playing against a pro recommended opening

[tapir]

@lindentree: Is your question answered already? I would say, your opponent was correct. With the opponents tengen stone in place, your star point stone in the middle of the side is less efficient, because the tengen stone limits your prospects. This becomes more obvious if you assume some common lines (low approach to the corners, low pincer, taking the corner) where the tengen ends in a perfect place to reduce the moyo and helps further reduction.

When you think about it, our play, especially at my feeble level, is all about mistakes: those that we make, which are exploited by our opponents, and those our opponents make, which we exploit. We don't have the ability yet - at least those who are kyu players - to think about efficiency, restraint, and safe groups.

Yes, it is all about mistakes. But the question about attitude may be how one can overcome mistakes in the long run. The right idea with bad reading can be corrected by building up reading strength, fundamental misconceptions - like the belief that you can't care for efficiency because you are too weak anyway - will stay without lot of effort to overcome them.

I guess amateur practice leads a lot of players adopting bad attitude for short-term benefits which may damage the growth in the long run. (Never resigning, trying to win lost games, lack of defense, trick plays.) I am pretty weak, but when I assess beginners play (and potential), I also look for humble-looking but efficient moves, good ideas and things like that more than results. It may help to look at one's own games the same way.

I must admit I remember won games better than lost games, though.

[flOvermind]

Yes, it is all about mistakes. But the question about attitude may be how one can overcome mistakes in the long run. The right idea with bad reading can be corrected by building up reading strength, fundamental misconceptions - like the belief that you can't care for efficiency because you are too weak anyway - will stay without lot of effort to overcome them.

I think a much more important distinction than "mistakes" vs. "efficiency" is "your mistakes" vs. "my mistakes".

We have many threads here that ask how to punish some mistake. This is "your mistake" thinking. We (amateurs) see a mistake of the opponent and want to take advantage of it. Ignoring for a moment that often it's not even possible to exploit a mistake, I think this attitude is inefficient and short-sighted in itself. It's basically learning something that won't help you later on, because later on you'll meet stronger player that won't make that kind of mistakes anymore.

In contrast, I think we should think more of "our mistakes", and how to correct them. Just play the best moves and avoid making mistakes yourself. That way, the opponent's mistakes don't really matter anymore. In a won a game, the opponents mistakes are irrelevant. In a lost game, we obviously made more or worse mistakes than the opponent, so we should work on making less mistakes, instead of trying to figure out how to punish the ones of the opponent.

I think that's a question of attitude that has nothing to do with rank or strength. When I play a 9 handicap game against a 15k, I have two ways to win. Either I can try to exploit every mistake I see (typically by reading better and killing some groups). Or I can just try to play good moves, and usually some group will just die naturally. That means you can get from 15k to 4k just by learning to avoid your own mistakes.

To come back to "mistakes" vs. "efficiency": I also think that comes naturally with the "my mistakes" attitude. Because when I look at my own mistakes (leaving aside the stupid blunders where I just misread and lost a group), I tend to think more about those things like "that's inefficient", "my position feels overconcentrated", "I had to run with a weak group", and so on. In contrast, when I look at mistakes of my opponents, I tend to think more in terms like "that's an overplay", with the implicit assumption that I have to "punish it". A more constructive approach would be to just accept the move without judgement, be happy about the suddenly improved position on the board and just play the best move

[gaius]

If people don't want to learn, there's nothing wrong in that for a mere game like go. But surely people asking how to punish something do, ostensibly, want to learn. Is it really the case that these people are all the "if I had a hammer" type and just want to learn to pound away at their opponents? Surely some want to know whether there's another way.

The problem often seems to be the double misconception: "my opponent deviated from the joseki I know" THUS "my opponent's move is wrong" THUS "I should strike to punish immediately". By replacing the question "how do I punish?" by "how do I avoid getting tricked?" or, even better, "what are the best follow-up moves for both players, and are they worth playing immediately?", one might expect a more reasonable result. Nevertheless, I have the feeling that you exaggerate this point.

