As far as I could remember, a typical game for me often goes this way: I'd have used up all 30-40 minutes of my main time trying to read well every move while my opponent would still have 20-29 minutes of theirs by around move 100 (maybe give or take 50 moves).

Does anyone have tips on ways (maybe ranked in terms of effectiveness) for me to speed up my play while maintaining my reading (and positional judgement etc) quality?

The most important step is to stop talking about reading and counting (positional judgement). Even though both are very important.

What you appear to be doing at present is like an actor going on stage and reading his lines from a script. To be even an amateur dramatics level actor, he has to first memorise his script. He has to internalise it.

To do this, you can either follow the advice of strong pros and even stronger Mother Nature, or you can follow the advice of weak amateurs.

Mother Nature tells you that to learn, for example how to walk or talk, by mimicry and repeated trial and error. You don't get lessons in physics or maths from your mother.

In go, pros advise likewise first and foremost playing over lots and lots of pro games. The idea is to internalise, by repeated mimicry, the best and most frequent shapes AND sequences. This is actually a form of reading. By internalising it, it is always there on tap during your own games. You don't have to spend time re-inventing the wheel in every game - you just turn on the tap. What you have to do in games then is simply a reading CHECK - a very different thing, but much easier and faster. You only check the wheel can spin - you don't craft the whole wheel in your forge.

Pros also recommend playing stronger players, and if possible only stronger players. What you internalise by mimicry takes a long time (hence plating over LOTS of games) to be fashioned into a totally reliable tool. If you just play players of your own strength or weaker, flaws in your internalised databank (your intuition) will rarely be exposed. A stronger player will punish, and with this feedback you can fine tine your intuition.

As your intuition gets honed, you start to get a feel for what is "natural" - basically, your subconscious counts the frequency of every element it sees and the most frequent elements are those that are offered to your conscious brain first. You can thus play "naturally" (as the pros call it) and fast. You can then use your 30 seconds a move just to do some basic checks.

Evaluation follows a similar, though more advanced, trajectory. Pros learn lots and lots of basic positions or elements. For example, a corner knight's move shimari is, on average, going to give you about 16 points at the end of the game. Some pros practise things like placing a hand between their eye and the board and counting the territory the hand appears to cover. With repeated practice, that gives them a good guideline to estimate the size of various territories simply by eye - with repeated practice you don't even need to put your hand out. Many pros learn by heart (and so do not count during a game) the size of various standard boundary-play sequences. I have been given estimates by pros of how many such sequences are involved, and the range is between something like 200 and 1,000. The higher figures seem mostly to involve combinations of lower elements, and so I'd aim for the 200 mark. The great player Genan Inseki produced a book of the commonest ones to learn. Another trick the pros use,, because they have internalised a host of "natural" plays, is to use that information in fast games by reasoning that if all plays by both sides have been "natural", the game is still even. If he spots an inefficiency (a redundant stone, say) he knows the balance has been upset. His vast experience gives him a good estimate of by how much, but even amateurs can do this. Try looking at a middle-game position and spotting all the inefficient moves, and then do a more formal count. Hey, presto! You therefore don't actually need to count most territories in each game.

Shibano Toramaru became the youngest Meijin ever. After winning the title, he revealed that his main method of study - even at that level - was play through lots of games on the internet FAST, looking only for new moves, i.e. moves that seemed unnatural to him. He could only do that by having already internalised a huge databank of natural moves. He added that he was not specially proud of his reading ability, and he lagged behind others in tsumego study.

In the recent Pro-Am Honinbos match, pro Honinbo Ichiriki Ryo praised the play of the amateur Honinbo Ozeki Minoru by saying that je had played Ozeki over 13 years, since insei days, and what he noticed was that, when playing Ozeki, it felt like playing a pro, because Ozeki played natural moves.

This is the sort of advice and remarks pros have spoken over and over again for centuries. I have never seen a pro recommend linear algebra, Monte-Carlo tree searches or even taking off your socks to do big counts on your toes. Like a baby, you just walk the walk, talk the talk and let your subconscious do all the hard work. You just provide time and focus.

I am baffled that the proponents of logic keep rubbishing the pro approach. But the pros do what they do and become strong. Amateurs do what they do and stay weak. Isn't it more logical to follow the pros? Logic only works usefully if you start in the right place. It's pointless patting yourself on the back for logically ending up at some "truth" you think you have discovered if you started from the wrong place.

To repeat, for emphasis. If you live in a house, you probably believe that the roof is vitally important. So it is. You couldn't survive without it. It stops you getting cold and wet and having soggy food and electrical short-circuits. But the roof (= reading checks in go) only works AFTER you have built the foundations and the walls. With just a roof, you are in effect living in a tent, with no heating, no fridge, nowhere to put your go board safely...

Do not believe John Fairbairn's previous message and its wrong advice!

It is wrong, in particular, because professional players do not only study reading and counting by repeatedly just looking at examples and waiting for the brain to do its magic learning. Instead, professional players and inseis also invest more of what almost all amateurs fear to be necessary, what John suggested for decades but has under-emphasised in recent years: effort.

