Helel wrote:Bantari wrote:I guess I deserve to be called out for being over-picky and looking at the words rather than intended meaning.
But then - aren't we all?
When you look past my words at the meaning rather than nitpicking yourself, you'd see that the message is that it is often not so easy to tell which stones are 'junk' and which are 'key'. I assume this holds for the pros as well as it does for me. We can both nitpick nitpicking or we can discuss, your choice.
Ah, such a hard hard choice...
The question whether the separation into 'junk' and 'key' stones is instinctive for pros or sometimes require considerable effort has merit.
I wouldn't presume to know, and I think karaklis more or less is equally clueless, so as things stand you may well be right.
It would however be great if someone else with an educated opinion would like to share his/her knowledge.
At the lower amateur dan level it's generally instantly understood
IF we remember to think about that before going "hey, I can capture those!"

Less than a millisecond, not sure, but definitely less than 1/2 second.
On the other hand, pros and extremely strong amateurs think a lot more deeply and see more variations at a glance than lower dan level players, so I could understand if they actually took longer in tournament situations to reach their conclusion - they're reading whole board variations 60 or 70 moves in advance and comparing them so that they can decide which strategy suits them better. However, when a pro is reviewing an amateur game, they're trying to give advice that we can follow.

So they will decide the status "at a glance" the same way an amateur 1-5 dan player would.