Life In 19x19

Which one do you think is easier to work on?

I used to feel easier to deal with L&D, I know what i need to do, and i have an idea if i make it at the end (maybe wrong, actually often wrong).

Shape problem refers to non-L&D tesujis, e.g. cutting two groups, connectting your stones, sealing opponent in, making him into a bad shape etc...This was very hard for me, I did not know what the problem asked me to do, and usually it asked for a best solution among many possible answers. unlike doing a L&D, if I can not kill, i know i fail. Here i can give an answer, but maybe it just has nothing to do with the correct one.

But after a bit training, i feel tesuji problems are getting easier. Shapes ring the bell, even though the problem itself is getting difficult. While L&Ds are getting harder and harder. The problems are getting harder and my reading did not improve in the same pace. My experience of the easy problems does not seem to help much on harder one.

When says 'work on', it doesn't mean solving the problem, it just means that one has an idea where he will go/try in the problem.

Do anyone else have the same feeling?

I definitely feel like tesuji and shape problems are harder. Especially if the problem is "get a good result", it can be hard to tell if you've actually found the answer, where in life and death you know exactly what you need to do. The only question might be if you find a ko, but you're not sure if there's a better solution.

I've always found tesuji problems easier than life and death problems, probably because I ground through Tesuji from the Elementary Go Series while I was still a DDK, but waited until much later to seriously study L&D.

Regardless of which is harder, I've always enjoyed tesuji and shape problems much more, they just seem more interesting and varied to me, where L&D just seems boring and hard, a deadly combination.

Shape problems are more interesting to me, because usually when even when I get it wrong, the real answer is interesting.

Also because I hate corners and edges which make most L&D problems. It's like the game glitches out and nothing makes sense anymore. If I could play Go on a sphere I would.

For me, in order of increasing difficulty:

* L&D that are "white to kill" or "black to kill"
* Tesuji with a concrete goal like "connect your groups"
* Shape problems and other open-ended questions where several moves look right to me
* L&D where the question is simply "status?"

It's kind of a difficult question to answer, because shape problems, l&d problems, and tesuji problems can all be of varying difficulty. So given any two categories X and Y, a hard enough X problem is harder than an easy enough Y problem.

But I guess I can compare difficulty in relative terms - based on what I think is harder for other people.

Relative to other people, I think that l&d and shape problems are harder for me than tesuji problems.

Objectively, for the reason you mentioned (you can always know the answer), l&d problems are the easiest. However, sometimes even L&D problems are not totally straightforward, especially if they end in ko.

When I read ahead, if I get to a ko situation, I think, "OK, I can get KO this way - let's see if I can do better than KO". If I cannot, I come back to this solution, and think, "OK, here's my answer".

But, this type of reasoning has gotten me in trouble, because some kos are better than other kos. I might have read a 3-step ko for black, but it is possible in the problem to have a 1-step ko, for example. This situation is kind of rare, but it's an example of when I needed to read more in a L&D problem to get a good answer.