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difficulty reading
Difficulty: Beginner
Aside from losing (heh), the thing I find most frustrating about playing Go at my novice level is an inability to read the board. Part of it is due to my poor memory (can't remember when I've placed imaginary stones), but most of it is because I can't think of where the best opposing moves would be. It becomes a paradox -- I can't predict my opponent's moves, so I can't protect myself from them. This means I can't work with tesuji problems of any post-early-beginner level. I tried my hand at the Kanazawa Tesuji Series[1], and had to quit after #5 because they required more reading than I can handle. Aside from practice, does anyone have any advice? -- Scartol HolIgor: It comes at the level of the pattern recognition. You gain some experience and then tend to build shapes with known properties (stability, thickness, attacking and defensive power). You learn a lot from your opponents, especially in the case when you cannot find what you can do against his shape. Then you use a similar shape in your own games. Soon you gather information about the strong and weak points of the patterns and tend to hit there or to protect there. The process is not very fast but not so long as well. Actually you cannot read everything. The trick then is to know what is worth reading. This is also a major drawback of computer programs. They can't figure out what to read. Interesting thing with them is that the programers build libraries of good patterns, thus programs play them successfully and therefore can beat beginners. The weak point now becomes a transition from local to the whole board and programs are extremely weak there.
If you want to solve some problems then --Stefan: Agree with this - the best way to turn yourself into a pattern recognition machine is the "solve a lot of easy problems fast" approach. Books like "Graded go problems for beginners" are ideal for this. Spend a limited amount of time on each problem, looking up the answer if you don't find it, and work your way through the book a few times in succession. When you solve a problem by remembering the solution from last time, you may feel that you haven't exactly improved your reading skills, but that's OK: the benefit from knowing the pattern is bigger anyway. BillSpight: At the start, I would not worry too much about your reading skill, in the sense of working out lines of play. There is another aspect of reading that is much more important: evaluating the result of the line of play. This takes judgment, which takes experience. You can start developing this skill right away. Look at the whole board. How does it look to you? (Later on you will be counting territories and assessing influence, but in the beginning you can be satisfied with an overall impression.) Now look one move ahead. What moves look good to you? Imagine that you have played one. How does the resultant board look? Don't worry too much about your opponent's reply. If he refutes your play, you will learn something. :-) If you try this out, you will find that an interesting thing happens: You will start seeing sequences of play. That's reading, too. Good luck! Scartol: On page 14 of Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go (which I finally got my hands on through inter-library loan), I found some more advice on this matter: "Some will say 'Phooey, that much I know already (that one must learn to read patiently); it's just that it's too much bother to actually do it.' Others will say 'Look, I'm still weak at the game; I can't do anything difficult like reading.' So much for these lazy students, let them do as they please. They are not going to get anywhere. They need to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck and have some sense knocked into them." A bit strict, perhaps, but by playing many many games (mostly losing), I find that my reading abilities have improved. Thanks for the feedback, all. Artis: I have difficulity with fine reading. It seems that my brain does not want to like to consider indivudial stones, but rather the lines they form. On a similar note I also tend to play worse when big lumps of stones are involved. [1] KanazawaTesujiSeries is probably directed at 1Dan on average. Agree with most of the rest above. --Dieter This is a copy of the living page "difficulty reading" at Sensei's Library. ![]() |