hoshizora's journal

[hoshizora]

Right now, I'm playing Go as one of a few hobbies, rather than with serious competitive goals.

Nevertheless, I'm having a lot of fun learning and slowly improving.

I believe I need to develop in the following areas:
* Reflecting more when playing, trying to apply what I've learned;
* Reflecting more during and after playing, trying to come up with lessons I can use in the future;
* Getting into the habit of estimating points during a game;
* Enjoying the process of playing and learning rather than being ego-attached to winning or losing.

[hoshizora]

Jeff23 very kindly agreed to a teaching game (I timed out partway through), and went through the game with me afterward.

There are a few points where I slacken an attack prematurely or play passively when I could have been aggressive, as well as introduce weaknesses into my structure (move 27); I suspect this means I need to practise more reading ahead and shape fundamentals.

[sgf-full]http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/download/file.php?id=643[/sgf-full]

[hoshizora]

This is an AI game; the major lesson for me here is not to waste sente on vulgar moves that strengthen the opponent and give up the initiative. I threw a lot of points away doing that.

I should look up the joseki for corner approaches too; my lousy opening managed to lose me two corners!
[sgf-full]http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/download/file.php?id=644[/sgf-full]

[emeraldemon]

With a 44 stone the corner isn't yours: there are many 44 joseki where the first player "loses" the corner in exchange for a thick wall. In your particular situation I prefer D6 to E5 on move 4, but that may just be my feeling. For move 20, it needs to be O16 or O17, as I'm sure you realize now

[hoshizora]

Yeah, to my consternation I repeatedly "lost" 4-4 corners to 3-3 invasions before a little book/article reading revealed that this was expected and frequently advantageous (as you describe). This was completely unexpected for me, and a head-exploding moment!

Move 21 was a bit of a shock but it's funny in retrospect!

[hoshizora]

I played another game on KGS, this time with a mysterious silent player who only plays Free games.
[sgf-full]http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/download/file.php?id=670&sid=957143a048f5594c4f419df9fd16dec3[/sgf-full]

I've been trying to get my head around the idea of "thickness"; in this game I got some early on but didn't protect myself from some nasty invasions. I'm not sure what the correct approach would have been; my guess is playing on the East star-point (and other star points) rather than continuing the wall.

By contrast White was compressed down the bottom and I didn't know how to invade that area, so he ended up with the entire South while splitting the rest of the board with me. Special mention for a couple of bamboo joins which seemed to serve me well during the game, and move 121 which involved more reading than I'm used to.

[jts]

Two thoughts.

(i) You should try to ask yourself, before you start a sequence, "do I play the last stone in this sequence, or does my opponent?" And if the answer is "I have to play the last stone, or I gain nothing," then you need to ask "is this area worth more points than anywhere else on the board?" If the answer is "no", then play somewhere else.

In the early stages of learning Go there's a lot of bad pattern recognition. You see a clever way to make three points - awesome, I've done this before, let's play there! But there's a huge difference between making three points and then playing somewhere else too, on the one hand, and making three points and then letting your opponent play somewhere else, on the other. The first is priceless, the second is fairly trivial.

(ii) If you had killed white's upper left group, you would have won.

$$B
$$ --------------
$$ | . . . . . . .
$$ | X X X X X X .
$$ | O O X O O O .
$$ | . O O C . O .
$$ | O O X O O O .
$$ | X X X X X X .
$$ | . . . . . . .

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
$$ --------------
$$ | . . . . . . .
$$ | X X X X X X .
$$ | O O X O O O .
$$ | . O O C . O .
$$ | O O X O O O .
$$ | X X X X X X .
$$ | . . . . . . .[/go]

Start looking for situations like this where Black can give White a false eye if he moves first. Very frequently moves like this can set up big captures, either by destroying eyes or by eating up liberties. In this case you would also have been threatening to capture W, forcing him to respond if he wanted to save his group.

I hope that helps!

[hoshizora]

Thanks for the tips jts.

I think what you wrote about bad pattern recognition is very true; I've read (what feels like) a lot of Go theory, but have trouble putting it into practice. I have to spend more time on each move and look at the whole board more. And get into the habbit of assessing whether moves are sente/gote.

[jts]

Thanks for the tips jts.

I think what you wrote about bad pattern recognition is very true; I've read (what feels like) a lot of Go theory, but have trouble putting it into practice. I have to spend more time on each move and look at the whole board more. And get into the habbit of assessing whether moves are sente/gote.

Yes! I just looked at how long you were spending on each move.

