DieterVerhofstadt/Ideas on improvement

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Introduction

When it comes to improvement, there are four categories of players:

  1. Those who are satisfied with their level [2], are not prepared to do what's necessary to improve and play for fun.
  2. Those who are not satisfied with their level, but are not prepared either to do what's necessary to improve.
  3. Those who are not satisfied with their level, who ARE prepared to do what's necessary to improve but do not know what that is.
  4. Those who improve because they both know what should be done and do it.

Many players are in the second category, whether they know what it takes to improve or not. They just don't want to do that and so they should be satisfied with their current level.

Many other players are in number three. I am writing this article so that people of category 2 and 3 should know what it takes to improve and then can decide whether they want to become happy players of their current level (cat 1), or people who improve (cat 4).

I am not a great Go player so what I write is aimed at lower kyu players. It is quite probable that to become a higher dan, something else is needed than what's below. What I do know, is that I would have become 2d much faster if I had applied it.

The keys to improvement

If you want to improve in the game of Go, and this I have distilled out of many other teachers' pages, there are four major things you have to do.

  1. Improve reading skill.
  2. Get a source of new ideas.
  3. Play games, fast and slow.
  4. Review games.

Here's more on each item.

1. Improve reading skill.

1.1 Tsumego

The main instrument for improving reading skill are tsumego. Exercising tsumego will also enhance intuition for vital points of groups, for possible actions against groups, for status of groups. This kind of intuition is developed by doing many easy tsumego.

Tsumego go one step further than ladders. In ladders, you read very deeply (say 30 moves) but do not branch at all. In tsumego, depending on the level, you read 3/5/10/20 moves deep and you branch into a few variations at each move. In whole board fighting, the branching is much broader and there is usually not one single solution. So, when tsumego exercises are done, one has to apply the acquired skill to the game. This is where many people go wrong: they become excellent problem solvers, but fail to extend their ability to the game.

It is a matter of discipline. "I'm going to read this like I would read a tsumego". It is arguable whether every single move is a problem setting. As a first approach, apply your "problem solving mode" to fighting where the life of groups is at stake.

1.2 Remembering games

Remembering your own games after they've ended, becomes a second nature to every strong player. Professionals can often remember games all their life. Actively trying to remember games, is another instrument to improve Go memory. It also serves as a test for understanding the game, as remembering a game becomes easier as patterns fit predictions.

1.3 Counting the score

Positional judgment is an important strategic tool. In the later stages of the game, it boils down to calculating the score. Strong players can score the game very accurately even long before it has ended. Working this aspect of go is yet another instrument to improve the more rote side of Go memory.

2. New ideas and knowledge

Of course, if you want to improve, you need to acquire knowledge. The best thing I think is a teacher, because he or she will know best what your game is lacking and how much new stuff you can handle. The teacher should give you a few new ideas and insist that you exercise them in your game. Replaying professional games can also serve as a source of new ideas.

Many teachers claim replaying professional games is an important step to improve. I have been on and off about this one. I believe it can be good for those who are aiming high. It is definitely a source of new ideas, often through the much undervalued learning method of imitation.

Mistakes: people without a teacher usually read too many books. Secondly, and consequently, they fail to consciously apply the new ideas in their games. Also, some spend hours trying to understand the pro game, which is well beyond reach for players below 5d. It doesn't harm your game, but it is time consuming and inefficient.

3. Play fast and slow

Even more obvious is the fact that you should play to improve. I know many players who just played an enormous amount of games and improved very fast. But this is also time consuming and out of reach for many people, particularly those with a working schedule.

In order to make effective use of the time invested in playing, one should do two things:

  • play fast games to test your intuition
  • play some slow games to test your reading ability and comprehension of the game.

The mistake: many people play games, applying the same attitude, the same old ideas, without any intention to correct their mistakes. Which takes me to:

4. Reviews

In my opinion, this is the activity with the heaviest impact on one's improvement. With your teacher or someone else or alone, review the fast games and try to find which of your intuitively played moves gave a disadvantage. You can do some tactical analysis, even if you didn't in the game, but not too much: the purpose is to find flaws in the intuition.

At the same rate, review your slow games and dive into tactics. Where did you read badly ? Where did you NOT read !? Which principles, ideas or concepts did you apply ? Where did you forget to apply which principle ? Where did you misjudge a position you anticipated in the game ? Identify your mistakes and try to consciously avoid them in your next (slow) game.

Incidentally, it is a good idea to occasionally review games of players just a little higher ranked than yourself. It will be easy to spot mistakes, which can psyche you up a level.

Here too one can go wrong: Unfortunately there are many teachers who point out mistakes but forget to urge their pupil not making the same mistakes again and do not verify the next time if the error is still around.

The allocated time

Here's a schedule I propose for an ideal student. The only thing you have to do when you have not the necessary amount of time, is take ratios.

