I've always heard that playing against stronger players helps increases one's strength faster.

Do you agree? With or without handicap?

I'm under the impression that it will end up teaching me to play passive moves to avoid losing entire games on a blunder.

It's absolutely better to play stronger players.

I also recommend taking the proper handicap (for the sake of both players).

There's nothing wrong with losing due to a blunder; if nothing else, it will teach you not to make that particular mistake again (even if it does take several repetitions before the lesson finally sinks in). Just do your best, and don't play passively.

Edit:

I don't think you should only play against stronger players, if weaker and similar strength players are available. It does help (with morale, if nothing else) to actually see your plans work out from time to time.

One way to avoid playing passively is to mix up your games: play the stronger player without handicap some of the time. One way to do this is to purposely end those games early. Play until you are obviously a good bit behind, then review. But handicap games can teach you to not play passively, so long as you are careful not to fall into that trap.

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Occupy Babel!

Playing against stronger players is a good way to improve, especially if you can review the game with your opponent afterwards. However, you can also learn from playing with opponents at your own strength or weaker. These players will make bad moves more often and you get practice in recognizing and improper moves and overplays. This is a valuable skill because if your opponent makes a bad move and you don't respond to it correctly you may turn it into a good move.

If you have the chance to play a stronger player, who will play you not for the sake of an easy win but for an interesting teaching experience for you, you will benefit the most. Generally a game against a stronger player offers a lot to learn but your mindset should not be to win the game but to mindfully follow how he gets the upper-hand. It's not "I lost here, because he killed my corner and my reading is bad", if he surrounded your corner and you had to live locally THAT is the real mistake. Letting positions get surrounded is almost always bad.

But you have to understand this and look for the real game deciding mistakes and/or the stronger player has to explain those to you. If you just play game after game, no review or reviewing and getting the wrong informations, you will not benefit greatly. This will lead to your experience of having to play timid and overly defensive moves against stronger players, which is the wrong attitude. The stronger player should explain you when to defend, when to take bigger points, when to trade territory for something else and so on.

In my opinion you also should not take any Handicap larger than four stones for a teaching game, because here White can play more relaxed and try to play moves, which should teach you and not utterly destroy you like on nine stones. If White is a strong player, he can play a very normal game and still make it close. I say, in the beginning it is more important to get a feeling for direction and big and urgent moves. It's not reading, so every fight or life-and-death-situation should not be reviewed in detail but what lead to it, because here was most likely the mistake.

That been said, it is equally important to play players your own strength and weaker (against Handicap!) because everyone has a different style/approach to the game and you have to know how to handle them all to become a really sound player.

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

I don't get much benefit from playing most stronger players, since they tend to insist on traditional handicaps, which makes the games boring and limits my development to a specific subset of go. If I were to give a tip to those stronger players out there when saddled with playing a weaker player, make it more interesting and have them play non-traditional placements, it will be good for you.

Stronger? I will say strong players not stronher. Person need to be at least 1dan to be. Effective. Prefer 5 d or higher. Handy is a must!!!!

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"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson

The traditional wisdom in most games (where a good handicap system doesn't exist like in Go) is to mostly play players of roughly equal skill - Play the weaker ones every now and then so you can try new concepts in more relaxed fights, and in Go properly handicapped teaching games are obviously part of a healthy diet, but the staple food of a growing player are definitely even (at least stone-wise) games against opponents of equal and especially of slightly higher skill.

This is important because playing even against a great player will just get you slaughtered and outplayed on all fronts very badly, so you won't learn much. Worse, you might learn a habit of ridiculous desperation moves in order to win ever.
But a slightly better player is someone you can beat if you are on point, but forces you to improve and generally play your best game. Thus he slowly but surely pushes you to improve.
It's what I try to do in Street Fighter currently, and it definitely feels good. Victory is something constantly challenging, but never truly out of reach. There's always that temptation of just trying a smidge harder...

When I was first starting to play go, I regularly attended a go club that had more dan players than kyus. After the club ended up closing down, the strongest player I had access to was a 1k, and I only played him about once a month. During the time that I was regularly playing dan players I was improving at a tremendous rate, but after the club closed my progress leveled off and stagnated for a while. There is not necessarily a correlation, I may ave reach the limit I could achieve without spending some real study time. But maybe playing stinger players was providing the benefits of study without making it seem as much like a chore.

This.
Of course, you still want to play all kinds of opponents (both much better, and much less experienced).
But consistently playing people just a little better than you (and of course reviewing and learning from your mistakes)
is an excellent way to improve.

What I've heard is that if you want to improve, you want to play engaged stronger players who don't mind reviewing at the end, even if you keep losing every time.

However, this disregards the psychological aspect of Go, that not everyone can always play their best, or be motivated to teach/learn when there is a great difference in strength.

So, I recommend what EdLee and Zombie said: Try to play someone slightly stronger than you as much as you can.

P.S. - I also think it's a good idea trying to teach players at least 5 stones below you, since it helps you synthesize your knowledge.

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

Don't know about you guys, but finding stronger players to play with all the time, or even regularly, is impractical for me. I will happily play one whenever I get the chance to, but it seems to naturally balance itself out in terms of playing a good mix of opponents.

I play about a third of my games against my mentor handicapped and the rest even with me playing black. I even win on occasion if he's nice.

Online I play a mix but since I'm fairly new most players are better or roughly equal.

I do feel I learn more from playing better players. I'm not bashful about asking for a teaching game from a superior player either.

I disagree with Zombie and EdLee. The key point of my disagreement is with how quickly can you improve. I believe you can improve much quicker by playing much stronger players than you can by playing players who are only somewhat stronger.

And if you don't have any stronger players around, then play though and review pro games.

But I agree that another key is to review your games, especially with your strong opponent.

One of the best ways to get games with stronger opponents -- play with sandbagging guests on KGS

(My emphasis on "believe".)