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How much a player should know at a given rank
exswoo -Okay, the most obvious thing to say on this topic is to just that a person A is X stones stronger than person B. However, what I'm wondering is if we, as Go players, have certain expectations for how much Go knowledge a person has when we look at their ranking? This is a bit of a loaded question since there are a lot of ranking systems out there...but if we were to disregard that, what things would you expect a 20k to know and not know? 15k? 12k? 8k? 1d? I think it would be interesting to see what our ideal vision for certain rankings are and make up some sort of a chart ;) WilliamNewman: In my experience "technique" things, like ability to find tesuji, tend to increase more or less continuously, so it's hard to describe what different levels of players have. Concepts, at least the original insight, are more of a black and white thing. I'd reckon 30kyus don't quite understand the concepts of life and death (like "two eyes live") and miai, 20kyus typically have no more than a very foggy idea about shape and sente, and 10kyus have no more than a foggy idea about kikashi, thickness, aji, efficiency, and sabaki. Of course, then these concepts have a lot of technique attached to them, so a 1kyu is usually much better at keeping sente than he was when he was 10kyu, even if he grasped the basic concept by the time he was 20kyu (and strong players routinely beat me up on shape even though I've been thinking about it for twenty years or so). Also, I think some people manage to delay their acquisition of these concepts by as many as 10 ranks, so you might be able to find e.g. a 10kyu who doesn't quite understand what's the big deal about sente; but it seems pretty difficult to delay longer than that. 'A 10th Kyu not understanding the advantages of the sente concept ? This is hard to conceive. I think this would probably be one of the concept needed to go past the 15th Kyu barrier. However I could perfectly conceive a 10th Kyu or even higher having no knowledge whatsoever about what is joseki and what isn't thus relying on his overall knowledge to define what the next best move is in the fuseki -- Darak' AlainWettach: The importance of fighting for sente goes beyond understanding in abstracto what sente means (this at least is not very difficult). On the other hand, deciding to answer or not to answer locally in a given position should involve a positional assessment of the game and maybe also life and death considerations (What will happen if I don't answer? If I lose something here, what can I get elsewhere?). If you watch a game between 2 players of different strengths, you will most probably notice that the strongest one will take sente more often. In my view, this makes much more difference than knowing if a sequence is joseki or not. WilliamNewman: OK, a 10kyu player probably knows the definition of sente. But I have more than once had the experience of talking about different variations (like in joseki), and pointing out that in variation X, black's position is stronger than in variation Y, but in variation Y, black was able to take sente; and getting a response, or nonresponse, which I interpreted as "Bother me not with those dan-level details! The X position is stronger, I'm not going to worry about the other stuff." My impression is that this pattern of thought, where the player knows what sente is but never takes it seriously, is reasonably common at 15kyu and not impossible to find at 10kyu. It seems to me that if you're good at some important techniques like solving life and death and connection problems, you can get to 10kyu with some pretty horrendous weaknesses in other areas. Someone in another discussion described the strategy of just making the game complicated and hoping to kill something... Bottleneck theories would take a rather different and personalised line on this subject. Charles Matthews alter Pedro 19k on DragonGoServer as of December 2002 (I have been playing mostly turn-based go?* for a year) keywords cut and pasted from the text above
Jasonred heh, simple. It's not what you know, it's how well you know it... and how well you put it into practice. Given enough time, and the fact that someone tells me that there's some nakade for a situation, I can eventually figure it out. But in a real game? Let's face it, I could get a newbie to hang around Sensei's Library and just read up every single go concept here, memorize the terms, etc, but not attempt any problems or actually play go... I don't think he's going to break 20 kyu. Though I've heard of prodigies, not in age, but in experience... despite only playing 3 games in their life, they've "suddenly" mastered tsumego, miai, sente, shape, and their playing jumps 3 stones a game... This is a copy of the living page "How much a player should know at a given rank" at Sensei's Library. (C) the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0. |