or your opponent makes less (or both). In the first case you either have more or bigger mistakes to look at, and in the second your opponent makes less so the consequences of your mistakes are move easily available for discussion. I think the theoretical argument is pretty clear - to argue against it one has to suggest something very odd, like that losses tend to occur in games where you actually play better than your average but make some mistake completely atypical for you that causes your loss. Surely such losses happen, but it is hard to believe that this is the norm ( it would mean, for example, that having an early advantage is an indicator that you will likely lose the game ).

As for the practical level, I think we all probably make so many mistakes that our more typical ones are there is basically any game we look at, win or loss. So I'd agree that the above theoretical advantage to looking at losses is minimal at best. However, as many people have mentioned, the practical advantage is that you have already seen the negative consequences of more of your mistakes in a loss and so are in a better position to understand advice.

I do think one needs to be a bit careful here - for example, when I was first studying seriously I thought I was great at strategy but terrible at tactics and looked to my losses where one of my groups died as evidence. As I got stronger I started to realize that I lost these fights because they were stacked against me because of some earlier strategic failure - trying to identify one mistake in an amateur game as the "reason" for the loss can lead to learning the wrong lesson.

When I've taken small group lessons from pros they usually seem to want to see losses, not wins, and I think the reason has more to do with wanting to make sure the student is actually trying to learn from the review, not just to show off their win to the other students.

If you'll allow that the probability of a loss given such a mistake is higher than the probability of a loss given no such mistake, then the above is a simple consequence of Bayes Theorem.

I think Ed has a decent point in that, for many, whether the game is won vs. lost probably has poor correlation with the number and severity of errors. I think a more reasonable stance might be that "highly skewed" games make for poor reviews. A game where you establish an early lead and can put the game on autopilot is less likely to push you and reveal true weaknesses. Likewise, a game where you fall behind early and are desperately clawing for anything is unlikely to be fruitful for review (you can identify the one blunder early on, but after that it gets hard to properly judge what the player thought was wise vs. "necessary even if it doesn't work"). Once you remove those highly skewed games you are left with a large number of close games. At lower levels just about any reasonably close game is likely to be won or lost due to carelessness in near or during endgame, however this is likely not going to be the area most teachers focus on.