ddks, especially below about 15k, always play a huge amount of contact play. It feels like you're attacking those enemy stones, so you're grabbing him and pushing him about. Of course, he's also grabbing you and pushing you about. You'd think that the one with the most stones will come out ahead, right? So, who has the most stones in this physical confrontation?

Whichever person gets "attacked" by being contacted gets to play another stone, making himself stronger. You're always a stone behind when you initiate a series of contact-moves. If you touch a weak stone, you make that weak stone get stronger, right? So, you should probably not attach to a weak stone. To attack a weak stone, you have to do so from afar. You surround it without touching it, cut it off, seal it in. It might live, but it will be a small life.

When do you attach? Attach against groups that are already strong, attach to defend yourself, make room when you're being surrounded. When you have a weak stone that gets touched by an opposing stone, smile and start making your position stronger!

Very general rule, of course sometimes it's good to go after a weak stone, and you need to make contact plays as the game goes on. But, in the beginning, when the board is near empty and you're mapping out positions, resist attaching against a weak stone, and see how the game forms up for you once the stones begin to come into contact with each other. You might still lose, but your game might start to feel more in control.

Anyway, that's my two cents. I hope it helps.

_________________
I write Go-ing Shodan, a blog about trying to get through the sdk's. If you want to check it out, tenuki.

So I decided that since one of my problems was getting nervous and anxious during games, I've resolved to play free games that don't determine rank. This way, I might be more able to play and experiment without a loss affecting my rank in a negative way. This might seem silly, but I've experienced enough of people not taking lower ranks seriously to make me want to keep my rank higher. However, always playing conservatively likely limits growth.

So here's a game I played today with no intention or care other than that of trying new things.

Played my first official games this past Saturday, as I took place in a four-round AGA tournament. Not knowing where to put my real rank, I chose 15 kyu as it's one stone stronger than my current KGS rank. I ended up winning my first game (an 8-stone handicap game) against a 7 kyu on points. I sat out the next round. I then lost a 9-stone game to a 1 kyu by resignation, and then I lost a 9-stone game against a 2 dan on points (though not that many).

In all three games, I noticed the same strategy on my part: the big middle. I've been seeing it a lot in my games lately, and I'm not all that happy. It seems that if I can get a big middle (which seems natural with a high handicap) and play a peaceful game (not much fighting or captures), I can do pretty well. The first game that I won went this way, as well as the game against the 2nd dan, which I lost by less than ten points. The 1 kyu made me fight and that was my undoing.

(caveat: I'm a beginner too!)

You must fight! You get those extra handicap stones to help you fight!

Played a casual game with Atheri this afternoon. Tried doing 7 stones instead of 8. I was doing alright until he killed off a large group of mine in the lower right. Obviously, I need more work on tsumego. For playing in the tournament last weekend, I got a copy of 1001 L&D Problems. This is good for me because I now have my own copy instead of having to constantly renew the library's copy.

Despite that, I made a lot of mistakes. 62 seemed a bad idea the moment I played it. After the game was over, Atheri made the suggestions that 6 would have been better at F17 & that 12 would have been better at J4 or J5. I wonder if it would have been better for me to attach at D14 for move 16 (and the joseki that results from this). I had more than a little difficulty concentrating while reviewing because a homeless woman sat down next to us and she smelled terrible. To be clear, I'm not blaming her or anything like that. But it did draw my focus somewhat.

No.No -- none of them ( , J4, or J5) is very good.

Ed,

The reason I was playing on the kick to small knight was because it is something suggested in Opening Theory Made Easy. I hadn't tried it before and wanted to give it a go. However, in looking at the book again, there's two specifics in Otake's example which aren't in mine. There's another black stone near the star point, which limits white's extension. And in his examples, the original black stone is on the 3-4, not the 4-4 as in my game.

