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Difference Between Pros And Amateurs/ Discussion
Sub-page of DifferenceBetweenProsAndAmateurs
(Moved from second section)
Charles I'm glad this proves somewhat contentious. If I can add a possible summary: necessary conditions for amateurs to come close to pro level aren't hard to specify. They can be read out of other games, sport and so on. It doesn't make much sense to talk about pros who aren't technically strong. But sufficient conditions - a whole set of them, with real explanatory value: it might be beyond us to understand. I expect another storm to break ... SnotNose: This page wasn't intended to describe how an amateur can come close to pro level play, but if one wishes to use it (or view it) that way, it can't be stopped. The intention was to document some ways that amateurs play that pros do not and which can easily be changed. My hypothesis is that there are some basic things (Kageyama would call them fundamentals) that pros do that amateurs can emulate. By doing so, amateurs will become stronger and might improve faster. And these basic things are, in many cases, not hard to do. They're good habits, really. And, I'm not talking about blindly copying pro play or memorizing joseki. I'm talking about more basic approaches to play (as in the first list). Charles Problem is, it's written by amateurs. I may be jaded; but I think amateur insight into pro go is fairly rubbishy. So I made some provocative remarks above. SnotNose: A valid point. We're really comparing amateur habits to hypothesized pro ones. Still, even if we're wrong, the comparison is useful if it helps amateurs see the value of good habits. I am a strong beliver in the idea that if one wishes to improve in something, one should eliminate all possible barriers to improvement, even if they seem small. After all, if you eliminate a lot of small stuff, it adds up! Second, I believe Kageyama implied thesis in LessonsInTheFundamentalsOfGo that a significant part of professionalism is one of attitude. One can have (or at least mimic) a professional attitude even toward something outside of one's profession. Mostly it is a matter of taking the endevor seriously and, in some sense, respecting it (not doing things that trivialize it). Viewing anything in the way a professional might can help one become much better at it, if only because one maximizes one's efforts. Time is not wasted fooling around doing things that don't help. So, asking oneself "could I imagine a professional doing this?" is worthwhile. It is more or less the same as asking "am I taking this seriously? Can I do better?" kokiri I think that attitude is something that is often only really tangentially considered. I remember reading in the British Go Journal (I think) a dan player saying that hardcore reading skills are really only needed once or twice in a game, whereas the vast majority of the moves in a game are played by instinct, so this is an important 'skill' to develop. The other side of the coin is the fact that a lot of games at levels approaching shodan seem dissolve into fights where no-one knows the outcome. Is there some point where the rationale of playing ceases to be an animalistic 'this looks good, this looks good, this looks right... oh I'm in a ko fight, now where do I have any good ko threats...' and flips into a more rational 'this way of playing looks ok - oh, it leads to ko. I don't have enough ko threats, so I'll try this line instead'? One thing that makes me mad is when people (usually my father) play a move inside a small group during the endgame at the same time as saying 'I don't think I need to play here'. I think it's a difference between a result based approach (I'm winning by about 15 so I don't need to take any chances) vs. a learning based approach (I can't see any weakness, I'm going to trust my judgement) and I'm firmly in the latter camp. Charles I like the way we have overviews at SL: this is almost something distinctive about the site, and sometimes the debates seem almost to justify the importance attached to some 'master term' (such as haengma, nerai. thickness, temperature ...). This page is another such attempt really. Or the dictionaries page: it might be simpler, if brutal, to say the pros know all that stuff (and we don't, and that's the difference). But what is even better, really, is that all these big-scale discussions speak to significantly different facets. Food for thought. John F. As a linguist I've always been able to see great parallels between language and go, both in how it's learnt and ways of thinking about it (moves as verbs and nouns, building in to phrases and clauses - there IS a grammar to go). But what has always struck me even more is the way so many families produce ranks of good go players. There are numerous examples of brothers and sisters, fathers and sons, etc becoming pro. But this is only the tip of an iceberg. There is a much, much vaster corpus of players who have siblings who reach high (usually very high) amateur dan level before drifting off to another career. I came across another one tonight, funnily enough - Mannami Kana's sister was strong enough to be instrumental in the career of the new prodigy Iyama Yuta. At one time I thought this may have been a feature of go, but there are quite a few examples in shogi (though I sense that the relative numbers are far fewer). I thought for a time it was a Japanese thing, but it's common in Korea, China and Taiwan. As far as I can tell, it's uncommon in chess. The Polgar experiment is not only exceptional, it's somewhat artificial. I'm pretty certain I'm right in saying that when this parallel sibling development happens in go, the siblings who don't go on to be pro are almost invariably very strong amateurs. For example, Go Seigen's brothers were early 7d amateurs, Kitani Reiko's brothers were 5d (one became a doctor instead). I infer, therefore, that reaching a very high amateur grade is possible, even likely, without a great deal of effort if you start young and (I imagine) live in the right environment, and having brothers and sisters who play can be a big factor. The reason I say "without a great deal of effort" is that this parallels how children can pick up a second language in a bilingual environment, but the evidence of biographies and anecdotes bears this out anyway. [1] Possibly it can also be inferred that the obsessional nature of some pros when they were young is not what made them strong players, but rather what made them choose go as a profession. Where there are multiple players in a family down the generations as opposed to across one generation, it is noticeable that one generation can be very strong but the adjancent ones tend to be weak (at pro level, one pro may end up as nothing more than a lesson pro; if the player stays as amateur he seems to end up as no more than 2d or 1d (by the by, this was the case with GSG - his father was about amateur 1d, his son never got past 2d. This seems to me to show again that having siblings who play is the best way to become very strong.
Rich: As further backup, Nie Weiping is the younger of two go-playing brothers. There was a book published recently that claimed that relative sibling position was one of the most important factors in shaping personality and deciding career; I can imagine that youngest siblings could have the most to prove. [1] Bob: John's remarks about youth and the right environment reminded me of a description of conditions in the Kitani dojo. It may have been Kato (if I recall correctly) who said that Kitani did very little explicit teaching. There were a lot of very talented children deshis and all Kitani did was provide the right atmosphere and the deshis became strong. This is a copy of the living page "Difference Between Pros And Amateurs/ Discussion" at Sensei's Library. ![]() |