  • Play one or two fast game a week. 1 hour per week mostly.
  • Play two to three slow games a week. 4 hours per week.
  • Analyse the fast games during half an hour. Analyse the slow game for one hour. 2 hours per week.
  • Do a couple of very easy (3 moves deep) tsumego a day. 15 min a day, 1,5 hours a week. Do 2 or 3 difficult tsumego a week, should take half an hour in total.
  • Have an interview with your teacher, read some articles in a book, on the web, replay a pro game etc. Not more than 1 hour a week and 2 or 3 new ideas.

This gives a total amount of 10 hours. If you have 20 hours to spend, make it double. If you have 5 hours to spend, cut every aspect in half.

To make a comparison, imagine you spend 10 hours the following way:

  • Once a week, you spend 4 hours playing two long games.
  • Every evening you spend one hour reading some Go book.

You may even try to maximize the effort and apply the ideas in the book to your two games, but:

  • You don't analyse, so you won't know whether you did, let alone correctly.
  • You don't analyse, so you keep making the same old mistakes.
  • You don't do tsumego, so your new ideas will get lost in failure to read and bad technique.

The philosophy of mistakes

In the game of Go, the effects of making a mistake seem to be much greater than those of making an exceptionally good move.

Here are two questions:

  • How often did you win a game because of an exquisite move??
  • How often did you lose a game due to a stupid mistake?

My bets are that most people will answer a much higher number for the second question. I often hear comments like "I was ahead but then I misread that ladder" or "I self atari'd in the late endgame".

But even if we do not play such outright blunders, I believe most of our losses come from playing a move that we are analytically perfectly capable of dismissing, but somehow during the game we pick it as our favourite. It occurs to me that, most of the time, when I try something fanciful, the game goes astray.

Oddly enough, many students of the game focus their attention on exquisite moves, intricate variations where the difference between the masterful and the ordinary is two points. I refer to the large avalanche joseki, where the turn inward was a revolutionary variation by Go Seigen to the turn outward, which in the standard variation of the time represented a gain of two points, giving birth many new variations.

Although the comprehension of the large avalanche certainly contributes to overall skill, I believe comparatively little time is spent on the eradication of blunders or fanciful moves which do not suit the situation. The reasons for this behaviour of Go students are probably the following:

  • Scrutinizing your games for mistakes, then wonder what's the mental mechanism behind it (greed?, fear, a desire for originality) is a somewhat negative approach. It feels like chastice to focus on what you have done wrong and seek to eradicate the mental process behind it or at least reduce its effects.
  • Moreover, the result of the analysis is often that one should have played the dull move, the common sense, the conventional wisdom, instead of the exquisite move, the highly original, individual effort.

It is much more fun for us to live in the illusion that acquiring expert thinking (like the large avalanche) will propell us into the higher dan spheres ... if it were not for those many moments of frustration when we are cheated by our momentary lapses of reason, our inexplicable behaviours, our stupid mistakes that keep coming despite all the expert study.

Given the fact that one blunder can throw away all profit acquired by many successive good moves, probably our focus in the game should be on reducing the scope for disaster. That is essentially what is meant by the sayings "Go is a game of patience", "Prepare (defend) before you attack" or the more basic "do not let yourself be surrounded" and "connect on a large scale".

There is more to it than avoiding blunders. At any move, the chance that you play the best possible move is very very low. That happens maybe a couple of times, especially in the endgame, when the outcome of perfect play can be calculated. So, rather than looking for the best possible move, we should perhaps look for moves that are "definitely not bad", meaning, "it is not easy to see how my opponent can take an immediate advantage of it". If you find a couple of that kind of moves, you can safely choose the one that appeals most. On the other hand, a move that looks like a killer move ... if it works, may as well be a candidate for a bad move.

Surely, this approach can lead to slack play. Adding a stone to an already alive group, reinforcing a connection which is not threatened ... these should fall under the general umbrella of big mistakes, because they are close to passing and rarely a move is worse than passing. Reducing the scope for errors does not mean to stop thinking and mindlessly play overly safe.

The analysis of mistakes may not be fun, especially for the ego. The positive approach of acquiring good technique and adopting sound strategy is a good counterbalance. But if we insist to study expert topics and neglect the scrutiny for mistakes, then we should not live in the illusion we are going to win more games. Few people however are capable of acknowledging that they're making progress while losing games. Most of us need some kind of an external criterium to tell us we're indeed making progress and except if we have a teacher watching our steps, that external criterium will be our win/loss ratio.

In conclusion, for anyone seeking improvement on their own, a strategy which is not backed up by measurable success, is not a very good one unless they have strong stamina. Measurable success comes from winning games and to win games, it is most effective to include the eradication of mistakes into the improvement strategy.


See also:


[2]

An important note about level

When speaking of level, I deliberately do not speak of rank. While rank is an indicator of level, preoccupation with rank too often distracts of the proper goal: improve. People who care about their rank will try everything to win or not to lose (which is the same thing but quite another approach) and tend to ignore the value of lost games, namely the analysis.


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(OC) 2011 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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