Question, when you say that white is heavy on the variation of move 40, what do you mean?

blindgod,Yes, very good to experiment -- and now you get some ideas on when it's OK to play it and when it's not. Good observations. (1) is important, and makes the big difference why the kick was in the book, like your own .
(2) is less important.Good question. When a group of stones is too big to give up, but not easy to settle -- either to make eyes to live, or to run away easily --
we call it 'heavy', as in a burden for the owner to carry around, to take care of, to worry about.
When you have a heavy group, your opponent may find ways to attack it, thereby profiting
from the attack. That's why the descend to R10 on and again on was very big --
B profits on the upper right while simultaneously making W heavy, for even more (potential) profit.

Ego is becoming a problem. It seems that I can play peacefully and do alright or fight and lose badly. In the last few days, I've played two peaceful games:

Played black in an even game against an unranked person who I would guess to be around 12k-13k. Lost by 1.5
Played white in a 2-stone handicap game against a 17k. Won by 3.5. If not for two stupid mistakes on my part, I would have won by about 9.5-10.5.

Recently, I've also played two fighting games where I was losing badly and resigned.

I know I need to play fighting games in order to improve. However, the desire not to look like an idiot gets in the way. I know that, long-term, this is a real problem.

My old jiujitsu teacher talked about the importance of putting oneself in bad positions. This would force you to learn and get better. If people avoided bad positions and didn't practice dealing with being in them, if it happened that those people got put into a bad position without their choice, they would be less skilled at dealing with it. I was able to keep my ego somewhat in check there and followed his advice and, as such, became good at defending against submissions and sweeps. While not exactly the same thing, the two situations seem to have a lot in common.

This post probably doesn't make much sense; I'm tired and when I get so, being coherent goes out the window.

Played Atheri yesterday. Chose a Barnes & Noble cafe rather than the coffee house. I must say that I much prefer B&N because:
1. There are tables big enough to comfortably fit the board, bowls, and kifu sheet. At the coffee house, we often have to put two tables together and hope that the staff doesn't complain.
2. The tables at B&N don't move. At the coffee house, many of the tables wobble at the slightest provocation and since I only have very light-weight plastic double convex stones, any movement causes problems. I do actually have heavier glass single convex stones, but they're too large for the board (despite being advertised as the correct size).
3. The food's decent and not horribly overpriced. At B&N, I was able to get a breakfast of a bagel with cream cheese and a bottle of juice for $3.50. At the coffee house, the only things to eat are slices of cake for about $4.25 each.
4. If you get there early (like I did yesterday), there's easy access to reading material. I was able to knock off about 100 pages in a very good book.

As for the game, I played moves 8 & 10 for the simple purpose of trying a different response to white's approach and extension. I wanted to see how each would play out.

I wondered at the time (and I still do) whether 14 would be better at L3.

I hope you bought that book. B&N is not the library.

Basics, basic broken shapes.

I actually already own it, but I didn't have it with me since I was in a bit of a rush when I left the house.

On another note, I finished Graded Go Problems for Beginners vol 2. I stopped keeping track of how many I got wrong/right around problem 250, but by the end, I was batting around .700. So I've started vol 3, and I'm a bit surprised at the increase in difficulty. Then again, vol 2 is certainly a step up from vol 1 and when I first started vol 2, I was discouraged by how much trouble I was having with even the simplest problems in that book. So now I'm experiencing the same thing with volume 3, so I'll just have to go through it and study and work on reading. Been here before.

So, my comments:
Move 26: Blocking the wrong way. You should always block in the direction you can get more territory. In this case, the amount of territory you get from blocking this way is zero. If you block the other way, there's a decent chance those two stones will die, and that's lots of profit for you. At the very least, those two stones don't have a base, and have to run for it.
Move 62: Doesn't really do very much. If your goal was to pressure my stones, there are better ways to do it. If your goal was to secure center territory, there are better ways to do it. If your goal was to make sure those two stones were connected, you don't really have to worry about them yet. There's no way they're going to die.
Move 112: I gave you sente. You didn't respond to my move, which was good. But then you go and play a move that secures only a few points in gote. There have to be bigger moves, and there have to be sente moves you could have played instead. Play them instead.
Move 156: O2 is possible here. See if you can read out the variations yourself.
Move 160: H16. Your stone is connected, and after W G16, B H15 (necessary. Why?) W H17 you've reduced me a few more points in sente.
Move 190: A5. Your move is worth 1, that move is worth 4. Count it.
That's it. You've definitely improved since last time. I think one thing you need to work on is finding weak points in a group. More than once, you attacked a group at what you thought was a weak point, only to find yourself burdened with bad shape. All of those groups had weak points, and all you needed to do was find them. Work on that, and I think you'll find that your fighting will improve.

