I know that feeling very well and unfortunately have to say that it stays the same, no matter how strong you are (at least for me). The beautiful thing about go is that you can always see that next step of improvement in front of you, regardless of strength (e.g. had I only read that one step further, counted the ko-threats, protected before attacking etc.) although maybe that can also be called the curse of go...

As you get stronger you make less mistakes but also learn to appreciate the game on another level. When you play for the first time, the board is like a closed book or a maze and you don't know what to do with it. But step by step you realize more and more of the nature of the game, be it the moment you get that you can't run away on the first line or when for the first time you defend against a ko-threat in a way to minimize the number of further threats.

With every improvement you learn more about the beauty of the game and the stronger the level, the more subtle these things become. But that next stone in strength always kinda seems to be in reaching distance, although it gets harder and harder with every stone.

So improvement in itself can enhance your love of the game, but maybe people who play for fun feel more comfortable to just marvel at the immenseness of the game which no one of us will ever completely decipher: not me, you or lee sedol. On the other hand I know people who play "for fun" and haven't learned or improved in years but they still get as agitated over a loss as everyone.

I've been an egf 1d for a good while now but I most certainly am not proud of myself or consider myself as strong because I still make so many mistakes and there is so much left to learn. But I guess for all of us there is no ending point where we're truly satisfied, only the path

Avoiding playing go and relying on books and problems instead to improve is like

...trying to learn guitar without practicing the guitar
...trying to learn soccer without a ball
...trying to learn French without speaking it (sadly, not an uncommon approach to English-learning here but...)
...trying to learn programming without writing a program
...trying to learn dancing without actually dancing

I was a bit slow, personally, to realise it, but study is only the start. The real learning comes in the practice. Study feeds the practice, and practice hones the study. It may be painful to lose a game, but it can help you understand what you have studied more, and if something you have studied helps you to win, then you`ll remember the pleasure.

It can take a lot of practice to consolidate something new learned in study. If it did not, then you could read a book on dancing and suddenly be backing up Lady Gaga, and you could read Entirety of Go Strategy by Gernot Thuempenhauser and be trading blows with Gu Li. But it`s not like that. Don`t worry about it! Just get on with it.

So what I`m doing is simple: study lots, play lots.

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Thank you all for writing here with your thoughts on this topic. I think that a number of insightful comments have been made. More specifically, it's good to know that I am not the only one bothered by this.

I spoke with a different pro about it. Specifically, I brought up the anxiety I feel when I play fast games at 20 seconds a move. My question was: "When you find yourself under time pressure, do you alter your playing style? Doesn't the anxiety cause you to not be able to read as quickly as you could if you were not under pressure? This idea that my reading is limited during fast play is causing me to really disdain playing fast games."

For the first, he answered that he doesn't feel like he plays differently under time pressure. I was baffled by this and said, "What!? You mean to tell me that you don't play it safe at all?" No, he does indeed play it safe but sometimes you really have no choice but to respond in an equally agressive manner.

To the second, the young professional thought about it and said that when he was in training, people would often play 10-20 fast games a day along with their serious games and that nothing but good came from it. There were obvious benefits.

1. More exposure to shapes, positions, and joseki that would happen in a game.
2. Experience, experience, experience.
3. Fun and ridiculously laughable mistakes.

Ultimately, the pro said I shouldn't worry about the results of these games. So I won't - instead, I'll play to have fun and practice.
Hopefully this helps urge me to play more and care less about the meticulousness of Go! Hope these conversations help those of you who shy away from blitz go because of anxiety.

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If your goal is still improving I think the serious games were an important part of that training.

To paraphrase Ishida Yoshio, if you want to improve the best way is trying to improve: Just playing for fun is just playing for fun (as xedover says too I think).

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Pssh, you think that slow games are more fun anyway.

Oops, this is an old post, but...



I think this analogy is a little oversimplistic, and in fact (having been in the lucky position to be able to tutor students who are beginners in some discipline in the past) I do often recommend that people think hard about what learning guitar or French really means.

I have attempted to learn the guitar in the past. For all the chords and cadences I know, no matter how good an ear I have, in spite of all the modes and keys I can write down on paper, I still can't make my fingers do what I want them to. Why? Because I want to be awesome at the guitar. So I don't practise stupid things like actually fingering the chords, or actually plucking the right string at the right time. It's all doing the right thing in my head, so why isn't it coming out of the instrument? Stupid box, mumble grumble. It's now sitting in a cupboard, gathering dust. (I had a friend whose fingers did all the things he wanted them to, but he knew no theory, so it came out of the other end sounding awful anyway.) Once you have all the tricks under your belt, you can jam to your heart's content - but only because you've put in the groundwork.

Likewise programming. "They" (the wisdom of the internet and programming teachers and so on) say that the hardest thing about programming is thinking logically and algorithmically, and once you've got that down, the rest follows naturally. I think logically and algorithmically anyway - by upbringing and by trade and by previous exposure to much simpler programming languages - so why did it take me four (long, gruelling) attempts to learn C? Because I didn't practise boring things like syntax. I would miss out a semicolon or put curly brackets instead of round brackets, and the compiler would spit out nonsense, and I'd be ready to throw my machine out of the window. (And people who practise syntax without structure will not produce working or efficient programs.) Once you have both down, write all the programs you like!

Likewise French. One does not learn French by being plonked in France - one learns by slowly accumulating large banks of grammar knowledge and vocabulary, practising forming it into sentences, reading sentences that French native speakers have written, studying them, and then, later, going to France.

Essentially, the guitar, C, French, and many other things, are very complex and difficult things to learn precisely because, before you are competent at everything, your creations will be good for nothing. This is why so many people give up at all of them: they want to be good at playing the guitar, writing a program or speaking French, so they try to do so from day 1, or day 10, or day 30, or drastically before they're ready, because let's be honest - the fun part is not practising your fingering/strumming, or your syntax/algorithmic thinking, or your grammar/vocabulary. But you need all of those arrows in your quiver before you can be good.

Of course, once you're a 6-dan professional at the guitar, C or French, you gain the right to say things like "oh, all you need to do is play/program/speak lots". It's not usually so simple - for every 6-dan professional who played lots, there are tens of thousands of 16-kyu amateurs who wonder why they play lots and don't improve.

For me, the desire to become strong is about having a deeper appreciation for the game. When you become expert at something, you view things very differently than when you are a novice. Do you need to be strong to appreciate good moves? Of course not, but I want to see the game through different eyes!