Chess Reading Applied to Go

I'd like to mention some ideas I got from a chess book titled "The Inner Game of Chess: How to Calculate and Win" by Andrew Soltis. I picked up this book because of the dearth of literature on Go in English that actually talks about the psychological process of reading.

Now chess is different from Go, so you have to interpret this stuff carefully, but some things are probably common. Here are some ideas I got from the book:

1. There is a myth of long variations. Most reading is not long variations but finding short sequences that improve your position.

2. Visualizing a game in your head is good exercise. I can only do this with 9x9 Go, and even then I misplace some things in my head. This is somewhat different from playing blind go. I just read SGF files directly and visualize them in my head. Try it. You'd be surprised how far you can get -- at least on 9x9.

3. Intuition comes into play when finding candidate first moves. It doesn't matter how deeply you can read if your first move is wrong. This is one way humans are different from computers. Even Yi Ch'ang-ho, who casually claims to read 100 moves ahead as a matter of course (which he says is the easy part) usually only starts with about 10 candidate moves. Most amateurs would do well to consider only 3-5 candidates. (See http://gobase.org/games/nn/samsung/4/ for a depressing interview with Yi Ch'ang-ho on reading and getting strong.)

4. Forcing sequences are easier to read because they branch less, but this means you sometimes ignore the quieter, stronger moves that may be better.

5. Learning to prune the branches of your variation tree is important.

6. Counting is important. In chess, this means keeping track of piece inventory, in Go it's knowing how may points would I gain or lose in this sequence, and do I retain sente, etc. I also have a pet hypothesis that counting (i.e. estimating the score) is actually a fundamental visualization exercise, even simpler than ladders. Mainly you just have to keep track of which points you've counted and which you haven't. You can't read anything faster than ladders, but you can't read ladders faster that you can count empty points (assuming irregular territory shapes that require you to count by twos, threes, fives, or whatever is your favorite method.) So counting is the fastest visualization you can do in Go, not ladders.

7. Re-checking is okay, and actually very important.

ilanpi The chess reading I think would be nice to apply to go is writing a transposition of my favorite chess book to go. That book is "Modern Ideas in Chess" by Richard Reti, and it retraces the history of chess strategy in a very clear way, and also makes some interesting analogies between chess strategy and the contemporary culture, e.g., the very close fighting style which occurred from 1880 to 1910 had its analogue in the trench warfare of World War I. This book gives you an excellent overview of the development of the game and also of its leading innovators, so it would be great to have a go version, which I haven't seen, the closest are the excellent historical sections of the Go Player's Almanac.