Btw, Atheri, we were talking about monkey jumps yesterday and I wanted to share one from a game I played a month or two ago. Since you've made me obsessed with this move. Obviously, there are other stones on the board, but I wanted to present just the monkey jump in this game.

But what about this?

I like that, Shaddy. Thanks. I'll have to remember that.

For what it's worth, for a long time I didn't like fighting either. I thought I was bad at it because I tended to get beaten by stronger players (not surprising) and this discouraged me from even playing at all. Of course, when I avoided fighting, my opponents walked all over me, because I let them get away with all sorts of overplays. Now I like it, and feel I do decently at it for my level. There are a few things that helped me:

- Reading. This gets better with more games and problems. If you get to a point where you think to yourself I can't read that push yourself a bit. Your limit is farther than you think it is.
- Good shape. This is vital to keep yourself from being cut to pieces.
- Sacrifice. Sometimes that group isn't worth saving. Other times, you can throw a couple stones in as bait and make gains by threatening to rescue them from the outside.
- Keeping your opponent separated. When you add two weak groups together, you usually get a strong group.
- Attack without touching. Guns are better than knives. If you look at higher level games, sometimes people will set up attacks by playing on the opposite side of the board and taking the outside, to cut off avenues of escape.
- Having a better idea when you're in a position to fight. This comes from experience, but generally speaking, if you have a lot of stones nearby and your opponent doesn't, you stand to do much better in a fight than they do.
- You also need to attack with strong groups, so that you don't attack on one side only to lose your group on the other side.
- Having a goal when fighting. Fights are complicated, and if you don't have an idea what you're trying to do, like make territory in this corner or push his group into the center, it's easy to get lost.
- Don't try to kill. Killing is dicey and if you mess up, you're often left in a painful position. Be happy to seal your opponent's group into a small area where he's only going to make the two points that keep him alive. Life and Death problems are for learning how to stay alive and when you can tenuki and still live.

This list keeps getting longer the more I think about it, but...
Most importantly, none of the above advice is absolute, and if you're not sure about something, test it out a few times and see when it works and when it doesn't.

Guns are good for gun situations (e.g. distances); knives are good for knife situations (e.g. distances).
Be good at both and choose wisely depending on the circumstances.
If the correct attack calls for a gun, use a gun; if instead it calls for a knife, then use a knife.

Played a 6-stone handicap game with Atheri yesterday that I lost by 0.5 points. I haven't been playing lately due to a mix of family medical issues and watching the olympics. As such, playing felt like trying to start a car that had been out in the cold, especially when the car wasn't that good to begin with. I played numerous exceptionally bad moves and... yeah, it was bad.

I did talk with him a little about learning a few more josekis since I only know 5 or 6 and not knowing a few basic ones cost me both in this game and in the past. So he was good enough to show me 2 or 3 more. Nothing complicated.

Now that I can finally watch the entire gymnastics and judo competitions, this has taken up all of my free time and more. Normally, I have between 60-90 minutes of free time per day, which I usually use to either play go or work out. Now that the two events I was watching are over, I'll probably go back to my normal schedule this week. I feel compelled to watch taekwondo since I practiced it for 15 years and taught it for 5, but I get the feeling that I'll turn it off after ten minutes saying, "This is really boring."

As a side note, watching Urska Zolnir win her first three matches by armbar, I fell in love a little.