I'm finally breaking down, and I'm going to set out a study plan. Inspired by SinK, here, I'm going to improve with him. I'm incredibly competitive, and I'm not going to go down in the Malkovitch Game without a fight, so I'm going to improve.

The story so far:
The story begins when I first began to get good at chess. I couldn't beat one of my friends, and he beat me about 30 times in a row before I beat him for the first time. During the time that I was failing to beat him I was studying chess non-stop. Now I really only play for enjoyment, not for the rating. Improvement stopped when I didn't have a target to reach for.

I first saw Go several years ago on Yahoo! Games, while I was looking for other strategy games that were different than Chess. I was bored of chess, and from time to time I need a breather from Chess. I played eight games, and said, "This is so stupid. Chess is better.", and went back to chess. So, two years ago, I was bored and remembered a conversation that I had with a friend of mine, and she said that I'd like Hikaru No Go. Well, I watched the anime and in January of 2009 I played my first game on KGS. Again my play was uninspiring, and I lost every game that I played that month. Slowly, but surely I've improved to 12K. I don't play much online, but when I do it's about 50% win 50% loss.

Obviously, I can't spend 24/7 on Go. I'm much older than I was when I could play and study chess non-stop. I'm a poor starving college student . I've got to go to class, do homework, study for tests, look for a job, and buy a new car (I unfortunately totaled my car recently). I've got competing interests for time, so I can't spend all of my time on Go. But what I can do is play all I can. Preferably, one a day. Also, I have the books Tesuji and Life and Death that I plan on working through. Also, I downloaded the Cho Chikun Tsumego Collections without answers available online. I will be working on problems as well as playing games.

So, putting all of this together the plan, starting Monday, is:

1. Play at least one game per day. If I can't log in to KGS, then I'm going to play the computer. I know that playing the computer isn't the greatest thing to do, but I like the option of always having an opponent handy. I don't know anyone that is on my level personally, so the computer is going to have to do.

2. Do 50 Tsumego a day. This will be the difficult part of the plan. I don't like doing problems, and I don't see how they're going to help me improve. However, I'm willing to try it out. I haven't done a lot of tactical chess problems in my life, and that could be why I'm stuck. I don't have the answers to Cho Chikun's Encyclopedia of problems and I want to be able to eventually solve all of them, so I have a lot of work cut out for me.

3. Review the games that I play, win or lose. I'm going to do this in two passes. The first pass, a cursory look for both sides and the mistakes we made. The second pass a more in depth look at my moves and why I made them. This means that I'm going to actually have to think about my moves. I play way too fast and I need to change that.

4. Ask any questions that I have about the game on this forum. Most of you guys are willing to help answer the weaker players' questions. You've been very helpful so far. I even want opinions of people weaker than I am.

4a. Try to absorb the information that the stronger players present.
4b. Weaker players have the tendency to charge blindly into some situations. I want the courage they possess when they play in those situations. If I can't read something all out, then I'm going to need the weaker player's courage to actually play the move if it's the right one.

5. Keep playing my Malkovich Game with SinK and compare my progress with his. I'm not going down without a fight. For now, SinK is going to be my rival, so I'm giving myself the same deadline: December 31st at 11:59 p.m.

6. Have fun. This is the most important thing on this list, since if I'm not having fun, I'm not going to improve.

Bring it on.

Hey Suji,

I looked through all the games you just posted. Let me offer three suggestions.

1. It looks like you have trouble with reading (and even some problems with atari-blindness). This would normally lead me to suggest tsumego, but it looks like you've already thought of that, want to work through Cho's Elementary problems, but aren't enjoying it. I wonder if that set isn't too hard for you. Have you done the beginner tsumego on Sensei's Library yet? There are also good beginner packs on GoChild, and one of the volumes of Graded Go Problems for Beginners might be appropriate. --- Doing tsumego should, imho, be relatively quick and painless. --- You might also want to look for a book of tesuji problems. Those tend to provoke the "Awesome!" reaction and sustain interest.

2. You play quite fast. When you reach a crucial turning point you'll frequently spend a minute thinking - which is good, many people don't even have the focus to do that - but then you'll spend 2 seconds on each of your next dozen moves. When you're playing a slow game, there's no reason not to spend a minute on nearly every move. When you get into byo-yomi you'll still have 30s to think, i.e., 15 times more than you typically use.

3. You seem to play contact moves when you should be attacking your opponent, or at least preserving the aji so that you can think about attacking. Maybe you think that contact moves are a good way to attack? In general you want to attack by reducing the size of the potential eyespace from the outside, or making a placement on the inside.

Yeah, I have a hard time doing problems in general even when I'm getting them pretty easily. I find them to be relatively boring compared to playing games. I do have the Davies' Tesuji and Life and Death books as well as the two preceding those (38 Basic Joseki, and Opening something or other and I do want to eventually have Attack and Defense, The Endgame, and Handicap Go.) but every time I crack either two open and try to solve problems I get bored quickly. It's the same with chess, I've played more games than solved problems.

I've done a few of the basic problems on Sensei's, and I've done a few on GoChild but I get bored quickly too. Also, I know problems help you get better, so at some point I'm going to have to do them.

How does one make Tsumego fun? I'm open for ideas here.

Yeah, this carries over from the habits that I made playing chess online. I don't know why, but I have a fear of losing on time, and if that happens I won't get to finish the game. I know that it's illogical and stupid to fear the clock like that.

Woah, the guy from the first game was big-time sandbagging. Don't worry about that loss, he should be giving a big handicap rather than taking black... Looks like the play of a (drunk) strong SDK, maybe weak dan player trying to boost his ego by kicking the crap out of weaker players on KGS.

Before even thinking about solving the problems - do you think the content of the Davies' Tesuji book is mind-boggling?

Look at the times in the second game. Your opponent spent 13 minutes thinking about the crucial sequence (21:00 to 8:30); you spent two minutes (22:00 to 19:30). Towards the end, you began playing really fast, as though you were hoping to trick him into doing something sloppy, or had given up hope.

Tsumego would help too. That false eye/snapback/shortage of liberties would look glaringly obvious if you had practiced it more. But you should try to give yourself time to read things out, too.

In the second game, at move 93, Black to move can save his stones. Think about it for a minute.

Just a quick note on your first game: you should capture with . The sort of move you're making only makes sense if a black move at G6 is extremely valuable. Because you don't capture, black gets two more sente moves locally, and you still don't capture, so then the ladder becomes broken a few moves later (although I don't think either of you realize).

I get the sense that many players learn "when you have meaningless stones in atari, don't waste a move capturing until the endgame", and then somehow get the idea that it's a crime to ever take stones off the board if they can come up with some complicated plot to keep them dead without capturing instead. More often that not, if your opponent makes a threat and one way to defend against the threat is to capture some stones, capturing the stones is the best move, robbing him of all possible forcing moves, peeps, ladder-breakers, and other miscellaneous aji in the future.