Life In 19x19

I'm fascinated by the idea of playing Go (or some other game) against oneself. The biggest problem with this, I think, is not that you understand your own strategies so much as that you remember them. To fix the memory problem, you have to spread out individual games. But that's boring unless you're playing at a normal game's pace, so play simultaneous games. But when you start out, the games can't be similar or the memory problem returns, so they need to be staggered in their progress, and using some partially-completed throw-away games with a lot of random moves seems like the best solution to me. Every time a game is finished, a new one is started, and after the first round, it'd be legit playing against yourself.

So first of all, is anyone familiar with software that does something like this? Is there a better term than "reflexive game"? And do you see yourself enjoying this anti-social version of your favorite game?

I think I’d definitely always prefer to play w/ real people or perhaps against a computer …

But one thing that comes to my mind is that arbitrarily letting the software turn the board 90 or 180 degrees and/or mirroring the board might be helpful for “forgetting”.

Just an idea. I’ve played a few games long ago with a friend where we decided we’d rotate the board 90 degrees every so-and-so-many minutes, just to detach from a “side” and to get a better grasp of the game, it was harder at the beginning but we got better at it after a time.

Greetings, Tom

I think he means actually playing against yourself. i.e you play white and black. If you play black you know (as white) what your "opponents" intention is so you can work to defeat it.

It helps if you're a bit schizophrenic

Although it sounds daft.. I got up to county level at chess when I was a lot younger by using this technique - I didn't have many books or opponents and the internet didn't exist then.

Mirroring/flipping the board might help to reduce the number of simultaneous games needed...

@BobC That's what the simultaneous games are for. I think this would prevent you from remembering anything unless you had analyzed a position very deeply and not so deeply with others.