Biggest Problem for Beginners is Thickness

  Difficulty: Beginner   Keywords: Strategy

I (anonymous) have just started playing Go for about a couple months and one of the mistakes I was making early on and didn't find out till later was I was playing too thick. After making the correction I noticed that almost all beginners were doing this so I thought I would post about it here.

Bill Spight: Hmmm. And here I thought beginners did not play thickly enough. :-)
20+k loser: Agreed, Bill, my problem is that I play too loose, nearly throwing the stones down and hoping they land somewhere nice.
Alex Weldon: So perhaps the page title is correct, and only the content is wrong. ;-) Maybe the biggest problem for beginners is telling the difference between thickness and overconcentration.
Bob McGuigan: I think thickness is a difficult topic for players at any level. I recall that Kobayashi Koichi used to be criticized for making moves which top pro commentators thought were slow but which Kobayashi thought were thick.

The reason for this is simple: beginners read that they should stay connected and that thickness means strength and influence. Which of course sounds great. So they start out in the corners like they were told maybe, or even at the edges too. But after that they just link stones right up next to each other building their walls right away. They're afraid to spread out because they've learned that separated stones are easily attacked and captured. And who doesn't want strength?

One of the first things I learned as a beginner was if I wanted to have any territory I would have to play looser and take chances.

[Diagram]

What I am talking about


Bill: This is not really what thickness means. Black is overconcentrated. And the top left corner is not so bad. A stone at a would be better than the marked stone. I made the same kind of mistake when I started out. :-)
Another Go player also mentioned to me that what I was referring to was overconcentration. Oh well thanks for correcting me. I will leave it as it is for now, unless someone else wants to take the time to go and change all the words "thick" to "over-concentration". Thanks for fixing my page Bill or whoever it was. (Whoever I am) I knew it didn't look right.
Kris Rhodes: Would this be better referred to as playing "too heavy"? Or is that something else?
Bill: Heaviness is a form of overconcentration, but it involves weakness and lack of flexibility. I wouldn't call Black's stones heavy, here. :-)
argybarg: Couldn't we also say that these moves are small? The real fault here might be in mis-measuring the value of moves against the opportunity in the whole board. This is something that beginners (understandably) struggle with.

A few other mistakes I see from TRUE beginners are:

Karl Knechtel: Disturbingly, I see these mistakes, or similar ones, from players at my ("kyu-counted-on-one-hand") level too. Well, the first two anyway.

Rich: I sometimes get the second symptom at the end of tournaments, when I have played too much. It's when I know it's time to take a rest. :P

Andy Pierce: I think this is part of falling in love with your stones. If you try to save every stone you put on the board you wind up either overconcentrated or, even worse, heavy. Mentally, beginners justify this kind of play as thick when it's not. Remember that thickness needs to be useful, where useful does not simply mean "doesn't get killed". Make your stones work for you. This includes working to force your opponent to kill them so that your other stones can benefit even more. My $0.02 anyway.


This is a copy of the living page "Biggest Problem for Beginners is Thickness" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2007 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
[Welcome to Sensei's Library!]
StartingPoints
ReferenceSection
About