"*** At this point Tamura (later Shusai) thought for eight hours and read the game out to the final ko, 130 plays."
And if you are lucky enough that your opponent reads out the same 130 plays, you are good to go.

BTW, did Tamura himself make that claim or was this another nice story by a commentator?

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

How? obviously you need to be able to prune. We aren't discussing that at all.
Edit: Bill, that is awesome

I have seen the claim in a couple of different sources, but neither one written by Shusai himself.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Reaching a known position is a very efficient way to prune. Knowing common positions allows you to read deeper by reducing the branching factor.

Obviously knowing the lines would be useful, but it isn't necessary, which you seem to be implying.

It's necessary to play optimally in timed games.

Noone can play optimally in timed games, regardless of whether or not they have memorized corner positions.

Right, but the difference in strength could be some twenty stones or more.

Of course I didn't mean optimal in an absolute sense,

How did you mean it then? It can't be subjective, because learning new things changes your strength.

Maybe we could communicate better by using more than one sentence.

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Occupy Babel!

What do you mean?

Everything of worth in this thread has already been said. Right now we're just poking at random words.

Playing optimally here was a bad turn of phrase, but having sequences/statuses memorized dramatically improves the ability to read, by letting you use your time on things that are actually important. I also don't see any restriction on limiting myself to dealing with timed games, because the time alotted in a game is already a bounded quantity, with the bound less than the time needed to read perfectly.

I used lee Chang Jo books to open to a random problem then test first instinct against answer. At 6k it helped a lot after just one 1 hr session in a car. But I wonder about basic shapes like j and l... I need to study them. For spotting first move memorizing is good, but seeing possible eyes and realizing switching order of moves can work is learned diffferentlly

Yeah, that seems like a good way to train intuition. It really isn't the same thing as memorizing

Well testing my instinct to answer means I'm learning to recognize first move on sight which is memorizing, just not blind no thinking memorizing.

Reading out 130 moves in the end game isn't as complicated as reading out two moves in the opening in my opinion.