Life In 19x19

OK, I am taking the plunge. I love reading updates from fellow players, so I thought it might be good to contribute at last. A few words about my go-playing life: discovered the game 20 years ago, but could not see how this could be half as interesting as the chess I was playing then. Came back to it 2 years ago, read read and studied studied a lot...without actually playing more than a handful of games. so much so that I lost interest for a while, and have only gotten back into the game this summer. And I almost followed the same path of failure, because I think I suffer from a mild case of OGA

I never suspected such a thing existed before I found a thread on this very forum linking to http://senseis.xmp.net/?OnlineGoAnxiety. Somehow, reading a description of my problem helped me shed light on it, and hopefully fight it. To summarize my case, I do not really mind losing (even OTB against a human I can "feel"), but I feel really humiliated and stupid when I take a beating out of a human whose thoughts, intentions, and history are alien to me. I guess I am also bothered by the fact that there is a trace of it for everyone to see forever. That might not have been such a problem, had I not been for some reason dedicated to KGS. The social interaction game visualization, history analysis tools make it the worst place for someone like me. Therefore, OGA took me in its grip, I never actually played and lost interest, naturally.

Understanding the roots of this OGA made me take interest in IGS actually, with its bare functionality, private and user-unfriendly rank graphs and game history, absence of communication in the rooms. There, everyone is so mute and anonymous that it is almost as if I was not playing a human being, and I am so much more comfortable for it. IGS has several other advantages for a player my level: automatch is instantaneous, and the Beginner Class prevents you from feeling any rank consciousness anxiety, since you cannot drop any lower, and that given time and enough luch you WILL end up promoting So my hope in the near future is that IGS will allow me to get some games in, which I desperately need. Nevertheless I must say that KGS is my dream server - in an ideal world I would like to combine go and social interaction. Unfortunately, it seems that I cannot play go and then make friends, things need to be done the other way round for me.

I own a few books of the elementary go series, and enjoy studying them, I also do my daily tsumego with the Wbaduk client, but if I understand correctly, playing is of utmost importance for progress.

As far as my targets are concerned with go, I would really just like to improve because I have the hope that improving enables you to appreciate the beauty of the game more, and that's what I am after mainly. I also need, naturally, to keep my OGA under control.

This is where this journal comes into play - I hope to make it one of the tools which will help me fight OGA, by commiting to report on actual games regularly. I also hope, of course, to get valuable input from your part, if you are so kind and comment so of my so many weak moves. Some other goals I would like to reach with this journal are to get to know some fellow players from this forum, so that I could play them comfortably online. Finally, if my journey can inspire some other OGA sufferers lurking out there as i was, that will be more than enough satisfaction for me!

I will post today's game, a tight victory on IGS, with my humble comments, mostly describing what I was thinking during the game (i.e. not much ). Any feedback much appreciated!

Hello and welcome to 19x19!

Here are some comments (along with the usual disclaimer - I'm only 9kyu so all I know is that I know nothing )

Welcome (back) to Go.

EdLee, S2W, thanks a lot for the time you spent on this review. I appreciate the effort - it must have hurt your eyes more than once looking into this! Your comments are very enlightening to me (EdLee, each time you write "why?" in your comments...I must say I am asking myself the same question now - except for excessive fear of nonexistent threats). I hope they will make their way into my confused mind slowly.

I will post further games for you to cry on regularly hopefully, but not tons - targetting one or two a week, just enough to push me to play and have some acutal material to post, but not so many that it eats up the time I spend studying because as Hushfield would say, the cure to my weakness may lie in doing more problems

Hi everyone, I have been keeping up with my regimen of daily tsumego and a bit of games.

As far as the tsumego are concerned, I only use Wbaduk's client, and the 360 problems in the "pre-intermediate, easy" category. I do all of them in a few days, and start again. I like the fact that they are quite progressive. On the other hand, I am not sure it is a good thing to do the whole series and start again, because I realize I remember quite a few of the problems, and just hit the solution without any need for actual reading. Therefore, it might be better to have a larger pool of problems to go through, so that I would have time to forget the beginning of the series before I start it all over again. In an attempt to enlarge the series I have given a shot at the "hard" section of pre-intermediate problems from the same app, but I end up spending several minutes before I am able to find the solutions, so I think they are a bit too hard. So I'd say for now I am in need for more problems at my level, ideally accessible from android.

Then, the games...I played two games yesterday on IGS taking 3 stones, and they were opposite scenarii. First one, my opponent was very agressive from the start, and I was annihilated in a the first fight which became large - resign. Second one, I think I was comfortably leading until around move 96, until I got greedy/tried to force the issue by pushing my opponent to resign. I ended up trying a non necessary invasion, which failed miserably, made him strong and allowed him to invade me. I eventually lost by 1.5 pt. Twice in that game I missed simple snapbacks, the first one leading to my fatal weakening and subsequent invasion, the second one leading to a 2 point loss, which decided the game.

From the first game, I guess the conclusion is I need to do more tsumego...but that I know before From the second game, I take away two things:
[*] I should not be greedy, or overconfident.
[*] I need to work on my whole board attention: I missed the simple snapbacks because I was focused on another, restricted, part of the board, and simply not realizing that my close groups were being weakened by the action happening nearby.

I have also started to read "opening theory made easy". Very nice read, simple to understand, but applying it in games is a totally different business .

I put up the games for the record, with a few comments in the second one - if you have any comments on the reasons for my total failure in the first one, I would be interested (apart from the fact that my reading is appaling of course )

I am not an incredibly strong player but I'll give it a shot!