For one thing, I think that before one can really understand the value of honte, one must first have a good amount of experience in sharp fighting. There is a very thin line between a honte move and a slack move, and there are moments where one simply has no time to play honte, no matter how solid it might be. I've seen "safe groups and restraint" being misapplied just as often as greedy invasions and unnecessary attempts to kill, and I doubt that anyone here would not agree that blindly defending is just as bad as blindly attacking. But for another, I have not seen any examples of your so-called "amateur attitude" in this thread. How to play against an unusual opening is an interesting and difficult question, independently of attitude. And what is amateurish about crushing an opponent? I've never seen any pro hesitate to crush their opponents when given the opportunity. Of course, there are those among us who fight with sneaky tricks and deliberate overplays, hoping for the opponent to screw up - I noticed that one particular Malkovich player has been extremely successful this way. But you seem to forget that it is entirely possible to crush someone through good, honest moves.

Finally (and forgive me for veering away from the original topic of this thread), I strongly believe that inventiveness is something to be treasured. Whether or not my new "invention" that deviates from joseki, or my strange-looking yet interesting "tesuji" is perfect is something I often do not know - but how would I be able to figure that out and get stronger, if I don't have the guts to try it out? Simply put, I think it's just hard to progress if one only plays standard moves, shallow defenses, and joseki from the book. Haven't a lot of really strong players had reputations of always attacking for the kill and fighting like crazy, before finally figuring out honte and getting from the middle-dan region to high-dan rankings? So, rather than bluntly declaring unusual moves to be "amateurish" or even resulting from "problematic attitudes", I prefer to value them for what they are: necessary steps towards learning the proper move.

[Kirby]

Just played an ASR League game where my opponent opened with tengen and double 3-3 as black, and I went with a sanrensei. When I asked about his opening afterwards, he said that Yilun Yang recommended it, and that I had handled it wrong because my sanrensei didn't have room to develop a moyo. I understand the logic, but I was curious about what others here think about playing/countering this sort of opening.

Yilun Yang may have recommended that your opponent try out the opening based on his particular style of play. Maybe he wanted his student to get some sort of experience.

Also, I don't think it is game losing, but it is true that it's difficult to get a moyo when he's played tengen, so maybe sanrensei isn't ideal.

It's probably best to be patient and play normally. He didn't waste a move by playing tengen, but he also cannot make a good moyo immediately since he's played 3-3. So you can maybe be calm and hope that you can get an advantage from his playing slightly inconsistent moves.

[John Fairbairn]

Ok, let's assume that you're right. (And I bow to both your strength and experience.) How does a kyu player like me learn the
correct "attitude"? Perhaps there's a book for you to write, John...

I don't really know. As I said, this is a relatively new shift in my own thinking and I may be way off course (but for whatever experience is worth, my instinct is that I am at least facing in the right direction). Maybe a discussion here will throw up some answers.

By replacing the question "how do I punish?" by "how do I avoid getting tricked?" or, even better, "what are the best follow-up moves for both players, and are they worth playing immediately?", one might expect a more reasonable result. Nevertheless, I have the feeling that you exaggerate this point.

The point possibly is exaggerated - perhaps simply through being exposed as a new idea? But rephrasing old ideas as above strikes me as the sort of thing that would make a Zen master hit you with his paddle (or whatever it is they do). Rephrasing is still an attachment to the old way of thinking. Detachment to allow in a new way of thinking is called for. For such a major shift maybe exaggeration is not enough?

I think that before one can really understand the value of honte, one must first have a good amount of experience in sharp fighting. There is a very thin line between a honte move and a slack move, and there are moments where one simply has no time to play honte, no matter how solid it might be.

I don't think that fighting is the only way to understand honte, and maybe not even the best. That's a bit like saying that a criminal learns to be good if he gets in trouble enough. I think it's more likely that he just learns to pretend to be good. The best way to teach someone to be good may be to teach them from first principles. I think those who are destined to be go pros probably learn about things like honte also from first principles. They learn about fighting from first principles, too. They don't really need one to interfere with the other. The essence of "first principles", I suggest, is learning how to make your own moves efficiently meet the criteria. Learn your scales before you try to play jazz.

