Calvin: I'd like to do an informal survey on player's thoughts about the frequency of play required to improve. This question is motivated by own experience: I find that I have periods of my life where for a few months I have a reasonable amount of interruptible free time to study Go, but little uninterruptible time to play full games. I once asked an AGA 7d if this is okay, and he asked, "Well, how few games are you talking about?" I said maybe two full games a week. He said that's fine because the brain can't assimilate information faster than that anyway. (Or maybe he was referring to my brain and not his.) So he told me to go ahead and study tsumego and tesuji in my bits of free time and not to worry so much about game frequency. But clearly he had some threshold in mind and two games per week surpassed it. On the other hand, I know some strong players who literally only play and do no other form of study, so I'm sure opinions vary.
Here are my questions. Thanks for your input. (Deshis: feel free to reformat this page if there's a better layout for this type of survey.)
1. If given 100 hours of uninterruptible time (in large enough blocks that game play is possible) what percentage of it would you spend actually playing games vs. other study such as pro games, tsumego, books, or reviewing your own games? (This is assuming you want to improve and not just goof off.)
2. What's the minimum frequency of actual game play where doing other things such as tsumego and not playing enough will cause you to develop a weird style or produce symptoms like kyu disease that might be hard to shake?
3. Is actual game play so important that you would resort to blitz games or 9x9 games to get up game count if you don't have much time, or would you refrain from that and wait until you can play more serious games? For example, if you have 20 minutes, would you play a blitz game or 9x9 game, or just do a few easy tsumego instead? (Again, I’m assuming someone who wants to improve and is not just addicted to play.)
unkx80: I am also one who do not have a lot of uninterrupted time for play. And sometimes I am just plain lazy.
Anyway, here is my take. I won't answer your questions point by point, though. I would recommend doing a mix of all, actually. Some time reading books, some time doing tsumego, some time reviewing professional games. As for games, a mix of serious and blitz can be good, I am saying both because blitz trains on intuition. An occassional switch to 9x9 can be good, because the tactics are different, but beware that too much of small board go can destroy the intuition for the usual 19x19 board. Anyway, a couple of serious games within a week should be good, and if possible, all serious games should be reviewed.
Anyway, these are all my personal opinion. But as I said, I have been goofing off all these while and not practicing what I preach.
ThaddeusOlczyk: The first thing I would note, is never to play more games than you can comfotably review. I have seen some of the dan players trying to modify their style and have difficulty, That's because they play 5 games a day and probably never have time to review their games and see where they are ineffictive in their new style. I've also seen some dans who stink it up for a few games and then stop playing for a while. Allowing the break to clear their heads.
I would limit the amount of blitz. It inculcates a degree of impatience which hurts your slow game. So balance each blitz game with at least one slow game. There are times when I know I don't have enough time to play, but I won't play blitz. Instead I watch someone elses game.
Vincent: About 50/50. It's important to strike a balance. There are some things you can only learn through experiance, while studying can introduce you to concepts and ideas that might otherwise have never occured to you.
It depends how much you study. As Michael Redmond said: "If you study something, you have to use it in a game, otherwise you haven't really digested it and made it your own." That said, I would play at least one serious game every three to four days to keep your mind sharp.
Ditto to the above comments on blitz games and smaller boards.