Quote:
Apart from faster endgame value calculations, professionals excel mainly at faster reading. However, slower reading does not prevent amateurs from understanding - they just need to invest more time.
I disagree that my reading is only inferior to pro's in terms of speed. For one, I lose track of earlier stones in certain situations, particularly when I need to read something deeply in one direction, and then double back to an earlier area of hypothetical play and read a continuation from there: I can keep a "wave front" of recently played stones, but stones 15 moves prior tend to shift.
I also miss important moves and read out dead ends. Reading depth is tightly connected to tree breadth, so failing to prune a bad move does constrain how far out I can read. Additionally, if I have a 3% chance of incorrectly pruning out the right move per ply and a pro has a 0.5% chance, that more strictly constrains me to a myopic view regardless of how much more time I am given.
If we mean go theory in the general: the importance of thickness, of sente, the existence of tewari analysis; I agree that there's no magical concepts that a reasonably strong amateur couldn't understand in the abstract. However, if we mean application of go theory, then I absolutely can get hopelessly over my head. If I invade on the side, a professional might point one space to the left and say "your way gets more territory, but it's not worth the extra thickness he achieves", but if I can't read out precisely how this invasion will go or judge how valuable the peep his continuation leaves behind in the full board context, I understand what he's saying but have no hope of applying it.