How often do you read?

[entropi]

At every move almost every position (except obvious only moves), what I do is

1-I select some initial moves to start (usually wrong ones)
2-I try to visualise the positions after the a couple of first instinct moves of the both players (usually incorrect visualisation and/or missing some tesujis)
3-I try to judge the results (usually misjudge)
4-I don't like any of the variations I visualized (long live pessimism)
5-I get impatient and play a different first move that I did not consider at all.

[gowan]

Of course, what usually happens is that I read out a sequence that looks good, play the first move, and find halfway in that my opponent plays a move I didn't expect, and everything goes pear-shaped for me.

Me too, and it's downright disillusioning. It makes me think: why bother to read at all?

When I say 'I play by instinct' I mean, 'I glanced at this situation, saw a pattern of about 5 moves that I thought suited, me, and charged ahead like a bull in a china shop.'

...I played whatever move looked right, and dealt with the consequences afterwards. Over time, and through a 6 month period of grinding tsumego, I've trained my 'looks ok' to be a fairly deep glance.. but it's still not, to me, actually reading.

This seems to be a common problem among us amateurs. When we read, we read as far as we think we can and hope for the best. While this is presumably better than not reading at all, it is a big reason that we cannot play with confidence. In a related post, John Fairbairn wrote:

...Koshida brings in two other important ideas ... For one he invented his own word: girichon. This is presumably a portmanteau word from girigiri and chon (like smog = smoke + fog). It will mean something like "down to the wire". He did this to stress the point that fighting is a down-to-the-wire affair. You can't just stop halfway through. That seems obvious to the point of triteness, yet I think very many of us don't fight that way. E.g. in our reading we reach a point where we spot a nice shape for us and stop there. It's not entirely stupid - it's a sort of probablistic way of playing, i.e. a position with good shape in it is more likely to favour us eventually. But it's probably not as good as digging even deeper. The ideal is to establish not just that you have an attractive position, but that you actually finish ahead of your opponent.

Reading is a difficult thing to define. I think a move-by-move slog, such as I play there, she plays that way, I respond, ... is certainly reading and everyone, (even pros) does it. We amateurs do it more than pros because they often read in a flash, as though they had the moves run on fast forward in their minds. Sometimes we amateurs can read this way, and the feeling of watching the moves instantly play out in a picture in your mind is wonderful. Even though this is not a move-by-move reading I would still call it reading. And the things Dusk Eagle described, positional judgement, counting, looking at shape, selecting a move from the whole board for further investigation, etc., all count as "reading" for me.

I liked the idea of Koshida that daal quoted John Fairbairn as quoting. The trouble is everybody has a limit beyond which further reading is not possible. A trivial proof of this is the fact that after the first move in a game White can't read out the rest of the game all the way to the end. I was just looking at John Fairbairn's book "Old Fuseki vs New Fuseki" and saw there that there was a point in the middle game, around move 95, when Go Seigen was unable to read out the situation, according to Go's own statement, so he made a cautious reinforcing move rather than forge boldly ahead.

A question I sometimes wonder about is whether, when we make a move based on "feeling" are we actually doing unconscious reading, say with the right brain? Someplace I read that pros have a vast array of go positions in memory and, when they have to choose a move thay look for a position in their memory (or experience) that partially (or totally) matches the one in the game and then analyse what happened in that position. I wonder whether we amateurs, with our limited experience and memory of positions, try to do the same thing as best we can, and this is where "feeling" or "intuition" comes from.

[Toge]

Reading is like tree branching. First branch is to choose the next move. Depth of reading is how long sequence you can visualize and branches are about spotting opponent's counters. I think most of the skill in Go is about improving the quality of reading. That is, discarding useless variations in favour of tesuji seeking.

I don't read deep, but I consider some possibilities before playing. I think this is best expressed as evaluation. I've been practicing this evaluation and decision-making in blitz games. I recommend you people give it a try. It's quite revealing what people's first thoughts are on such fast-paced games.