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Improvement
   

Improvement in general is obtained through the following three aspects

  • The acquisition of new ideas
  • The eradication of wrong ideas
  • Consolidation of acquired knowledge

Since Go is neither a fully solved game nor an exact science but instead relies on a combination of intuition? and reasoning?, these three aspects of improvement can be obtained on both the intuitive level as the analytical level.

It is widely believed that the following practices lead to improvement on some level:

  • Reading Go books or online articles and having a teacher enables one to acquire new ideas on an analytical level.
  • Replaying professional games? enables one to acquire new ideas on an intuitive level.
  • Playing fast games is a (the) way to test and consolidate intuitive knowledge.
  • Playing slow games is a (the) way to test and consolidate reasoning.
  • The analysis of games? enables
    • the evaluation of analytically based judgment, as exercised in slow games
    • the evaluation of intuitive judgment, as exercised in fast games
    • the identification and eradication of wrong ideas, bad habits or wrong attitude?

The overlying aspect of improvement is attitude?. The willingness to acquire new ideas, to investigate flaws in one's own play, to reconsider what one thought was correct, are all indispensable in the quest for improvement. In particular, a preocuppation with rank - the desire to win or the fear of losing - can distract from the real objective of becoming better at playing Go.


Andy Pierce: How about watching more skilled players playing each other? I'm not talking about pros but just people three or four stronger than you are. I 'think' this is useful anyway, but if I can be convinced otherwise I'll stop wasting my time doing this. There seem to be certain discrete classes of overplays and mistakes that are made at any given level. Watching slightly better players shows those mistakes for what they are and how they get punished. If you just study pro games, you never get to see these basic errors (and the correct responses to them).

Anon: I think this is the basic idea behind for example AlexandreDinerchtein's commented KGS games. These are useful for amateurs to study because the amateur's games contain more basic mistakes than in pro games --- mistakes an amateur player is more likely to make. But, there is a difference between reading a pro's comments and just watching the game yourself: it is quite likely that you will not realize many of the mistakes made, and further more that you risk picking up these bad habits.


See also:

dnerra's ideas on improvement
Dieter's ideas on improvement
Teach Yourself Go
[ext] David Mechner's How to Improve at Go
[ext] Sorin Gherman: How to Study Go



This is a copy of the living page "Improvement" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.