Greed (3-3 invasion as first move)

[Loons]

I think Mef hit the nail on the head here, but also:

Especially in 10 or 7 second blitz (which I don't find fun anyway) though also in regular games, people sometimes play special strategies like "take territory at all costs, I can probably get a great reduction/invasion result later" and "take influence at all costs, I can probably get an impregnable supermoyo later".

[Koroviev]

Playing in an unorthodox or 'wrong' way is an excellent way to learn.

[jts]

I think blitz can be legitimately fun, but it would be unsportsmanlike to play weird strategies in blitz to take advantage of the fact that your opponent hasn't thought as much about the implications of the strategy as you have. (At the very least, if we enjoyed that kind of thing, we'd be playing chess.)

And yes, it's entirely possible that a weird strategy is designed to highlight a very unevenly developed playing style. If you suck at fuseki, suck at joseki, suck at attacking and killing groups, suck at yose and at reducing, but are incredibly good at handling weak groups, then it's a legitimate strategy to give away a slight advantage in every corner so as to not expose yourself to a game where any of your weaknesses come into play. If I came across this strategy in a slow game, that's what I would assume.

[Laman]

emotionally, i feel with tapir. it also upsets me when i face such a "rude" player. but when i try to put reasoning behind my attitude, i find i can't blame him:

- if i win, it is because he chose a suboptimal strategy, that gave me an advantage since the move 0. nice, come again, i welcome an easy win
- if i lose, it is even less reason to be angry. how could i call his play wrong, when even with playing objectively bad, he still managed to beat me? train harder, beat him next time

however, while i don't mind in a single game, this conflict of attitudes was the main reason why i tried wbaduk only for short time and soon returned back to kgs - it was no fun for me to confront my knowledge-based style with aggressive, fighting-oriented style of my opponents in pretty much every game there. it would be more educational to stay and incorporate this as a possible variant into my own play, but i play for fun, so i decided to leave

[entropi]

Who said I am losing such games? Who said this "strategy" works?

If you play that way, you are actually saying "you are so incompetent, I do not even need to try, I can beat you even in such a funny way". Play with proper handicaps, however much, but play your best game. Everything else is an insult, not much better than those guys, who type real insults in the chat window to make you steam. If you are good enough to beat me no matter what, you can play a teaching game instead, fine then, but probably there are better ways to conduct teaching games.

If nobody in this thread sees this similarly, huh, very sad.

I feel the same way against players that play bad moves on purpose. I mean moves that may be tricky to punish, but objectively bad at our level of understanding the game.

My reasoning is similar. I perceive such moves as insincere.
When my opponent makes a move which is clearly bad at out level, I cannot help feeling insulted because I cannot find any other explanation of purposely making bad moves other than hoping a for an even worse failure from my side.

I want to play games with my opponent, and not against my opponent. I want to appreciate and enjoy a beautiful tesuji he finds, even if I was not able to spot it and even if it costs me the game. I want to feel sorry for an obvious mistake from my opponent and have no problem with an undo. But against such tricky opponents as tapir mentions, I cannot enjoy the game as I would like to.

It has nothing to do with winning or losing. I also don't enjoy such trick games even if I win. I may only like the fact that I have proven his insulting claim wrong, but it's not the game itself that I enjoy. It's just a different mindset or a different approach towards the game.

Maybe a game of go is much more like a conversation compared to chess. And as in any conversation, I would like my counterpart to be sincere.

[hyperpape]

That playing against these tricks helps you advance as a player seems more like an article of faith than something believed on evidence.

A player needs to be able to improvise and fight instead of just playing patterns in books, but that doesn't mean that they should know every stupid idea out there. I've heard stories about amateurs who could give bigger handicaps than professionals because they knew hamete. Does their experience make them better? No.

[norman]

If nobody in this thread sees this similarly, huh, very sad.

I feel like you do a lot, but it's definitely one of my weaknesses. In such cases, I often feel like I'm entitled to win just because my opponent is so "bad". It's easy to get lazy and play moves without thinking. "Obviously my opponent is an idiot, so I can pretty much play anything and win". I'm sad to say this has caused me to lose many, many games.

