Quote:
Does anyone have tips on ways (maybe ranked in terms of effectiveness) for me to speed up my play while maintaining my reading (and positional judgement etc) quality?
The most important step is to stop talking about reading and counting (positional judgement). Even though both are very important.
What you appear to be doing at present is like an actor going on stage and reading his lines from a script. To be even an amateur dramatics level actor, he has to first memorise his script. He has to internalise it.
To do this, you can either follow the advice of strong pros and even stronger Mother Nature, or you can follow the advice of weak amateurs.
Mother Nature tells you that to learn, for example how to walk or talk, by mimicry and repeated trial and error. You don't get lessons in physics or maths from your mother.
In go, pros advise likewise first and foremost playing over lots and lots of pro games. The idea is to internalise, by repeated mimicry, the best and most frequent shapes AND sequences. This is actually a form of reading. By internalising it, it is always there on tap during your own games. You don't have to spend time re-inventing the wheel in every game - you just turn on the tap. What you have to do in games then is simply a reading CHECK - a very different thing, but much easier and faster. You only check the wheel can spin - you don't craft the whole wheel in your forge.
Pros also recommend playing stronger players, and if possible only stronger players. What you internalise by mimicry takes a long time (hence plating over LOTS of games) to be fashioned into a totally reliable tool. If you just play players of your own strength or weaker, flaws in your internalised databank (your intuition) will rarely be exposed. A stronger player will punish, and with this feedback you can fine tine your intuition.
As your intuition gets honed, you start to get a feel for what is "natural" - basically, your subconscious counts the frequency of every element it sees and the most frequent elements are those that are offered to your conscious brain first. You can thus play "naturally" (as the pros call it) and fast. You can then use your 30 seconds a move just to do some basic checks.
Evaluation follows a similar, though more advanced, trajectory. Pros learn lots and lots of basic positions or elements. For example, a corner knight's move shimari is, on average, going to give you about 16 points at the end of the game. Some pros practise things like placing a hand between their eye and the board and counting the territory the hand appears to cover. With repeated practice, that gives them a good guideline to estimate the size of various territories simply by eye - with repeated practice you don't even need to put your hand out. Many pros learn by heart (and so do not count during a game) the size of various standard boundary-play sequences. I have been given estimates by pros of how many such sequences are involved, and the range is between something like 200 and 1,000. The higher figures seem mostly to involve combinations of lower elements, and so I'd aim for the 200 mark. The great player Genan Inseki produced a book of the commonest ones to learn. Another trick the pros use,, because they have internalised a host of "natural" plays, is to use that information in fast games by reasoning that if all plays by both sides have been "natural", the game is still even. If he spots an inefficiency (a redundant stone, say) he knows the balance has been upset. His vast experience gives him a good estimate of by how much, but even amateurs can do this. Try looking at a middle-game position and spotting all the inefficient moves, and then do a more formal count. Hey, presto! You therefore don't actually need to count most territories in each game.
Shibano Toramaru became the youngest Meijin ever. After winning the title, he revealed that his main method of study - even at that level - was play through lots of games on the internet FAST, looking only for new moves, i.e. moves that seemed unnatural to him. He could only do that by having already internalised a huge databank of natural moves. He added that he was not specially proud of his reading ability, and he lagged behind others in tsumego study.
In the recent Pro-Am Honinbos match, pro Honinbo Ichiriki Ryo praised the play of the amateur Honinbo Ozeki Minoru by saying that je had played Ozeki over 13 years, since insei days, and what he noticed was that, when playing Ozeki, it felt like playing a pro, because Ozeki played natural moves.
This is the sort of advice and remarks pros have spoken over and over again for centuries. I have never seen a pro recommend linear algebra, Monte-Carlo tree searches or even taking off your socks to do big counts on your toes. Like a baby, you just walk the walk, talk the talk and let your subconscious do all the hard work. You just provide time and focus.
I am baffled that the proponents of logic keep rubbishing the pro approach. But the pros do what they do and become strong. Amateurs do what they do and stay weak. Isn't it more logical to follow the pros? Logic only works usefully if you start in the right place. It's pointless patting yourself on the back for logically ending up at some "truth" you think you have discovered if you started from the wrong place.
To repeat, for emphasis. If you live in a house, you probably believe that the roof is vitally important. So it is. You couldn't survive without it. It stops you getting cold and wet and having soggy food and electrical short-circuits. But the roof (= reading checks in go) only works AFTER you have built the foundations and the walls. With just a roof, you are in effect living in a tent, with no heating, no fridge, nowhere to put your go board safely...