Tactical reading, as well as counting-evaluation, skills and speeds are learned by a) effort of solving problems and b) theory for shortcuts and enabling otherwise impossible decisions. All professional players and inseis (except for a few lazy ones) have done (a). Strong amateurs have done (a) to a smaller extent. Professional or amateur players without John's theory-antipathy have also done (b).

(There is also a possibility that your reading is fast but you use your thinking time more wisely than your opponents and therefore find yourself with less remaining thinking time.)

If you are asking how to spend less time reading without making more reading mistakes, then it's impossible. But maybe you can use your time more effectively. For instance, study openings and josekis, so that you spend less time during the first 30 moves.

What?! Training reading skill should have the effect on game-play of having to spend less time reading while making fewer mistakes!

I didn't say that reading skill can't be trained, but that until you improve your reading skill, spending less time reading in your game necessarily causes you to make more reading mistakes.

First is to realize two things that may seem contradictory at first:

1. It is possible to play quickly and play very well.
2. It is not possible to play quickly and very well every situation.

That was not a practical advice, instead it is a framework to help us understand why one player may use 1 minute for his first 50 moves and another will use 30 minutes and yet it is often the former that wins

Another generic truth coming. This one is controversial, but only in the sense that many people reject it out of hand, not in the sense that there is a meaning full debate about it

Often in Go it is more important to play good enough moves than it is to play great moves.

Based on these truths it is possible to give practical advice:

1. Practice to quickly find reasonable moves while playing. Even if you decide on another move in the end it is hugely important to quickly find a good enough move. This move should be a sure move, something you really could play. Depending on the situation you may not play this first move but you may also reject all other moves and run out of time. That is dramatic but if you can be confident in your first move then that will pay off and if nothing else you can compare other moves you think of to the first move.

2. Don't use time on every turn. This is a pitfall that people fall into. Not using clocks and using generous Japanese byo yomi seems to reinforce this habit. It is a bad habit, it wastes your energy and time, it can also annoy your opponent.

3. Decide ahead of time how long to think. Either by setting milestones like "I want to have X minutes left by move Y" or that you want to reach a decision about the next move in certain time.

4. Don't rely on sound signals when determining when it is your turn. Focus and look at the board. Human reaction time to sound cues is slower than with visual cues. Then when you hear the cue you will have to look at the board, that takes some time, it will be quicker to gaze at the board and wait for the visual cue. The sound may also be played later on computers, that is the move may be visible before the computer has played the sound. Did you need an excuse to stay focused on the board? Well here you have it

5. Conserve your effort and energy. If you don't think you need to think about something, it is unlikely to be played or it is unlikely that it would change how you'd play, then don't waste your effort with it. Same goes for provocative play on the board, if it is not needed then conserve your effort instead, this is imperative if you wish to play quickly and well but it is not meant to be a rejection of other styles of play Also, try to get it right the first time. When you need to find a move or make a judgment call, try to get it right the first time and avoid revisiting if unnecessary. Basically, every time you do anything in Go there is a risk that it is a mistake and that the effort is wasted, so do less!

6. When you encounter a situation that you can't solve try to find out what happens when you play naturally based on your own understanding rather than being stubborn about it. You will safe lots of time. You will also learn something if natural moves don't work out for you in that situation, you won't learn anything if unnatural moves don't work out (knew that already).

7. Remember that it is OK to lose and you too should lose all the time. Many people create incredibly high barriers for themselves by thinking that losing is too bad. Others try to impose this limitation on their friends. With friends like that, you don't need enemies You should lose half the time on average, so don't spoil your potential by inventing the wheel on how to not lose your games all the time.

8. Play people who are pleasant to play with and try to be a pleasant opponent. This is what is most difficult but it pays off. Maybe such games are less competitive than some other games, but you shouldn't exert 100% effort when practicing, so that isn't an argument. Practice makes perfect and practice requires a partner in Go, so try not to be selfish and don't forget that being good at Go also means being a good opponent

1. You don't need to spend a lot of time in the opening - knowledge of Uberdude's Leela's Opening Gospel will take you a surprisingly long way https://senseis.xmp.net/?LeelaZerosOpeningGospel

2. Life and death and tesuji problems will improve the speed and accuracy of your reading and help you read new situations. For example, it's amazing how often the two stone edge squeeze https://senseis.xmp.net/?TwoStoneEdgeSqueeze, and its corner cousin, come up in real life sequences. Learning the main standard sequences thoroughly really adds to your reading ability.

Thank you for everyone's insights so far!

Here is an extreme example from my forthcoming book Encyclopaedia of Classical Go problems (Vol. 1). White to live. The solution is 45 moves long, but you don't need to read that many moves. Details are hidden below for those who want to try it.

