I'm a beginner (though not a complete beginner--I've played my first hundred games I think), and I play with the computer most of the time. I have 2 questions.

1. Should I really be looking to play with other humans at this stage? I haven't been able to get on KGS, and I suppose generally I just feel intimidated by trying to find people online to play with. I have joined OGS, but computer opponents have been so convenient, I haven't really pushed myself.

2. When I'm playing a computer game, and we're 50 to 100 moves in in something like igowin or smart go, I usually use the computer scoring button to check out where the territory is and to give me hints where the best spots to play are. I sometimes just leave it on for the next 50 moves or until the endgame. I feel like this is helping me understand the flow of the game better, but I also think it might be a bad habit since I should learn to read the board without it. Any comments on this?

1. Play humans. I assume your end goal is to play other people, if so then you need to play other people as computers play somewhat differently and don't use psychological tactics. Anxiety about playing other people is pretty common, you just need to find ways to get past it.

2. You're better off counting yourself as this is a very important skill to have when you play other people. Go AIs are quite inaccurate when counting open territories in my experience as well.

As a general rule, I think people tend to find the KGS score estimator has issues when they reach 10 kyu or so, which is really not that strong in the grand scheme of things.

What gradually starts to happen as you get stronger is that you know a group is alive and the score estimator says it's dead, or the inverse. That can throw off the estimate by as much as 50 points. It's a very rough method of counting which doesn't work all that well.

If you go on KGS, they have "automatch", a way of matching you with an opponent automatically. You generally get an opponent within a minute, sometimes even instantly. All you have to say is some variant of "Hello! Have a good game." at the start and "Thanks for the game." at the end. Some people abbreviate it to "hi gg"/"ty" and some don't even bother with any words.

You don't really need a high level of social interaction just to play. It's imperative that you play against humans, because they play differently. A computer would never try to scare you or shy away from certain situations. A computer will never try to confuse you or fall apart in disarray. The mental metagame is quite real, and it can be a great weakness if you have no experience with it.

Apart from that, computers make different mistakes than human players. You can only learn human mistakes from human players, and they'll be very good at finding your mistakes, too.

Also, don't fret too much over if you're playing "well enough". The rating system is there to put you in your place, whatever place that may be. After your first ten rated games, you will be ranked very close to your actual ability. Everyone already knows someone might be a little stronger or a little weaker than your actual rank.

KGS has very weak players (20k or worse) all the way up to people who could give pros an interesting game. This is true of most of the popular servers. Everyone is welcome to play at their level, however modest that may be.

Okay, I've been wanting to go on KGS, but can't seem to do it from my IPad or my Mac at work. I know people have written on this before on this forum, but when I try to follow up the instructions, I just get error messages. I finally got Java installed on my work computer, but that's as far as I've gotten. I'm VERY computery challenged which I'm sure is rare on this forum.

Anyway, thanks for the advice. I'll push myself to find people to play with and stop using the scoring system.

You don't need to play on KGS by any means, it's just a popular one. WBaduk has a good app for the iPad, Tygem has an app though I'm not sure how good it is (I'm not sure if they have Mac apps). OGS is quieter than the previous two but should give it a look as well. There's probably an IGS client for both Mac and iPad but I don't know if they exist and how well they work. But really, don't feel like you have to play on KGS.

The IGS app for the iPad is very good, and the Mac client is fine. There are more ranks binned together at the bottom of the scale (they don't assign individual ranks until 17 kyu), so you'll likely end up playing a variety of opponent strengths at first. The plus side to this is that getting a game is very quick, even for beginners.

Don't feel like you're making a permanent choice picking a server to play on. There is no reason you can't play on all of them until you find one or two that suit you!

Problem with KGS from work is likely because of a firewall