Some ideas to think about:

Thanks a lot cyndane, that helps. Indeed, I found very strange, but in hindsight, I think he really wanted a fight and was getting ready for it, or a misclick.

Your indication at I must admit I am surprised - I did not think a stone such as B4 is expandable. I imagined its role was to block W, and therefore it should be saved. But obviously you mean that once B has forced C3, it is all that should be demanded from that stone? I shall try to keep it in mind.

I see the importance of the C3 point now.

Concerning , I felt he had placed a ladder breaker in order to cut at G3, so I defended. And I was starting to get scared, so I played as solid as could be. Indeed, it is slow, H4 looks much better. The rest was just panic mode I guess. Oh well, there will be better games

Thanks for your input!

mimano wrote:Thanks a lot cyndane, that helps. Indeed, I found very strange, but in hindsight, I think he really wanted a fight and was getting ready for it, or a misclick.

Your indication at I must admit I am surprised - I did not think a stone such as B4 is expandable. I imagined its role was to block W, and therefore it should be saved. But obviously you mean that once B has forced C3, it is all that should be demanded from that stone? I shall try to keep it in mind.

With , once you play it, you have forced white to defend in sente, and because of the surrounding stones, if white plays B5 to capture it, black will play B6 to block off the side. White will then have to capture, gaining maybe 3-4 points or so in gote, or make the previous move meaningless. Since it's pretty early in the game, those few points are worth a lot less than sente. Once you get to the endgame (or white needs to capture that stone to make eyespace), the relative value of saving B4 becomes much higher.

The point that at B-04 makes a White play at B-05 gote is an important one, and one that comes up repeatedly.

That said, I think that I would prefer at E-03, because it threatens the atari at D-02, which is not the case after in the game. If now White plays at B-05, Black can make that atari. OTOH, if White descends to D-02, now Black can play the atari at B-04 and get both plays in.

Thanks Bill and Sky for the clarification. It makes a lot of sense. So much so that it seems difficult to imagine in hindsight how on earth I come come up with this disastrous move. sente/gote is something whose impact I feel strongly when watching a game. I would also say that in some of my games, having sente (because my opponent is too weak to grab it) makes me feel comfortable - I realize its benefit while playing. But when I am struggling in a game, I seem to completely lose its potential and its importance, forget it is something worth fighting for to get out of a bad sequence, and just blindly hit play left and right to try and save stones or territory. Something to ponder on my side, definitely.

mimano wrote:Thanks Bill and Sky for the clarification. It makes a lot of sense. So much so that it seems difficult to imagine in hindsight how on earth I come come up with this disastrous move. sente/gote is something whose impact I feel strongly when watching a game. I would also say that in some of my games, having sente (because my opponent is too weak to grab it) makes me feel comfortable - I realize its benefit while playing. But when I am struggling in a game, I seem to completely lose its potential and its importance, forget it is something worth fighting for to get out of a bad sequence, and just blindly hit play left and right to try and save stones or territory. Something to ponder on my side, definitely.

Bill's suggestion notwithstanding, is certainly not a disaster by any means, and there are certainly cases when it's exactly the right move to play. Don't remove it from your repertoire just because there is a better sequence in this particular instance.

Hi everyone, I thought I would check in and report how things are going. I am keeping my OGA under control, and am now at 12 games on IGS, which is a good enough rhythm given the constraints of real life, about 1 game every other day. The good thing is I do not refrain from playing because of fear for the time being, so I would say that's good.

I have hit a wall with the wbaduk tsumego, and got fed up with doing the same 100 problems over and over again, so have switched to Tsumego pro (I use android), after reading a post about on L19, and I am fairly happy with it right now. Daily tsumegos are therefore part of my daily diet.

I have discovered thanks to another of L19's threads Batts lectures, and I quite like it. It has also made me think that maybe I could incorporate some high level commented games into my study.

I keep on reading Shape up! and opening theory made easy, but I feel there is so much information in there that there is no point trying to absorb too much too fast. It is a very pleasant read, but I feel I need to play and try to put into practice whatever little I have understood, rather than reading volumes of theory, so I try to do that.

On the games front, here is the loss of the week - interesting from the point of view of playing psychology . During the game, I was quite happy with the way the first part went. This made me in fact so confident that my play deteriorated fast and became so passive that I finished behind (at least, that is how I see it, but maybe it was already lost in the first half! ). I have commented the file with my thoughts, but any insight is much appreciated as always.

Here are some comments (hidden). With a little bit of endgame it would have been yours - just remember - sente sente sente.

Hi S2W, thanks a lot for taking a look at that game.
Well, I am not sure it is really an idea, more something like a misclick really I was thinking preparing the corner enclosure after C16, and played the enclosure before the 304 point

Yes you're right, it does look very slow. Like most of the variations you have annotated before. I do not know if I should qualify the weak moves you pointed out as slow, weak, or timid and full of fear. Probably all of that at the same time, but I think the root of it all is largely in fear, fed by weak reading ability => more tsumego

I hear you, and it sounds like a reasonable option. Maybe if I had not invaded him first, and only made sure my area was a bit bigger than his, I would not have suffered this excess of confidence in the second part of the middle game...

Your variation at is not very clear to me - I cannot really see why it is better than in the game? For instance, it may lead to following, where I cannot say if the situation is actually better than in the actual game?
I can feel you felt sorry for me at :b110: That move is indeed...let's say "slow" again

You raise a double question mark at :b116: , but my motivation is easy to figure out! Its name is FEAR (of getting cut in that area...)

Thanks also for the pointers in the yose. Many missed opportunities, but I will try to see the good thing: it should not be too difficult to improve enough to be able to bag such games in the future !