Life In 19x19

Recently, Hyperpape had a sig that read "When you think your opponent has made a mistake, that's when you should be the most cautious." That has been sticking in my mind because it cost me an important game that I should have won back in the Wash DC Congress.

Another proverb along the same lines - I forget where I heard it - is: Keep an eye on your group any time it is down to 3 liberties or half of its liberties.

What is your rule of thumb for when to get paranoid about your group?

I’m paranoid all the time

Hyperpape's sig seems like the best answer to me. I've had many tournament games with the internal monologue:

Great!
I guess this game will be easier than I thought.
That move does almost nothing!
...
...
Oh.

For me the reverse is actually true. Nah, I'll live there, it's safe, I'm connected, I've plenty of room, I can always move into the center etc... Often I'm right and the result sucks due to the high amount of forcing moves my opponent gets. Sometimes I just resign a couple of moves later.

Nowadays, I try to tell me, it's better to lose because of a "slow" Honte move than because of a dead dragon.

"Three eyes are better than two, because one of them is a lie."

I get continually confused between "that move is pointless" and "that move is gote". So I ignore the horrible, point losing sente move. It's pretty embarrassing. (the unifying idea being the "what a stupid move" emotion.)

[mumble grumble] thickness [expletives deleted]

I have been getting some mileage out of waiting to punish my opponents mistakes. It is so tempting to call them out immediately, especially in Joseki/Fuseki variations, but most the time they don't even know it was a mistake, so there is no rush. If at some point in time later they smarten up and try to correct, it doesn't matter they have already lost tempo.

Fedya wrote:[mumble grumble] thickness [expletives deleted]

Looks like the mods are out to get you!

Actually, that's all my original post.

Thickness makes me paranoid because stronger players keep saying it's a good thing, yet I can't recall ever getting thickness and having it work out well for me, no matter what I try.

I just remembered a particular thing that fell under my signature. In OGS games, you can define conditional moves. Sometimes, I start to set a conditional move for a branch that I don't think my opponent should play. And often, those are the branches I shouldn't set. Because if the move is as bad as I think it is, then my opponent probably wouldn't play it. If they did play it, the odds are good that I missed something.