Dieter: move discussion (2007-07-27 10:26) [#3599]

XCMeijin: is replaying a pro game as good as memorising one? I've recently started doing this and was just wondering... And should i replay the same game over and over again, or is variety better?

Truc: I've heard varied advice on this subject ranging from "Don't bother with pro games until you're a high dan" to "Replay games to get the feel for shapes" to "Replay a game over and over until you can remember it without looking at the kifu". Ultimately you should decide for yourself how you want to study pro games. Most pro games have middle game fighting that's way beyond my understanding, so I usually replay the first 40-50 moves of a game to get the feel for the fuseki and don't bother studying their middle game too much.

Tamsin: It's unlikely you'll get more than a slight boost to your intuitive feeling for the game simply by replaying pro games. But if you play through a game several times and try to memorise, say, 100 moves, trying to understand the meaning of the moves as much as you can, then you should expect several benefits: first, you'll learn a lot of joseki and the situations where they are appropriate; second, you'll notice what shapes are made in which situations; third, you'll pick up middle-game tesuji and joseki, and again you should begin to associate them at some level with the appropriate contexts.

I used to do this a lot in my first two years of playing, and improved rapidly; now, I realise, I find that almost all the joseki and standard techniques I know were first encountered in this way. Therefore, I'm trying it again; it should be more fun than force feeding and other things that I've done (force feeding works, by the way, but it really drains the enjoyment out of studying).

Malweth: Learning pro games was one of the things that has helped me the most getting from approx 15k to 3k AGA.

At first (15-12k) I just watched through the game once, and then replayed over the first 50 moves, not caring too much if I got the correct next move, though memorization of the first 50 moves is still ok and I did that a number of times too.

Around 8k I concentrated more on short-term memorization of the first 50-100 moves. I'm not aiming to keep any single game in long-term memory, but the shapes and josekis are learned easily this way.

Now, between 5-3k, I've been concentrating most on memorizing the game until just before small yose (150-200 moves) and attempting to reason out why each move was played. I believe that it's only important to start doing this when you're in the very low kyus or beginning dan levels. I'm concentrating on easy to understand pro players (Takemiya) for this aspect of learning pro games, and I continue with my 8k method with the harder to understand pros (Go Seigen).

Just a warning that: this does cause (relatively) rapid improvement, but Life and Death and Tesuji Tsumego are also very important. It's my opinion that Wu's games helped me crack 8k and that Takemiya helped with the 5k barrier.

Chris Hayashida: I tried to memorize a game earlier on. I think it did help, but not so much in the tactical or strategic ways mentioned above. I think that being able to remember up to 200 moves sort of "cleared space" in my brain so that I was able to remember longer sequences. I found that my reading improved directly as a result.

I didn't find it that helpful with strategy, as I could only guess what the pros were thinking, even when the game was commented. I also found that I couldn't read out some of the tactical issues (Why did he tenuki? Can't he be cut off?) That being said, I still think it was beneficial to my game. Good luck.

Discussion

Arden Chan: What specific pro games are recommended as the "first" game to study and memorize? (Please provide specific info - both players, dates, etc. Thank you)

Hyperpapeterie: This is something of a stab in the dark, but you might try the Game Gallery at gobase which has a section entitled 'crystal clear' containing two pro games which are quite easy to understand (of course there is still much more to the pro games than what we can see). The Rin Kaiho game has several people commenting on it in chat mode, the O Rissei game does not. Which you prefer would be a matter of taste.

Tamsin: I've tried memorising games recently, but I'm starting to think it's one of the least helpful activities. It seems to be like memorising joseki writ large. The activity might give a boost to one's feeling for shape and direction, but without understanding the moves very well either strategically or tactically it seems to me to be the equivalent of learning a foreign language by memorising conversations (without knowing what they mean) - maybe you can pick out the odd thing, but most of it will be mysterious.

On the other hand, I've just started going back to studying pro games by following commentaries. Gobase has a section of commented games, and I find Jan van der Steen's remarks perfect for students of my own modest level. I feel that I could learn a lot from this approach.

MakubeNoGo Personally, I think that the main reason why memorizing pro games early helps is because of shape. If you replay a pro game, you memorize good shapes, if you memorize a pro game, you memorize how to form good shapes.