Thanks to jts' recent off-topic on chess, I was tripping down memory lane (forty years since I was an active chess player) a couple of weekends ago. I ended up at ChessCafe.com, more specifically the Novice Nook column written by Dan Heisman. Dan is a long-time professional chess instructor who has obviously thought long and hard about what goes into playing competitive chess and what is involved in improving. Many of his insights and lessons carry over well into Go (or any other "mind game").

In one of his earliest essays, The Secrets of "Real" Chess, he describes his "three levels of thinking" (I've substituted Go for chess and edited down to just the flavor of the original):

"FLIP-COIN" [Go] – A move is played quickly and without serious thought. The winner of a game where both players are playing Flip-coin [Go] is almost random, and thus I named it after a coin flip...

"HOPE" [Go] – "This is not when you make a move and hope your opponent doesn't see your threat. Instead, Hope [Go] is when you make a move and don't look at what your opponent might threaten on his next move, and whether you can meet that threat on your next move. Instead, you just wait until next move and see what he does, and then hope you can meet any threats..."

"REAL" [Go] – You select candidate moves and, for each, you anticipate and evaluate all your opponent's main candidate moves... One goal of Real [Go] is to anticipate each of your opponent's moves – if you have a good opponent and he makes a move you hadn't even considered, that is not a good sign!...

I found Dan's description of "Hope" [Go] struck right at the heart of my own way of playing. Whatever else has changed over the years in my strengths and weaknesses, I know that I have become less inclined to fight my way through a proper assessment of the position and much more willing to play a "good" move that catches my fancy and then wait until my opponent's reply to "sort things out". Similarly when I see a problem and can not immediately find a solution, I far too often just say, "Let's play this reasonable move here and try to find a final solution after their next play." Needless to say, as often as not that next play by the opponent turns out to be the final nail in my coffin! Ahhh, if only I had buckled down on the previous move...

How about you? Are you a "hoper", someone with reality firmly in hand, or just one of those coin tossers?

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

I get into "hoping" when it's hard for me to fully read out a situation, or when I'm desperate. When both of those scenarios meet, it isn't good.

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

i am almost always in hope mode or flip coin mode.
In chess in the end i played only blitz in "flip coin" mode and i disgusted myself of chess this way.

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

I think (but then again, I'm a 8 kyu useless worm =P, theorycrafting without real experience so don't take me seriously) that those simplifications are appropiate to chess but not really translate into Go.

Looks to me like a matter of strategy versus tactics. In a fully tactical game (as chess has been described by many experts) every move and its branches can be analized completely, and thus a good player would be, in theory, always be able to choose the undisputed best. Go can't be analized in such a way (at least with the technology we have to day, or using a reasonable computing power), so there must be a great deal of personal preference, "feel", hope if you wish, on some moves at least.

From the very moment there are compromises between territory and influence, light and heavy, you are bound to push your own luck and assuming there will always be players that fight better than you, you'll always have to cross your fingers and say "I know this SHOULDN'T" give me trouble but I hope he doesn't find a way to prove me wrong.

That said, I think the analogy works perfectly for some stages of fighting, specially at my SDK level. When a fight spawns a series of complex semeai, It's obvious how better my result gets when I think it through, where as the days I don't feel like reading and I just smash stones in the points that help me with the liberty counts I end up dead,

Yes one should always play like that, but I would say that it requires far more discipline than in Chess with its limited possibilities and branches.

Of course in a local situation it is a given to look at the opponents responses, but on a global scale the possibilities are often overwhelming, at least to weak players like me.

One tip I remember for Chess is to occasionally walk behind the opponent's side of the board and consider the situation from their point of view (flipping the board online does the same thing). I found this very useful to "reset" my thinking and look at the board more objectively. In Go there is little sense in doing that of course, as the board rotation is rather arbitrary, but it might still be useful to make a point of frequently jumping into the opponents shoes and look at the board as if you were really playing their side, not just thinking about what they might do.

Slightly less related, this also makes me think of how digital artists often recommend to frequently flip the painting to avoid the often skewed perspective we get when we stare at something too long from the same angle.

Of course I'm a hope go player too, but I must admit, I'm fairly shocked to discover that there are 6d's that also play that way. I guess your experience is often enough a reliable judge of when your opponent might be holding that final nail, and in those situations you probably do buckle down.

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Patience, grasshopper.

No, I think dan players are worse offenders. In those situations where a kyu player just can't read it out, a dan player hopes not to have to, "I'll just wait and see what he plays." and thus on to the road to perdition...

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

the 'real' go aspect of your story is what i try to make players aware of when they play in the ASR league.

Most ppl wont admit it, but they play in coin flip mode a lot of the times and thats understandable in a world where everything goes faster and faster.

Most high ranked players playing a lower ranked player resorts to 'hope' go and they get hit on the nose for that often which makes them aware again that they played without paying much attention.
They usually rebound by playing a few games seriously then slip a bit again. Its hard to always play 'real' go.

I guess i float in between 'real' and 'hope' in a game, i cant say i have played a whole game 'hope' or ' real'.

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

I am currently playing some correspondence games, and thus have a lot of time to think about each move. My impression from that experience is that all thinking about a move sooner or later gets into a "hope" depth: you read until you feel confident that you have found a reasonable sequence, but you then have to hope that at the end of that you will be able to deal with the rest of the game. This holds until the late endgame, when you read until the end.

Of course, sometimes players will only read one move deep, which would then approach the "hope" scenario you outline.

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

@Harleqin: Do you think that correspondence games offer a better way of improving in comparison to real-time games? Maybe because Hope-Mode is less prominent?

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Stay out of my territory! (W. White, aka Heisenberg)

Yeah, this is totally applicable to go.

I'm a coin toss or hoper in casual games and a "real" player in rated games (when I catch myself thinking along the lines of the other two styles, that is), I think.

At congress I was 6-6 in rated games and like 3-10 in casual games, so it does make a difference.

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

Not per se. It depends on your personality. It may help you overcome or form some habits, if you consciously set your mind before each move. I also think that it may form some experience in deep reading. However, it cannot replace other forms of training (no form of training can do that).

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

I always "hope" my opponent is one of those "flip-coin" players (=