I've seen "safe groups and restraint" being misapplied just as often as greedy invasions and unnecessary attempts to kill. I doubt that anyone here would not agree that blindly defending is just as bad as blindly attacking.

That again seems to me simply to be either a statement of the obvious or another restatement of old ideas, but it certainly doesn't seem to be relevant. To be relevant it has to address the question of whether a safe move was played when a safe move was called for, but was just the precise point that was wrong - full marks for style (i.e. attitude), poor marks for technical merit. Or was it played when an attacking move was called for? Poor marks for style, good marks for technical merit.

My still coalescing view is that a senior pro assessing pupils would select those that had good style, reasoning they can be taught technique with enough time. He would, however, tend to reject those with poor style and good technique because his experience would tell him that it is much harder to teach style (again, in the special sense of attitude). As a concrete example of that, I refer you back to a remark by Kobayashi Satoru I quoted recently here where he talked of "professional tactics, amateur hallucinations" in relation to some top amateurs. After all, we don't make a guy professor of mathematics just because he can do Rubik's cube in 12 seconds. Nor would we even make Rubik a professor on the strength of his invention. We expect a professor to have the right approach/attitude/style to the whole subject of maths. I regard the hamete experts and the like as Rubik cube solvers, nothing more.

How to play against an unusual opening is an interesting and difficult question, independently of attitude.

Interesting and difficult, yes of course. But I don't see how any fruitful consideration can take place independently of attitude. It then seems a reasonable stance to suggest that some attitudes are better than others.

And what is amateurish about crushing an opponent?

Nothing per se, probably, but that wasn't the point raised. The characteristic identified was amateurs WANTING to crush the opponent. Real pros just want to play the best move. If that involves crushing, so be it, but it's incidental, not the motivating factor.

[Kirby]

...

And what is amateurish about crushing an opponent?

Nothing per se, probably, but that wasn't the point raised. The characteristic identified was amateurs WANTING to crush the opponent. Real pros just want to play the best move. If that involves crushing, so be it, but it's incidental, not the motivating factor.

I think that this is a good point - one that I should try to follow more. I am often kind of greedy. A half point game makes me too nervous, so I want to win by at least 20 or 30 points if possible. Sometimes this means that I will play moves that I know do not work.

Sometimes I will even tenuki when I know that it means that my opponent could kill my group ("I hope he doesn't notice!").

These types of ideas that I have are not helpful to my improvement, I feel. But it is hard for me to shed them.

I hope that I can play more good moves and not be so greedy.

[kirkmc]

My favorite games are the ones I win or lose by a half point. For me, ideally, a go game should be a perfect balance between two players.

[lindentree]

I don't know if Yang recommends it - I've got all his books and he doesn't say anything about it - but I had a game against someone a while back and crushed him. He tried too hard to make a moyo and it was easy to prevent.

Apparently it was a KGS Plus lecture, although as somebody else pointed out, he might have misinterpreted it. Thanks to everybody for the helpful feedback, I'll probably go with nirensei if I see this opening again. At the moment, I don't feel qualified to weigh in on the other discussion about correct attitude.

[gaius]

By replacing the question "how do I punish?" by "how do I avoid getting tricked?" or, even better, "what are the best follow-up moves for both players, and are they worth playing immediately?", one might expect a more reasonable result. Nevertheless, I have the feeling that you exaggerate this point.

The point possibly is exaggerated - perhaps simply through being exposed as a new idea? But rephrasing old ideas as above strikes me as the sort of thing that would make a Zen master hit you with his paddle (or whatever it is they do). Rephrasing is still an attachment to the old way of thinking. Detachment to allow in a new way of thinking is called for. For such a major shift maybe exaggeration is not enough?

Before letting this conversation derail into a technical squabble, let us agree on the subject of the discussion (which is already waaay off-topic). Are we talking about: (a) the way a senior professional selects young children; or (b) the best attitude for an amateur to progress? With the possible exception of those select few amateurs who play evenly against professionals and those young players who have the potential to get there, these discussions seem fairly disjoint. I can understand the perfectionist approach towards go that you advocate; your approach might even be employed in Japanese professional go schools - if so, you are a far greater authority on that than anyone else here. But the reality of amateur (and also, I suspect, professional) tournament go is that every game is decided by mistakes, and that none of us has the faintest idea of what we're doing.

