Life In 19x19

I remember the days, when I could effortlessly name and describe all 150 original pokemon or could tell you the side and panel if you read me the speech bubble in a manga. Those were also the days I was totally immersed in both activities. Day- and night-dreaming about them, playing, talking ...

When professionals say "tsumego" they mean training your reading capacity. That's why looking at the solution is really irrelevant, rather recommended against because it's not part of the reading process. It can reveal blind spots and teach new techniques though.

As with amateurs there are a ...

Yes, you need to check the points carefully on OGS. Here D13 is marked as a point for Black.

Play fast, review slow was some advice I got a long time ago (maybe here?) and the longer I play the game and the stronger I get the more it makes sense to me.

I do ponder turning points in my blitz games afterwards. There are of course skewed by my identifying them as turning points. I don't ...

My chess trainer once told me that if I can consistently read three moves ahead (thus not falling for a two-move-tactic) I would be master level.

That's 5 ply (5 go moves), right?

Humans are better at depth first search than breadth first search. But if you have read to depth 5 in, say, 5 ...

So, I'm enjoying blitz even more nowadays (1/5*20). I mentioned it elsewhere that I think more time does not benefit the majority of players when they are not strong enough to make use of it. In my case more time leads to reading a lot of bad candidate moves and often times I convice myself that one ...

$$Bcm37 Black to play
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . a f . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . M . . . . . . . b . . . X O X . |
$$ | . . . O . . . . . W . . . . . X O X . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X X O ...

Thank you, that was indeed a joy - inspiring man!

It's fun, let's move on to more similarities: Remember the first line misclick in one of the online pro matches?

If I remember correctly that was due to the touchpad being too sensitive. But since played stones don't move, this essentially lost the game.

Maybe even better a comparison: The one ...

[...] we're probably spending most of effort fixing that which doesn't need fixing yet and missing the low hanging fruit.

Yes, that's key in my opinion and it was also an eye-opener for me: If all you ever did was doing tsuemgo (like I did for a long time), more tsumego is hardly the efficient ...

I don't want to demotivate you further, but reaching dan level is not like achieving enlightenment or anything like that.
At best it's like climbing to the top of a hill, only to discover the mountain ahead.

Nowadays I compare improving to a Mandelbrot fractal. You will encounter the same things ...

Starts at 2:38. For those interested in moving images.

I actually like long time settings, which force us to read thoroughly instead of guessing. Well, I still guess a lot, but less than in fast games. If all internet tournaments were with short time settings, then we wouldn't be able to play long games before the end of the coronavirus crisis.

I can ...

I also recently discovered the 101weiqi website. This might be my next series of problems after Level Up/Jump Level Up. It appears to have thousands of problems so I guess I don't have to worry about memorizing solutions or running out of tsumego. It's unbelievable that this website is free to ...

I like and support the idea but I don't like the time format. 1h main time per player... , for me as an amateur go player that's way too much to play another amateur over the internet. Alone in front of the screen is already bereft of all these nice little things a tournament makes great: moving ...