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Fault Tolerant Play
Keywords: Problem
Jan: (written on 2003-01-11): OK, I seem to be 14 kyu now. But, as David Byrne once sang: "Well, how did I get there?" Surely not by letting the days go by... Playing against IgoWin or TurboGo helped. Reading Sensei's is helping. Reading Charles Matthews's articles helped. The Internet helped. The FAQ helped, but it wasn't much use. Tesuji by Davies helped a lot. Life and Death didn't. Neither did studying professional games. What really helped was playing people over the board and, most importantly, learning what aspects of the game I was good at, and at what parts I sucked. I now know that I don't know very much of joseki, that I am good at playing with a handicap, that my opening plans don't work out very well most of the time, that I spend too much time in the endgame looking for one point gote plays. But fortunately I can spot a lot of tesujis and I understand the concept of miai. This has led me to develop a style of playing I like to call Fault Tolerant Play. It works like this:
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This is an interesting article. I wonder though if avoiding plays purely because you feel your opponent has a chance of outplaying you is such a good idea. Sometimes such pragmatisim is called for yes, however there is surely a danger of losing out in the change to build experience of complicated positions. After all you need to learn how to kill and sometimes how to be killed. Besides which I always try to make my play universal - the same regardless of the opponent.
This is a copy of the living page "Fault Tolerant Play" at Sensei's Library. ![]() |