Life In 19x19

Hi everybody,

I have decided to research improvement in go. I don't know about others, but I confess that in the past I have tried many shortcuts for improving my game, usually with disappointing results. Therefore, I have made a poll listing different strategems. Please would you take a moment to vote?

Please feel free to point out any possibilities you think should be added to the poll. I would also love to hear about your experiences with and opinions about shortcuts. Be honest, too. Some of these ideas have a poor reputation, but did that stop you from trying them for yourselves? Did you learn anything? Did they even help you?

Caveats: My purpose is not to solicit advice for improving my own game. Rather, I would like to open discussion about well-known and not-so-well known shortcuts that people have tried and continue to try. In other words, please talk about easy approaches that do not require significant investments of time or energy. Generally, I am assuming "all-in-one" approaches are ineffective, but I am prepared to entertain the possibility that certain ones do in fact have merit.



Many thanks!

Bingo!

When I was ~7k, I found that learning some 3-4 pincer josekis was a surefire way to beat other ~7k by killing large groups.

Thanks to everybody who voted so far. I accidentally wiped the first few results when I added an option - I didn't realise that this completely reboots the poll instead of just adding an option to it. Therefore, I will post revised versions of this poll from time to time in response to your suggestions.

Not sure I can call l+d an "easy way" though!

I dont k now if "Tenuki" choice in poll is for fun, but i am using it even now in casual games. It is rly unusual and fun method and i think it is even good for progress.

I didn't mean L&D was an easy activity, but I would like to find out if people treat it as though it were a magic pill to get stronger (which it may indeed be!).

As for the tenuki option, I did hear, second-hand, that one well-known pro teacher suggested their students tried playing tenuki no matter what (at least in the opening), and that for some of them it was an eye-opening experience. Sometimes I encounter opponents who play as though my moves did not exist, and I wonder what motivates that approach.

Again, what I'm after here is information about things people do to get better without putting too much effort into it. For what it's worth, I have the hypothesis that over a long time, even the silliest magic pills can produce effects, even if only by revealing some folly or misunderstanding more clearly. For instance, suppose you learn all the sharpest joseki, but keep on losing despite always knowing what line you're playing. Surely you will eventually want to know why, and that could be the moment your knowledge begins to turn into understanding.

I didn't select tenuki because I don't make the effort to ignore every move my opponent makes (even just in the opening). I do naturally ignore my opponent a lot - I think one of the hurdles (especially when playing a stronger player) is feeling confident enough to ignore your opponent when you think you can.

Life & Death is currently one of my primary study methods. I personally think L&D (aside from very simple, 1-3 move problems) is OK when started in SDK.

I hate to be negative, but I think that if you try to find a shortcut to getting strong, you will end up frustrating yourself.

That's not the point, Kirby! I'm not looking for shortcuts for my own improvement. I'm trying to find out what shortcuts people have tried, even against good advice or their own better judgement.

Have you, for instance, ever learned a trappy joseki (the 5-4 joseki contain many possibilities for trickery) with the hope of getting easy wins? I know I have. Everybody knows the saying about memorising joseki and getting two stones weaker, but does it actually stop people from attempting to improve by that means?

There is plenty of good advice about. I'm interested in the bad advice, and the dodgy advice, the hustles, the cheap tricks and side paths and back passages. It's not that I'm shady, but that I would like to consider all angles of the improvement issue, and find out how and why people go astray, and whether they can even learn by doing the wrong things.

Okay. Maybe I misunderstood. It sounds like you are looking for "bad advice", if I understand you correctly.

There is plenty of good advice about. I'm interested in the bad advice, and the dodgy advice, the hustles, the cheap tricks and side paths and back passages.

I was under the impression that you were looking for "good advice".

However, it could also mean that you are looking for "tricks to win". In that case, I would suggest studying [sl=hamete]hamete[/sl]. Of course, reading will help you no matter what, but I'm not sure I'd consider that a "trick".

There are shortcuts?!?!?!?

I guess I'm the wrong person to ask about this ... all my studying is haphazard, at best. I have no illusions that my improvement will be rapid. I seem to always be improving, though, so I must be doing something right ...

I didn't vote in the poll because I haven't done any of those things or at least I don't consider some of them to be "shortcuts" (e.g. doing tsumego). I did take weekly pro lessons long ago and advanced from 2d to 5d in one year. Does that count as a shortcut?

When I was shodan a visiting 5-dan (a former insei, back when Japanese 5-dan was around two stones stronger than now) took an interest in me. One of the first things he said to me was that I should play as 2-dan. He explained that an amateur one stone difference was actually quite small in terms of strength.

I did not believe that I could simply play as a 2-dan, and did not take his advice. But years later, after a year and a half as a 3-dan, I decided to try to up my game by one stone. (We were on a ratings system, so I did not alter any handicaps.) In a month and a half I had not only gone up a stone in the ratings, I was maintaining it.

In tennis, Billie Jean King talks about players raising their play a level. If you can do that within a game, you can do it for every game.

When I was shodan a visiting 5-dan (a former insei, back when Japanese 5-dan was around two stones stronger than now) took an interest in me. One of the first things he said to me was that I should play as 2-dan. He explained that an amateur one stone difference was actually quite small in terms of strength.

In the voluminous literature about needing to put in 10,000 hours to become an expert in various activities, there is always a similar remark that mere repetition is not enough and you must find ways to challenge yourself. I have an impression that an awful lot of people read that, accept it, and then ignore it because it seems so blindingly obvious! In the same way that it's easier to cycle through the channels via the tv remote without actually watching any programmes, or to wiggle a finger non-stop over an iPad without actually reading anything, I think that many people do exercises with the mindset that so long as we get in enough repetitions everything else is OK. Possibly the greatest value of a coach is breaking through this mindset.

I don't actually study go and rarely play, so I have no experience of trying to improve in go by biting off more than I can chew, but I have done this extensively in hobby programming and it seems to pay off handsomely.

Or perhaps the biggest problems are how to decide how much extra to bite off, and also deciding which bits make up the extra. Again, getting a teacher or coach may be the best way forward, but judging by what happens in sport, music, etc, it is not enough simply to find someome better or stronger than you. They also need to know how to teach. Maybe the simplest criterion is to find someone who's been at it a long time. If so, the vast array of young pros who are switching to teaching because they can't make it in competitions and/or who want to teach as a way to learn English may not be the best options.