Filed under: Game Reviews, Go Journal, Go Study | Tags: game reviews, losing
Too many of my game records end up looking like this. How can I stop this from happening?
Growing up in the 1970′s, I was sure flying was a bad idea.
I remember watching the “Airport” movies, each of which featured innocent passengers and plenty of potential death and destruction. And if Hollywood drama wasn’t enough, the evening news was peppered with regular air disasters.
In 1978, a Boeing 727 collided with a small plane near San Diego, just 3 years after the first airport disaster flick starring Charlton Heston movie featured a 747 colliding with a private plane. No wonder my family seemed to drive everywhere.
So, what happened? Hollywood has stopped making airline crash movies, even in this age of remakes. More importantly, the news doesn’t have much to report in the way of airliner downings either. Why are the skies seemingly safer today and in the 1970′s?
Answer: The National Transportation Safety Board and other similar organizations world-wide. It seems they figured out that studying the causes of crashes yielded information about how to improve safety. Go figure . . . (no comment on the pun).
Over the past 30-40 years, the United States and other countries have actually reached the rank of transportation shodan, reducing fatal crashes by some 5,000 percent. They studied what went wrong and followed through on improvements. What does this mean for me besides the fact that my fear of flying is serenely parked on the tarmac? It means that I need my very own Goban Safety Board.
Well, okay, a government agency probably won’t help my game, but I do need to study what goes wrong, especially in the games I lose, and then do something about the weaknesses I find.
A go player called Vultur writes a blog titled “Lose 100 Games.” He advocates embracing your mistakes to learn from them. I like that idea.
“The idea of being patiently mindful of our errors is encouraging, unlike the feeling of frustration that comes from erroneously thinking that losing is necessarily a bad thing.”
The idea of being patiently mindful of our errors is encouraging, unlike the feeling of frustration that comes from erroneously thinking that losing is necessarily a bad thing. Playing should be a learning processes. Perhaps we teach others when they make mistakes in games that we win. Are we then too proud to learn from our mistakes when we lose? We do this I think when we pout about losing. If we’re playing at the right level, winning and losing is a 50/50 thing anyway. I know I’ll enjoy go more when I start to enjoy the losing efforts more. (Ha, maybe I don’t want to enjoy them too much, eh?)
Anyway, I’m going to follow Vultur’s lead and not only lose 100 games (I’ve actually lost many times this already) but I’m also going to review as many as possible when I lose and ask, “Why did this plane crash?” Unlike with aviation, where at least some of the crashes can be blamed on mechanical failure, in go it is always pilot error. Granted there may be opponent induced ice and fog, but . . . well, no excuses, right?
To start off my safety board investigations, here’s a game I lost recently to a player named ‘loot’ on DGS. I played white. The result was Black + 7.5.
I didn’t put hours into the review. Instead I quickly ran through the game to look for any obvious mistakes that cost me the 8 precious points that brought about my crash. I found one at move 128. Check it out and see if you agree with me that it was a simple case of carelessness with perhaps a little greed tossed in for good measure.
Also, I’d love to hear from you about your experiences with improving your safety record on the goban through your own ‘after-crash’ reviews.
Like this:
Yuan Zhou's book that helps SDK players get closer to shodan.
At this year’s U.S. Go Congress, I stopped by the vendor room and chatted with William Cobb from Slate & Shell. He had a nice selection of go books and I was itchin’ to spend a little money on my addiction.
I mentioned that I was a single-digit kyu (SDK) player looking to improve and asked what books he would recommend. Yuan Zhou’s How Not To Play Go was his first choice.
I started reading it that day. But, as most of you understand, go books are not typically quick reads. Reading the text and comparing the various diagrams that most go books are filled with means a little work is involved.
So, I’ve just now finished this short (32-page) book a month later. I’m pleased to say that I began practicing what Yaun Zhou teaches in the book after reading only the first part of the book. So, my games on Dragon Go Server (DGS) became my lab as I studied.
The points made in the book are simple and straight forward. The message is essentially “stop ignoring the whole board.” So, I guess I could end this review with that wisdom, eh? Were it only that simple, we’d all be shodans by now.
If you’re an SDK player looking to move closer to shodan, here’s a quick preview of the major advice from the book:
- Stop automatically following your opponent
- Pay attention to the whole board
- Begin taking sente seriously
- Stop assuming your opponent’s areas are bigger than your own
- Realize that every play involves the whole board (If these sounds similar to point #2, realize that this is the book’s mantra)
- Stop practicing wishful thinking (or ‘not thinking’ as Yuan Zhou calls it)
If you’re a moderate to strong kyu-level player, do yourself a favor and give this book a read. The author uses three games to illustrate the points I share above in a what-not-to-do style that will have you shaking your head and saying something like, “Yeah, I do that, too.”
