I can't have fun with what I learn for reasons such as:

1. I forget to do it when the time comes, there are too many things to keep track of.

2. I can't see how many points I'm going to make every time I do something since I don't know my opponents strategy.

So my question is, is there a way to play by myself against an artificial opponent(doesn't have to be a computer AI) with an obvious strategy?

There are different ways to have fun with the game. Some enjoy the competition, others enjoy the social interaction, and still others enjoy the artistic creation. Some enjoy the puzzle solving. Some enjoy teaching. Some enjoy study. Some enjoy just watching high level games.

And as time goes on, I no longer necessarily enjoy the same things that drew me to the game initially. The things I enjoy most about the game has changed over the years.

I suspect that the solution is to just play more games. In the beginning a large part of Go is pattern recognition. You need to internalize what you've read in order to apply them consistently, and to do that you need more games.

I think it's a bit dangerous to play against AI (are there any other type of artificial opponents?) that are intent on one thing (I'm not even sure if such an AI exist) because you will likely internalize mistakes.

Recently, I went from enjoying the game to not enjoying it and figuring out how I can enjoy it again. Part of my enjoyment is not caring if I lose and not trying to play "perfectly."
One way I think about losing is that if I lose, I actually get closer to winning because my rank goes down. The lower my rank, the higher my chance is of winning my next game. So, I really try not to care if I lose. If I care too much, I do not enjoy the game.
The part about not playing perfectly, is that I just try to play at my level. I play moves that I think I understand. If my opponent surprises me, it is either the "wrong" response and I try to take advantage of it, or it is a better response than I considered, and I try to recover. I realized if I try too hard to find the best move, I get frustrated and lose my enjoyment. If I just play the game without thinking too much, I enjoy it more. I guess for me it is a problem between thinking some about the moves, but not thinking too much about the moves.

It seems that what you are looking for is some assurance that there exists some kind of correct way to combat a certain strategy. That if you follow a set of guidelines against an opponent playing for example a moyo game, that you will know what to do and emerge the victor.

If so, it doesn't work that way.

Often when we learn something, we expect it to have a high degree of validity. With go however, despite black and white stones, most of our knowledge of the game falls into a gray zone. Every strategy has some advantages and some disadvantages. In fact, every move has advantages and disadvantages.

Unfortunately, these advantages and disadvantages are not necessarily immediately apparent. Sometimes a move shows it's worth much later in the game.

The difficulty with your idea of learning how to combat a certain strategy by fighting against a predictable opponent, is that the more sure you are that you know what to do, the more wrong you will be.

The fun of go lies not in knowing what to do, but rather in discerning shades of gray. You are learning this. It's just not apparent yet.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Hi

I'm still a beginner so I understand what you are going through.
I don't know how strong you already are so this might or might not give you direction...

In the beginning for me everything was chaos but after a while I found out that this works:

With every move try to walk by this list in sequence:

a) Are there any of my groups not strong enough => strengthen your own group
b) Are there any of my enemy's groups not strong enough => attack the group
c) Are there big points for me AND my enemy => play the big point
d) Are there any big points for me => play the big point

If you do the list in sequence for every move and prioritise from a to d (a is more important than d) then a lot of things will automaticly become more clear to you.

The second thing I learned a lot from is by really understanding the way you can move your (strong groups).
This is very good tutorial on this:
http://senseis.xmp.net/?HaengMaTutorialForBeginners

There is more advanced stuff on haengma aswell but just understanding what the properties of the different type of moves was got me pretty far already.

Hope this helps you with finding a working strategy against different types of enemies

Cheers,
Otenki

otenki, Passion,

a) For understanding whether a group is strong enough you might consider setteling it. Aka make sure that you are always able to make two or more eyes. So strengthening means simply creating a shape that is able to live in the future. Life and Death problems will help with seeing this.
b) Well its a bit the opposite from a, if the group is not yet settled you might want to consider attacking it. It does NOT means you have to play contact moves, rather you can play moves close to the group that will give you territory while the group has to defend. Remember that you don't need to kill... scaring your oponent in loosing a group while you create nice teritory is fine.
c&d) This is a hard question, I learned this by having stronger players review my games and tell me where I was doing stupid slow things. I also learned it from reading the book: "opening theory made easy". A good move could be a place where both players could get a big amount of teritory.
e) The priority is always to let your own groups live UNLESS the group is not worth saving, hmmm another very vague and hard point to explain. A friend of mine once told me that the only thing the game of go is Basicly about is to cut your opponent groups into pieces while staying alive yourself and playing good shape

I hope this explains a little bit.
& Thanks to EdLee for pointing out that the list in itself might not be enough...

Cheers,
Otenki

I learned this list slightly differently. It forced me to look at the board slightly differently (not that it helped much!).
a. Are all of my black groups either able to connect or to form two eyes in a hurry? (Not so easy to decide in the beginning, requires knowing the limit of the reach of adjacent stones and how to work from the third line when attacked or some other defensive strategy. It's best to form living groups.)
b. Can I, with my limted skills, attack any of the white groups because they are unsettled or too loose?
c. Evaluate those two questions carefully. Then:
d. Is there a play I can make that accomplishes both A and B?

The reason my teacher wanted me to look at D instead of focusing only on A or B is that's how you learn to get past your reactions to every white move in handicap games.

Being able to form eyes when under attack is so difficult in the beginning because white forces black to make concentrated dumpling shapes with overplays that really pose no immediate threat. It took me hundreds of games to figure that out.

_________________
David Bogie, Boise ID
I play go, I ride a recumbent, of course I use Macintosh.

bogiesan,