togo

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Rank: 4 dan on DGS (long thinking!), probably 2 dan in real life
Servers: DGS
Nationality: German
Languages: German, English
Birth: 1969
Gender: Male

I am playing Go since beginning of 2006. After nearly two years now I have reached 3-4 kyu and are leveling off a bit (30 games without much change in level). Somewhere I read that this a normal occurence. For me it is the combinatorial explosion of combining different joseki to a meaningful fuseki (respectively answering fusekially meaningful to joseki). The problem of course is not to know some fuseki patterns (which is easy in comparison) but to know the outcome of every major joseki and their combinations in advance. Having an overview of fuseki patterns is helpful but not sufficient. I guess I have to play a lot or stubbornally study joseki! ^_^

Time goes by, another 1½ years, now I am something between 2 dan and 4 dan. Luckily "stubbornally studying joseki" was not really necessary: With understanding of the basic principles and some general hooks it is easy to (re)construct the joseki by oneself (or to construct new ones). A good thing to memorize instead are the associated tesuji.

I learned another thing: There is the chance tesuji (mixing in some 50/50 random by making game just complicated enough through violent forcing moves) and the boredom tesuji (annoying game partner by playing lost or mishandled game - eg. by chance tesuji - on and on). And there are a lot of players solely studying those two. Don't do this!

Unfortunately there is no remedy for chance tesuji and boredom tesuji in online playing: playing along is boring, giving up disturbes the ranking mechanism, doing something strange oneself is boring, too


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