Life In 19x19

I read somewhere that playing with your non-dominant hand may effect your strength in a bad way.

The source is not reliable at all, I wouldn't even be too surprised if it was meant as a joke.

Nevertheless, it made me think whether something like that could be true.

My preliminary opinion (without any knowledge or experience) would be that for slow games, one would typically decide on the move before touching a stone, thus it should not matter with which hand you put the stone.

But it might indeed have an effect on blitz games. Hand motions activating different brain areas, or ...???

Any idea, experience?

Testing this thing seems kind of... sinister.

Chew Terr wrote:Testing this thing seems kind of... sinister.

Between this and the gaucheness crack in JF's recent post, it's bad lefty pun overload today.

I'll try to remember this in my next F2F games and see what happens if I focus on using the hand that feels "wrong" ("wronger"?). At least it'll give me another excuse if I do poorly.

Mandatory leftie joke for this thread: As long as I don't get left behind in the midgame.


Bruce "Sinister Dexter" Young

I'd say I nailed it, but it was obviously a joint effort. Seriously, people give me a hard time for my puns, but I don't want to just knuckle under. Gotta hand it to you John, yours was more clever than mine. =D

This presumes you're any good in the first place.

Since, for most people, the right brain is more visually oriented than the left brain, maybe playing with the left hand is a good idea.

Bill Spight wrote:Since, for most people, the right brain is more visually oriented than the left brain, maybe playing with the left hand is a good idea.

Is there any evidence (even anecdotal) that left-handed people tend to be better go players than right-handed people? Or, that they pick up some subtleties of the game more easily?