1. 5 s
2. 4 s
3. 2 s
4. 8 s
5. 4 s
6. 11 s
7. 15 s
8. 3 s
9. 2 s
10. 4 s



In this game you had 30 s byo-yomi, so you could have spent twenty minutes on your first ten moves and then played the rest of the game slower than you did. There's nothing wrong with playing blitz games, of course, but try this as an experiment: use up all of your main time before move 100. In a 20 minute game, that's about 24 s per move.

(As another experiment, you might spend 10 minutes thinking about the first 20 moves of this game and see if you can see anything that you would have done differently if you had spent 10 minutes thinking about it.)

[hoshizora]

This is just for fun, but I tried Thomas Frech's approach against GnuGo and lost - 4 times (3 with a two stone handicap...)! I suppose the unthinking intuition of a dan-level is still pretty strong...

2 stone handicap.

[sgf-full]http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/download/file.php?id=674[/sgf-full]

No handicap, starting with Tengen.

[sgf-full]http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/download/file.php?id=675[/sgf-full]

[hoshizora]

This was a frustrating game against AI; I thought I was going well until White started living and my groups started dying.

I think this came down to two major mistakes - attempting to pincer White in the South-East without enclosing the corner, and not playing against White moves in what I thought was an enclosed region in the South-West. This is partly because I'm experimenting with more aggressive moves as a result of recent reading. In this case they backfired - the road is long...

[sgf-full]http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/download/file.php?id=690[/sgf-full]

[jts]

Some thoughts on the beginning of your game.

(As always, take with a grain of salt... I'm quite weak myself.)

First, you've probably been told this already, but it's better to play human opponents than AI opponents. You're more likely to pick up weird habits from imitating the AI (which does smart things which are impossible to copy, and dumb things which are easy to copy), and equally weird habits from exploiting its weaknesses, and besides, when you play humans you can adjust your handicap to your strength more easily.

16: My instinct is that both H3 and P2 are bigger. If you play P2 and white moves elsewhere, this move becomes very big. H3 solidifies the profit you got from attacking the white stones.

18: This move is so-so for the same reason that the kick is frequently so-so... it lets W make an ideal extension. I think if you pincer here, white has few good options. I suspect the kick is better, though, because it normally forces F4 and then gives you breathing room to take C6.

24: This is okay, but don't think of it as an invasion. Think of it as a placement; you're putting stones inside white's group to ruin his eye space. Notice that you have miai of J1 and G1 to connect these stones out.

28: Yes, you normally don't ignore a contact play.

30: Too late. Not sure what this accomplishes at this point.

32: Not bad. You should note that, since W has ignored your play, a move at G2 becomes very big.

34: No, this is good. Frequently in this situation B would invade at 3-3; comparatively, this invasion is good.

42: This is double bad. First, F17 is really, really dead, so you don't want to play another stone so close to it; that's throwing good money after bad. Second, you normally play around B14 or C14 here, to get more of the corner. Without that extra move, B is dead. Third, W will often reply to a move around C14, so you may have lost sente for nothing.

44: Neither of your options is ideal. Do some tewari analysis. If W plays Q2 on move 7, where do you reply? If W plays Q2 on move 43, where do you reply?

[hoshizora]

Thanks again for your advice, jts.

Though logistically more difficult, human play is definitely superior; I hadn't thought of the point that the AI may use techniques a human can't really copy.

Your tips about move 16 make a lot of sense: I was attacking without banking territory, and leaving big vulnerabilities ripe for invasion/placement (which is what happened in the South-West and South East).

24: Hadn't thought of using the monkey jump to escape rather than invade!

I was quite frustrated after the game because I lost without understanding why, but after review I realise my mistakes concern principles that I'm familiar with (respond to contact plays, bank profit, pay attention to sente/gote), so I feel I've got a better handle on where things went wrong.

Hmmm... I think some perfectionist tendencies are getting in the way: reading books instead of playing, trying to understand all the concepts at once, not wanting to play against real people until I'm "good enough"...

[hoshizora]

I like to think that my guesstimated rating of 25-kyu isn't generous enough, but you wouldn't know looking at the following KGS 6-stone handicap game.

[sgf-full]http://lifein19x19.com/forum/download/file.php?id=703[/sgf-full]

I messed up a ladder! I really important one!

By the end of this game, I was mentally exhausted - not what I expected when I first took up Go, never intending to play it seriously...

[hoshizora]

Here's my first "proper" (non-AI, not my friend who barely knows how to play) "win" against on KGS - my opponent resigned after move 84 but I'm not sure I had a certain victory. (Maybe he thought he did!)

[sgf-full]http://lifein19x19.com/forum/download/file.php?id=733[/sgf-full]

Aside from walking into a ladder at the beginning, and questionable moves at 30 and 54, I didn't notice making any big mistakes; hopefully someone can prove me wrong and give me a thing or two to think about!