Bill Spight wrote:
Better to play White against shodans until you can beat them. 
Bill wrote this in another thread recently, and he's voiced the same sentiment before. It has been on my mind because for the last two months most of the games I've played have been in the ASR League on KGS - which, for those of you who don't know, is lots of unevenly matched players playing lots of games against each other with no handicap.
In most of these games, the victor is not in question. This removes a lot of the tension and drive from the game. If I play unusually well or unusually poorly that won't affect the outcome, so I'm much more relaxed. In the games where I'm favored to win, I can experiment in fuseki and joseki and then not really pay attention until I'm kind of behind, but then my opponent makes a mistake. In the games where I'm not favored, I fall behind rapidly and then vacillate between playing for a win and playing for the smallest margin.
So, any thoughts on how to get the most out of even games with stronger players?
But for me, anyway, actual play stimulates a fire in the belly and sometimes what Billie Jean King calls raising your game a level. Almost every amateur can play one game one stone stronger than his or her rank. And if you can play one game stronger, why not every game? 
) In an even game against much stronger players, I still experiment with the added idea of "let's see how close we can make this". I really enjoy these games.