I have the same "problem". Only I don't see it as a problem, because I enjoy thinking about go positions more than I enjoy throwing stones down quickly by instinct. Sometimes I actually win the game, because I've understood the position better than my opponent. Sometimes I lose through mistakes in a time scramble at the end. Or through overthinking it and trying a "clever" line of play that doesn't actually work. And sometimes the opponent is actually stronger than me :-)

I think the answer is: you don't. Choose one or the other. If you want to play faster, then read less and rely on your instincts more.

The advice above by kvasir is very helpful.


How you learn as a young child, how you learn as a professional-in-training, and how you learn as an adult hobbyist are three very different things. If you're looking to professional habits (or nature) for inspiration, you need to filter carefully and consider what's reasonable on a few hours a week in between the distractions of everyday life. Pick out the bits you can use, but don't try to take on the whole package.

Mother Nature has this unpleasant way of killing her failures. Not a model that's appropriate for every situation.

Oh, one more tip. Think about how to use your opponent's time!

On your turn, of course you focus on choosing your next move: picking candidate moves, reading out sequences, and so on.

While your opponent is thinking about their move, that's the time for:

• Positional judgement: can you tell if you're ahead or behind, and by how much?
• Anticipating the endgame. That shape that's going to need an extra move once it runs short of liberties: exactly how many liberties does it need to be safe, and what's the vital point? That open area where they might monkey-jump into your space, but you're not defending yet because it's too early: if they do play the monkey jump later, what's your best defensive option? And so on. Have the answers ready ahead of time, so that you're not trying to figure it out during a 30-second byo-yomi countdown.

This is true in practice, but it is an interesting question whether it has to be so. Education, marriage and career all have a huge impact on most of our lives, and in particular deprive us of time. But there are older individuals who choose to make time and still achieve great things. One well-known example in western go is Mark Hall, who became 4-dan and British Open Champion in late middle age simply by transcribing thousands and thousands of professional games. He also followed the expected templates in that he was our best lighting player but also found it hard to explain what he knew intuitively. He is a relative rarity here, but there are many such examples in the CJK countries. There are several pros who started go only after the age little Sumire became pro. If we count players who may have known go when very young but didn't play it much until a significantly older age, there are many more. We can also cite very many examples of players who took time out for a higher education (e.g. Ke Jie) yet still reached the top of the mountain. Even Honinbo Jowa is famous as a late bloomer and he became not just a Meijin but a go sage. One things that seems to affect everybody adversely however, even Meijins, is that marriage causes a serious (though temporary) blip.

Obviously, an early start is a huge advantage. In ballet, it is commonly assumed that starting around age 4 or 5 is the best path to becoming a professional (though the actual desire to be a professional dancer normally kicks in only when they are teenagers), but teachers also say that if you start after the age of 11, forget it! Yet there are some pro dancers who have started when they were in their early twenties. Oddly, though, they all seem to be men. The decisive factor there seems to be that females are required to stand en pointe but men aren't. Young bones are mouldable - adults are not.

I know a Londoner who started started taiji as a teenager and became a world champion in Taiwan. Maybe the decisive factor there was that he had access to great teachers even in London.

Xela can probably give examples of great musicians who started late in life. I would guess that few, if any, reached the very top level, but even I know of people who earn a living as musicians even though they did not start out in music as very young children.

What I know of these various people I mentioned is that none of them learnt from theory books. In every case it was a matter of first putting in the hours to acquire muscle memory or intuition, or whatever you want to call internalising the basic skills. Then, for more advanced skills, they practised with a pro teacher. By that I mean a teacher who is or has been a pro at the discipline in question. Outside of the pop scene, I can think of no-one in my experience who has succeeded with just amateur teachers. Even if a case exists it must be rara avis.

Adult hobbyists is a special category. It's probably more accurate to talk of adult wannabe pros in the quote sentence. An adult hobbyist, which is what I think I am, is more likely to be a fan of go and go players and the go scene and go history in general rather than someone who just wants to be very strong with a vague possibility of becoming a pro. We fans can make do with small snippets of new knowledge to help us appreciate our hobby better. We prefer to take vitamin D pills at home rather than going jogging in the sunshine in the park.

Since you mention theory books,

- they are not the only source of theory but theory is also learned by verbal education, media other than books and doing research,

- professional go players can hardly have moved from strong amateur to professional playing level from (improving their practical skills etc. and) theory books because there were almost none for this level and my time so far has not allowed me to fill more than a small part of this gap in the literature,

- they have been only marginally useful for Bill Spight and me to develop new go theory because the well covered combinatorial game theory in the literature is only marginally related and we have relied mostly on our own research to create go theory.

Apprentice professional players are in a similar situation: they need to do lots of studies (although hardly research) on go theory and practical skills but they have often had the advantage of verbal input from professional or other strong amateur players. Input that nowadays might also come from AI study so expect to see some new professional players without input from earlier ones. Are there none yet?

I think most adult hobbyists just like to play go at their level and to interact with other hobbyists, without any hope to achieve high dan level. Not many follow the go scene very closely or are very interested in go history. So I guess any learning method, whether books, lessons by pros or self-study with AI can work. Just don't force yourself to do something you dislike.