The book includes examples from three games, an 8-kyu game, a 4-kyu game, and a 1-kyu game. So, no getting off the hook for the 1-4 kyu players out there. Yuan Zhou shows how the same weakness exists at 8 kyu and 1 kyu. It’s just that the 1 kyu players are closer to kicking the bad habits. But the point is, they are still there!
So, reaching shodan seems to be less about complex knowledge of joseki and the like and more about approaching the game in a new way through the elimination of some bad habits. Hmmmm . . . sounds a lot like life success in life. That’s why I love go!
The book is available from Slate & Shell for $10. Click here to visit the book’s page on the Slate & Shell website.
Filed under: Go Study, Tsumego, Video/Screencast | Tags: Life & Death, Methods
One way to improve your game dramatically is to regularly work life and death problems. But many beginners are put off by this because they lack a workable approach to tackling challenging problems. I have found that working life and death problems requires patience more than anything else. Yes, a trained eye is useful in a game, but we develop the ‘intuition,’ if you will, that a trained eye depends upon by working lot’s of life and death problems both in and out of games. This post then is all about process and patience for new players.
We develop the ‘intuition’ that a trained eye depends upon by working lot’s of life and death problems.
When you don’t have the experience to ‘see the obvious move’ what do you do? The answer is that you let process and patience do their jobs until the answer is clear. To begin, let’s take a tried and true method that I first read about in a book titled “Tesuji” by James Davies. We’ll apply patience, perhaps throw in a bit of stubbornness and we’ll learn how to effectively work life & death problems. The method or process is easy but can seem hard when we try to apply it to problems that stretch us. But it works! stick with it.
Here’s the method: select the move you think is the right one and play it in your head, then respond for your opponent with the best response you can think of. Then continue making moves for both you and your opponent until you prove that your moves are correct or incorrect. They are correct if you are able to kill or live depending on the objective of the problem despite any attempt by your opponent to foil your plans.
Something is incorrect if one of your opponent’s responses causes you to miss your objective. If you see that one of your moves is incorrect, back up to that move and try another one, then again respond for your opponent just as you did before. If you see that your moves seem to work, then back up again and this time play a different response for your opponent and play out the problem again. Continue to do this for both you and your opponent until you have exhausted all of the possible options.
Discipline and concentration will win everytime over a good guess. So, while you might not be able to work out problems that are way above your level, you should be able to patiently work out problems rated at your strength or slightly higher without your brain tapping out and begging for a guess. The video below shows an example of this method at work. The example problem is rated at 20 kyu. So, if you’re between 30 and 15 kyu, you should find this video helpful, especially if you are new to working life and death problems.
If you’d like to see other video tutorials on this topic or other topics, leave me a comment and I’ll add your request to my list of blog projects.
I admit it, my study-to-play ratio is out of balance
Let me start this post by admitting that I study more than I play. I also know that this slows my progress.
With that put on the table, I’m ready to refute the idea that playing much more than studying books is the way to learn and progress most quickly. The statement that is the title of this post is something I saw echoed on the forums on godiscussions.com. I just can’t buy into this approach however.
So, I’ve already admitted that I tend to read more than play and that I know my approach is not optimal. First, I enjoy theory of all sorts. I suppose I’m an academic at heart. This inclination injects a certain joy in reading about and imagining using the ideas I read about in my games. (Of course, this is easier to dream about than to do.)
So, I admit that I need to shift the balance of books to games from a 7:3 ratio to perhaps a 3:7 ratio. My problem is that I can fit a little reading in here and there during my day and week. Games are harder to fit. So my busy schedule and busy evenings with my family encourage me to read more and play less.
“If lots of playing time is supposed to make you stronger, it seems that too much time spent re-inforcing shakey fundamentals cements them into solid bad habits.”
Honestly, my personality also re-inforces this pattern as well. I am conservative by nature and the idea of preparing well before risking rank and reputation seems natural. But avoiding games out of fear of failure is supremely counter productive.
So, for me, I am working to find more time and opportunity to play. I am also sincerely working on easing up on my own expectations that often morphs into a greed for winning. This is my challenge.
I need to add one final thought about the 1:9 ratio. I have seen too many accounts on the online servers belonging to people who had played 3,000+ games and were still 15 kyu. If lots of playing time is supposed to make you stronger, it seems that too much time spent re-inforcing shakey fundamentals cements them into solid bad habits.
So, I suppose we have to let people learn in a style that fits their personality and schedule, while not hesitating to state what works for many people to in effect blaze a trail for others to follow. After all for amatuers go isn’t just about winning and progressing though sometimes we fool ourselves into thinking it is. Unless you’re making your living playing go, I think it is about enjoying this gift of God that we call go.
I learn life lessons from this game all the time. From time to time, you’ll be able to read about some of these observations here. So, if enjoyment comes from reading or from playing, do what brings you joy. If gaining strength alone brings you satisfaction, then more playing and less study seems to be one that is recommended. No matter which approach you take or which mix of play and study you subscribe to, make sure you are enjoying the journey.
