Life In 19x19

Is abstract reading just that feeling of 'knowing' the answer to a position? And then for an expert player, they get that sensation for far more complex situations?

The experience that comes to my mind is looking at a tsumego and immediately smirking. There was some obvious tesuji, maybe a squeeze, and it just looked wrong. It was like a visual joke: the position strongly evoked meories of other problems where the tesuji was the answer, but some detail meant you needed to find a different one. Then I had to read out, step by step, why that tesuji broke down. I hadn't seen that particularu position before, and I couldn't point to a stone and say "it fails because of that", it was just intuition.

Aji-ridden positions in the end game is another example, lots of two stones with hanes on there heads: Sometimes it feels like "that won't hold", and sometimes it feels like "it'll be fine". It isn't just an obvious application of memory, because the configuration is novel, it's more like you remember the vital points for each section of the wall and something triggers based on whether the vital points end up overlapping.

Just speculation, but my guess is you develop a little bit of this sort of reading rather early on and refine it over years and years of play.

Polama wrote:Is abstract reading just that feeling of 'knowing' the answer to a position? And then for an expert player, they get that sensation for far more complex situations?

The experience that comes to my mind is looking at a tsumego and immediately smirking. There was some obvious tesuji, maybe a squeeze, and it just looked wrong. It was like a visual joke: the position strongly evoked meories of other problems where the tesuji was the answer, but some detail meant you needed to find a different one. Then I had to read out, step by step, why that tesuji broke down. I hadn't seen that particularu position before, and I couldn't point to a stone and say "it fails because of that", it was just intuition.

Aji-ridden positions in the end game is another example, lots of two stones with hanes on there heads: Sometimes it feels like "that won't hold", and sometimes it feels like "it'll be fine". It isn't just an obvious application of memory, because the configuration is novel, it's more like you remember the vital points for each section of the wall and something triggers based on whether the vital points end up overlapping.

Just speculation, but my guess is you develop a little bit of this sort of reading rather early on and refine it over years and years of play.

Hm i dont know this seems wrong to me. Everyone can do that with L&D, look at most problems and see the first move/right tesuji right away, usually its the order of moves that matter. In my take abstract reading is hard to understand because ive never done it and it might not be possible, but I think it would be in mid-game being able to sort of see end results or at least be able to tell the result of variations without having to read move by move and think about the variation, sort of like the reading I was talking about with reading faster but without having to place any stone down in your head. You just can look at it and see the different results in general, but not visually, kind of like you just know which is better/worse and which groups will live/die, as in getting the understanding of the results without reading.

That is a bit hard to imagine though, but what you said is just vital points, which everyone learns around 6k if im not wrong ?

EDIT: However the last part you said about endgame situations is what I think Tami was talking about too, but as in you could tell those kind of things about future sequences without reading, as in this move will cause that kind of situation.