Life In 19x19

I wonder if there's going to come a time when I don't find my lack of skill discouraging.

Played Atheri yesterday. This game, for me, has three unique features:

1. It's the first time I've played a ko fight. Since I lack experience, I try to avoid ko. But that's no way to gain experience, so I willingly played move 66. Not that it was well-advised in this case, but see point three.

2. It's become a personal goal of mine to learn more about pincers and how & when to use them, due partially to Atheri's suggestion. Take for example the lower-left after move 29. I've heard many times that it's possible from here to play, as a pincer: H3, H4, J3, & J4. However, I've never heard much in the way of explanation of the pros and cons of each. And since I'm a learn-by-doing type person, I'll find out for myself. The only way I learn things is the hard way. As a side note, I learned in this game that move 30 & 44 is not a good combination. Perhaps if 30 had been at H3 & 42 had been at L3, I would have been better off. Actually, now that I think about it, if 42 had been at L3, I doubt 43 would have been at O3.

3. This game was a lot of fun to play, which is something that's been missing for me in playing Go for the last few weeks. I got so caught up in being hypercritical and worried about whether each move is good or not that it sucked alot of the enjoyment out of playing. I went through a similar phase a few months after starting out and I quit playing for 7 months.

I think what made this game more enjoyable was that I was willing to try things out and experiment and knew going in that I probably wasn't going to succeed (as with the ko fight mentioned above). That being the case, I was freed from a certain amount of personal expectation. I also played faster than usual, partly because of this and partly because I was in a bit of a time-bind.

Anyway, I said all that to say this. I saw a number of mistakes I made immediately and some more after the game was over (Atheri's been very generous with his time and guidance). I then saw more while entering the game into SGF form. But rather than getting upset about them, I'm just going to try to learn from them and move on. Dwelling on the negative is a strong personality flaw of mine and I think this approach may allow me to enjoy the game more, which will lead to playing more often (family time obligations aside) and will ultimately lead to improvement. But even if it doesn't, at least I'll be doing something I find fun.

Some thoughts:

Thanks for the feedback. However, I don't understand your comment about move 88. Could you please elaborate?

On a side note, I went to a local pizza place today for lunch and when I came out, I noticed there was a car in the parking lot with the license plate "WEI QI."

I think it's actually two comments masquerading as one.

Both move 88 and move 90 protect cutting points around the same stone. By connecting with the hanging connection, there's a weak point at m8 that white could exploit later, and there is still some aji at the cutting point at p8. By connecting directly at n8, black keeps this aji to a minimum, doing more with one stone. In addition, while the hanging connection is good to stretch if a group desperately needs to get somewhere faster, in this case, black is stretching towards his own group, in an area he might hope to make territory. It's better to make the wall more solid so that white has less threats if he tries to invade.

The second point is that black felt that the one stone used to protect was not enough, so black spent two moves in that area, letting white get two moves in other places. With the more solid connection, there is less aji, so black should be more comfortable taking sente to gain more points or pressure white.

Does that make sense?
[edited for clarity]