In actual real-life practice, it is not so easy to get stronger simply by pretending to understand "honte", or some such "good" approach to the game. In fact, I think that pretending to really understand any aspect of the game will only lead to stagnation in your development. I, for one, most certainly do not understand go! I do not understand honte, I do not understand sabaki, I do not understand fuseki, and whenever I play a tournament game, I am uncertain at virtually every juncture of the game. What's more, I believe that the same holds not only for all of us here, but also for professionals (though at another level). We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars... Acknowledging this, I do not see how any amateur can really progress by following a shallow misunderstanding of a perfectionist, "professional" attitude. I don't need to tell you how Takemiya Masaki 9p, winner of many Japanese- and world championships, advocates freedom and experimentation at every level!

I think that before one can really understand the value of honte, one must first have a good amount of experience in sharp fighting. There is a very thin line between a honte move and a slack move, and there are moments where one simply has no time to play honte, no matter how solid it might be.

I don't think that fighting is the only way to understand honte, and maybe not even the best. That's a bit like saying that a criminal learns to be good if he gets in trouble enough. I think it's more likely that he just learns to pretend to be good. The best way to teach someone to be good may be to teach them from first principles. I think those who are destined to be go pros probably learn about things like honte also from first principles. They learn about fighting from first principles, too. They don't really need one to interfere with the other. The essence of "first principles", I suggest, is learning how to make your own moves efficiently meet the criteria. Learn your scales before you try to play jazz.

Continuing your metaphor, I happen to be a jazz piano player and I am very glad that I learned to improvise before I ever really studied the traditional jazz scales and chords. It taught me how to play both with and without the jazz voicings - and that greatly enriched the way I play the standards. Sometimes you can hear so-called "jazz" musicians that have been almost scholarly taught at a conservatory to play in the given style; though technically refined, their music tends to lack any passion and joy of playing.

However weak I am, I feel that every game of go is a battle, and fighting spirit is at its heart. It saddens me every time I see somebody lose a game by 15 points without putting up a struggle. At an amateur level, the idea of playing by "first principles" is misinterpreted far too often, leading to insipid play by the book without any fighting spirit or creativity. I am not saying that honte is unimportant, far from it! But he who mindlessly defends when not necessary has failed to grasp the idea, just like the musician who forgot to use his creativity.

I've seen "safe groups and restraint" being misapplied just as often as greedy invasions and unnecessary attempts to kill. I doubt that anyone here would not agree that blindly defending is just as bad as blindly attacking.

That again seems to me simply to be either a statement of the obvious or another restatement of old ideas, but it certainly doesn't seem to be relevant. To be relevant it has to address the question of whether a safe move was played when a safe move was called for, but was just the precise point that was wrong - full marks for style (i.e. attitude), poor marks for technical merit. Or was it played when an attacking move was called for? Poor marks for style, good marks for technical merit.

My still coalescing view is that a senior pro assessing pupils would select those that had good style, reasoning they can be taught technique with enough time. He would, however, tend to reject those with poor style and good technique because his experience would tell him that it is much harder to teach style (again, in the special sense of attitude). As a concrete example of that, I refer you back to a remark by Kobayashi Satoru I quoted recently here where he talked of "professional tactics, amateur hallucinations" in relation to some top amateurs. After all, we don't make a guy professor of mathematics just because he can do Rubik's cube in 12 seconds. Nor would we even make Rubik a professor on the strength of his invention. We expect a professor to have the right approach/attitude/style to the whole subject of maths. I regard the hamete experts and the like as Rubik cube solvers, nothing more.

How to play against an unusual opening is an interesting and difficult question, independently of attitude.

Interesting and difficult, yes of course. But I don't see how any fruitful consideration can take place independently of attitude. It then seems a reasonable stance to suggest that some attitudes are better than others.

Actually, I think studying hamete can be an interesting way to practise reading... More to the point though, I strongly doubt whether a professional player would select a child that does not show any fighting spirit. Even if that would be the case, due to all the reasons stated before, I don't see how an amateur would benefit from following such an approach.

