My new approach to tsumego

[daal]

I've been doing quite a bit of tsumego on GoChild lately, and here is my conclusion. Doing lots of tsumego quickly helps my vital point intuition. However, getting two such problems wrong in a real game is often enough to lose it, and doing tsumego fast encourages a similar "bang that stone on the vital point" attitude during games. Often a "solution" has a loophole, and if I don't look for it, I won't find it. So my new approach is: "Do tsumego as if the game is on the line."

[Toge]

Those are my findings also. If finding solution to a problem takes more than 2 minutes, I would ignore it as unsolvable in game. I think it's a good idea to take into account how fast games you're playing.

[daal]

One of the biggest problems with tsumego is that one knows that there is a solution. This might mean for example that if the liberty count is equal, that the first move needs to take away one of the opponent's liberties. In tsumego, you just do it. In a game, taking away the liberty might not be a solution at all. Just clicking and getting the answer right might lead to a similar behavior in games, except that the "answer" in the game might be wrong.

I need to get used to the fact that getting a problem right means seeing the last move before playing the first move. 'Till then, I'm off to lose another game.

[Kirby]

I went to a workshop with Diana Kotzegi, and part of the discussion was about tsumego. One question I had in particular was, "When I do tsumego problems, I know there is a solution, so it's a bit different than in a game. I feel like I can solve tsumego problems more accurately than 'in-game' problems for this reason.".

Her response was, "You need to do more tsumego problems".

I replied, "You don't understand. I do a lot of tsumego problems. The problem is that I don't recognize the problems in games - or I don't know if there is a solution in games.".

Her response was, "You don't understand. You need to do more go problems".

What I gathered from this was, it's true that go problems have a definite solution that we do not know exists in games; But if we do tsumego enough, we can get strong enough to see solutions on the board more easily.

Of course, I still agree with your new approach to tsumego; being thorough never hurts.