It also happens to be that one of my biggest weakness as a go player is playing against "interesting" moves - overplays or novel strategies that might be suboptimal but that I don't have a canned textbook response to fall back on. I'm sure my weakness there is strongly related to my bad attitude towards people who play that way.

[Magicwand]

i am not 7 dan but if my opponent plays that way i will not lose.

[tapir]

Once more I recognize that my thought process seems to be rather uncommon. (Best match is entropi.)

I am unhappy about winning such (meaningless) games more than about losing them, which would surely aggravate me, but in the same time encourage me to play better / get better understanding. I.e., I would not have started the thread if I had lost the game, which triggered it.

I am not advocating reliance on book knowledge instead of fighting strength, on contrary.

What I resent however is the disrespect for the skill of the opponent (usually me, but it is the same when watching) that lies in consciously playing inferior moves. I would feel similar to someone starting on 1-1 points or to the way some players play handicap games, playing utter nonsense relying on mess up potential - incidentally this happens more often in rapid games than in slow ones on KGS. ...

[golem7]

I must say, I can't find anything wrong with that kind of playstyle. I don't want to think I'm the only one who loves the non-restrictiveness of go, that is the freedom to create your game any way you like. So I believe it's perfectly fine to try any strategy you want. If you can't take advantage of your opponents suboptimal moves it just proves that you don't really know/understand why these moves are bad, in that case it's just repeating what you "learned" from books/stronger players. Since Go is about efficiently placing your stones over the course of the whole game, if you lose against an unconventional player, your moves must have been worse than his, so you have no right to judge him.
You should welcome such games as you are forced to think and read for yourself much more than in a book-style kind of game, which will help your improvement as well. And if you win, you confirm your own ability/understanding (which is nice) while also helping your opponent to get stronger by showing him the error of his ways

concerning your last post, tapir: I don't believe someone plays this way while really believing it's bad. Nobody wants to lose on purpose, right? Such a player must have had some success with his style (after all, he has the same rank as you) and has yet to be proven wrong, which is your task.
Also playing early san-san/unconventional opening and playing 1-1 are completely different cases imo.

[OtakuViking]

What I resent however is the disrespect for the skill of the opponent

Have you ever thought that you might be the one who is disrespectful and not the other way around? He's probably playing like that because he likes that way of playing, and not because it makes you mad.

He doesn't follow conventional opening theory. So does that mean he disrespects your skill? What about 6-4 5-5 or 6-3, if he played them would that make him disrespectful? It seems to me that he isn't the disrespectful one, no offense or anything....just saying...

[Magicwand]

What I resent however is the disrespect for the skill of the opponent

Have you ever thought that you might be the one who is disrespectful and not the other way around? He's probably playing like that because he likes that way of playing, and not because it makes you mad.

He doesn't follow conventional opening theory. So does that mean he disrespects your skill? What about 6-4 5-5 or 6-3, if he played them would that make him disrespectful? It seems to me that he isn't the disrespectful one, no offense or anything....just saying...

if he is indeed 7D then he knows that what he is doing is wrong.
no question about that.

[Loons]

I have two more thoughts.

1) Playing in a way that you know aggravates your opponent is a real tactic, and I won't say it's bad.

2) How do we feel about those multitudes who only play this 4-4 joseki, which is played often as a bona fide mistake to the tune of, "I prefer getting the territory here" (and endures to quite high ranks).

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Click Here To Show Diagram Code

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$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
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$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . O 1 . . . . |
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[Koroviev]

^That has seemed wrong to me since I was about 15kyu, and I hardly ever see anyone above that strength use it. (Unless white hasn't the space to make a two-space extension at the top.)

Do high ranked players really use it?

[Magicwand]

if you are talking about starpoint joseki...i used to play starpoint joseki only. nothing wrong with that opening.

from your diag below, exchange of and is said to help white.
at first i didnt believe that but as i got stronger..i felt that white is better from that exchange. it is better not exchange and play
is something i would not play against someone same strength..but i do on a handycap game.

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$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . O 1 . . . . |
$$ | . . . O . . . . . 4 . . . 2 . X . . . |
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$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 . . . |
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$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bc
$$ +---------------------------------------+
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . O 1 . . . . |
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