And what is amateurish about crushing an opponent?

Nothing per se, probably, but that wasn't the point raised. The characteristic identified was amateurs WANTING to crush the opponent. Real pros just want to play the best move. If that involves crushing, so be it, but it's incidental, not the motivating factor.

Sure, but the original comment expressed no such intention. It only said "I had a game against someone a while back and crushed him".

[John Fairbairn]

gaius, apart from apparently saying you want to be left alone to enjoy your fighting games in peace - which is basically how I feel about go myself, as it happens - I'm not at all sure what point you are making.

Yes, all games are decided by mistakes, even pro games. Another truism. But some people try to minimise them, by study or by modifying their approach to the game. Successful players don't fight for the hell of it, pretending that experimentation is creativity or just hoping that with enough "experience" they will discover some insight, which in my experience is a common amateur approach, mine included.

Among pros everything is much more calculated. One common style of play among Japanese pros for example is to play the percentages in the dull way that pensions companies invest in the main stock markets. Chinese pros and Korean pros, probably because they have shorter games, like to play the secondary markets or dabble in venture capital, but even they are calculating the percentages on a risk versus gain basis. They play risky new moves not to see what will happen and have an exciting game in the process, but because they've studied them already and know there's a good chance they can make a profit in quick games.

Which of these pro approaches is better is hardly the right question. They are adapted to different playing environments. Longer time limits tend to favour the Japanese approach. At present, Chinese and Koreans can have enviably spectacular results, but sober Japanese pros also often look at them and say, yes but they have short careers - we have long ones. In other words, they are translating their avoidance of mistakes from the outcome of one game to an even higher level of a whole career. Whether that's good or bad is really a personal choice, but in the case of Japan especially there is also an element of self-perpetuation - established teachers probably chose people somewhat like themselves.

But whichever cast of pro you are talking about, my contention is still that they all learn go in a different "first principles" way from amateurs. The fact that I personally am not able to identify all the first principles doesn't preclude that observation from being correct.

I'm not convinced by your references to Takemiya and fighting spirit. Takemiya does enjoy telling amateurs to experiment and have fun, but notice that he always stresses that he is talking to amateurs. Many other pros make the same distinction when they give similar advice. If you want to see how Takemiya learnt go himself it is all well chronicled in a book by his father, with many handicap games, and you will certainly not find much experimentation there. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether Takemiya's exuberance in his later play is a reaction to the way he learned, and I also do wonder whether his advice is unsound anyway. At least whenever I've seen an amateur trying to play like Takemiya it ends up as a dog's breakfast, and I find it hard to believe they learn anything from the process - except what a dog's breakfast tastes like.

As to fighting spirit, I suspect you are borrowing this from the phrase as used in many commentaries, where it is used as a translation of Japanese kiai. It is very misleading. Kiai does not have to mean cutting, slashing, thumping, pounding - and very often does not. It is more like determination, or Shakespeare's "gird up your loins". Playing a honte can show kiai - come and get me! Determination and tenacity are commendable even in amateurs. Sheer aggressiveness is probably not, though it may be fun.

Yes, the original comment only made an objective statement about crushing. But if you read on, you will see that I said this brought something else to my mind. That's part of the way discussions work. Similarly, discussions don't require an (a) or (b) approach. We are all perfectly capable of holding more than one thought in our heads at once. As to this being off the original topic - are you serious? The poster wanted to know what approach to take against a particular opening. This is a very common kind of question here. Some people suggest specific ways of "crushing", which it seems is also what some people actually want. I have simply pointed out there may be another "first principles" approach worth exploring - and since you are in favour of exprimentation, why not? If you come up with an all-purpose knife that does 99% of jobs, that is probably better than coming up with a hook for taking stones out of horse's hooves in the hope you meet a lame horse one day.

[gowan]

I think it is worth pointing out that when pro teachers urge us to play defensively they aren't talking about gote moves to make life for a group that is surrounded. Pros strive to make moves with more than one effect, multipurpose moves. The famous ear-reddening move of Shusaku is an example. A move which defends or strengthens one of our groups may make an opponent's group weaker. A gote defensive move may create large endgame plays for later. A common amateur mistake is to attack when your own stones are thin or weak, a tactic that usually backfires. Certainly the outcomes of games are decided by mistakes. The great Sakata said that we don't win because we made good moves, we lose because we made bad ones. Yes none of us really understands the game but when we lose we can try to learn why and try to avoid making the same mistake more than twenty times. If we remember the games we lose wouldn't we have a better chance of not repeating mistakes?

[Mef]

Nothing new in that, of course, but it also brought to mind Yamashita Keigo's recent comment that he was surprised that amateurs remembered the games they won whereas he felt they should remember the games they lost. That in turn got me to musing whether there is rather more in this than a mere joke. Does it signify a profound difference in attitude? After all, we get countless examples here of amateurs asking "how do I punish this mistake", which is something pros very rarely say.

I've long assumed that we amateurs, as regards go development, are to be regarded as children. When we are weak/young we expect beginner/childish mistakes but hope we will grow out of them. Recently, however, I've been leaning towards the conclusion that amateurs, even the best, never grow out of their mistaken attitudes. They will always talk about crushing, punishing, hamete, invading and a quick result. Real pros (not amateurs who reach a pro rank but those who've been groomed as pros) seem, whether they have an aggressive style or a patient one, to prefer talking about things like efficiency, restraint and safe groups (and only then attack). In other words they worry more about their own moves rather than the opponent's. Which brings us back to Yamashita...

That's a rather interesting observation, to me it fundamentally makes sense. A player with an open mind, I would feel, should almost never use the phrase "How do I punish this mistake?". The statement assumes the opponent's move is wrong, yet admits not knowing why it is wrong. If you do not know a punishment, why are you assuming your opponent made a mistake? (the exception would of course be if some sort of authority had informed you the move was wrong, presumably an explanation would be forthcoming though). To me it almost points to a bit of an "entitled" attitude ("I know I'm right and they're wrong....but I don't know why I'm right and they're wrong...I just know it..."). The pro attitude as you put it might then be, instead of worrying about why your opponent is wrong, just try to make sure your plays are right regardless of the situation.

[schilds]

It seems to me that looking to punish mistakes is a specific activity subsumed by the more general activity of simply looking for the best move and that the obvious effect of deciding (for a particular move) that you're going to do the former is that you limit yourself.

[gaius]

Mr. Fairbairn, sorry for the late reply . I'm a bit unsure as to what point you are making yourself as well... Sure, professional players have a different attitude than beginners. Also a truism. Yet, what you seem to be saying is that, for optimal learning, even beginning players should make a professional, or even "honte" approach a priority in their games! That seems a bit strange to me. How can someone try to apply advanced concepts if you don't have a feeling for basic shape and basic fighting? I personally have the feeling that the "optimal" way to get strong (if that is what one desires), is to begin with the fundamentals of go: liberties, shape, tesuji, tsumego, reading. As for the opening, just having a basic feeling of what a big move is should be fine until at least 8 kyu, after that, understanding some basics should do. On top of that, you should review your games critically. This approach is hardly news, I suppose - I have always had the feeling that professionals-in-training are initially taught with a lot of emphasis on reading as well (maybe less so in Japan than elsewhere, I wouldn't know). Perhaps that doesn't hold for the stronger ones. Correct me if I'm wrong!

Unless they are playing like crazy killing machines, telling a 10 kyu to play "honte" tends to lead to uninspired, defensive play in my experience. Also, players around that level hardly seem to benefit from too much opening study - good concepts just tend to get misapplied... Similarly, I don't think I need to repeat the arguments against studying joseki too early!

Of course, once you hit the stronger kyu/lower dan levels, the story might change, and you may have been talking about that. But I cannot say much about that: if I would've had the key to becoming 4 dan, I wouldn't still be here at 1 dan, would I? Yet, I am working at getting stronger, so maybe one day, I will really understand honte. Already, I feel the tesuji flowing through my veins stronger every day! And if there would be a Zen Smiley, I would put it here.