Playing at a Go club

I got a chance to play a face to face game against a 3 kyu opponent at the Nashua, NH Go club last weekend. It was a 9 stone handicap game, which I lost by about 30. It was enjoyable in a lot of ways:

• I liked playing against someone stronger who was willing to make comments (as if it was a teaching game) as well as try to win like a competitive game. We didn't have a kifu to record the game - too bad. I think it could have been helpful for a review.
  
• I liked that fact that I felt like I wasn't too far from gaining some strength and catching up to the other club members level. I guess I didn't just feel like a "loser DDK" amongst the elite SDK members. They didn't seem or act godlike and unapproachable. They were regular people I felt I could learn from and hopefully gain strength from.
• It didn't feel like a game against a computer. I had a real feeling of moves being about tradeoff and compensation. When a computer moves, it feels like it has made the one, the only, the best move. Playing a person had a much different feel. Lots of "I'll let you take the side if you give me the corner" situations.

There were some downsides - mostly that it is an hour drive to get there. But I will see if I can't keep attending.

Other news - Santa was good to me, he brought 4 Go books! I got Graded Go Problems 2 & 3, Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go (Kageyama), and Go the Natural Way (Takemiya Masaki).

Return to tsumego - and recognized weakness

Reading a thread on GoDiscussions about getting to SDK (Single Digit Kyu) I saw a bunch of good recommendations, mostly around a few books and doing problems.

I realized that I hadn't done any tsumego for quite a while, so I headed over to GoProblems to try a few. I set up a set of 50 problems from 30 kyu to 15 kyu and got 49 right. Next I tried 20 from 12 kyu to 10 kyu and got 6 or so.

Wow! Tsumego really does have difficulty levels! I don't think I really believed that before. I was successful at tsumego that focused on killing "dead shapes" and finding cutting points but generally failed on liberty races. This is a huge, clear indication of a path to improvement.

Seeing that there were situations on the board I wasn't comfortable with helped me see others. In the past I think that when there was something tough to read, my brain just sort of glazed over a little and I convinced myself it wasn't important. Now I am trying to alert myself when I get into a position that is over my head.

I noticed that I can't clearly tell when an unfinished corner is alive. I am not confident that I can succeed at a 3-3 invasion. I also need work on liberty races.

So, although you hear it from everyone, doing tsumego can help your game. Tsumego actually does have strong correlation with skill level. So, if you work on problems that are a bit harder than you can do, and you learn how to recognize and solve those situations, you will have improved!

"The Corners Don't Matter" or why 4-4 Opening is OK

So, my opening strategy has gone as follows:

1. Clueless - play anywhere and get beat up. This was the chaos of a beginner.
2. Imitate Others - I started playing 4-4 since it seemed common and maybe a symmetrical opening would be easier to memorize. I kept getting attacked and undermined. It seemed too hard to save the precious corner.
3. Read a little - Picked the 4-3, 3-5 opening. This supposedly secured a corner with 2 moves rather than the 3 moves required for the 4-4. It works ok, but I often don't get that second stone on 3-5 down before my opponent invades.

Hmmmm...if my opponent can block my 2 move corner how would I ever get a 4-4 corner secured that requires 3 moves? Answer: Almost never!

***LIGHT BULB***

I realized that even though the corners are worth a lot and you WANT to get entire corners to yourself, your opponent will never let you play 3 unopposed moves unless they are getting "adequate compensation" somewhere else on the board. So, in fact you have to assume you won't get the corners you stake out with a 4-4.

What you can expect is to split the corner fairly evenly with your opponent via some joseki. (Joseki's are famous series of moves more or less Go's version of Chess openings.)

So, a 4-4 opening is a one move method of setting yourself up to split the corner rather than attempting a 4-3 & 3-5 opening that requires 2 moves to try to get the whole corner.

Looking at a 4-4 opening move as a "quick 1-move initiation of a corner splitting series" rather than the "start of an attempted 3 move unopposed series to capture the corner" changes the way I see the opening and the whole initiation of the power struggle on the board.

Playing on OGS (Online Go Server)

Almost all my recent Go activity has been on OGS. It is quite a different experience to play "turn-based" Go rather than "real time" play. Some points:

Anxiety: KGS gives me some anxiety - I have a hard time starting a game there. On OGS it is a lot easier. You can also join tournaments, so I quickly had around 30 games all going at the same time.

Focus: Having 30 games going at once can be problematic. You need to make 1 or more moves a day to make sure you don't lose on time. So, playing 30 moves in a day, all on different games feels a bit like tsumego (life and death practice problems). It doesn't allow you to get into the flow of the game. I often go into the Analysis window and roll the game back a few moves and then play it forward to remember what was going on. I guess the obvious point here is that it doesn't feel like playing a game in the traditional sense (sit down, set up the board, play through to the end, count the score).

Feeling of Progression: It is also a bit difficult to judge if you are improving. Starting 30 games at the same time and playing them in parallel to the end feels different than playing 30 games in a row, one at a time. If I feel my opening is lousy, I will play 30 lousy openings at the same time rather than have 30 chances to play a better opening and learn from mistakes if I play in a series.

Time Pressure: It seems silly to think that 1 move a day is tough and can lead to time pressure, but it does. Many days I have been in a situation where I wasn't in a Go mood. For whatever reason I wasn't really ready to play, but I felt I needed to so I didn't lose on time. Maybe I was really tired, distracted or had a few glasses of wine and even though I shouln't have moved in my "unready" state, I did. So, my games end up with a bunch of moves that were probably not the best I could have made.

Less interest in tsumego: It didn't really occur to me that the "one move per board" play style that OGS offers feels like doing tsumego until I wrote this. Each time you sit down to play you see a board and the question is "What is the best move?". It feels A LOT like tsumego. So much so that I stopped doing any real tsumego. I think that is a big reason I feel like I am not improving...I stopped doing tsumego!

Conclusion: Turn based online Go is just another tool out there. Like any tool it can be helpful or it can get misused. Having spent almost all my Go time on OGS lately, I can see that it isn't the perfect tool for helping me get better. It is one of many tools that I need to split my time on. I need to add more tsumego, books and real time play to my "Go diet" as well as adding some across the board play.

Feeling Stuck at 15 kyu

Hi all,
I haven't posted for awhile as I haven't seen much improvement in my game. (I have been a bit busy - moving from west coast to east, unpacking and job hunting.) But I have kept playing GO on OGS. OGS is a nice change from KGS, but it has its own issues (I will post on that). I need to play a few games on KGS and get rid of my ? again...

I do have a few things to talk about. I am straying away from my "ignore the middle" strategy that I posted on below. I find myself roughing out small side areas I think should be able to make an eye and then looking to connect with other groups (and surround territory) in the middle. So, a lot of my latest games have me taking chances/guessing about what moves will allow me to connect. If two groups are a knights move apart can they connect? What if their closest stones are 2 knight's moves apart?

Latest realization is what I call "the corners don't matter". What this really means is that it is OK to play a 4-4 opening rather than a 4-3 and 3-5 combo. More on this in a later post.

Finally, I really think I would benefit from some in person games. I need to join a local club and/or find a teacher. I will post as I investigate these potentially helpful methods of improving my GO.

Tesuji by James Davies and the Nose Tesuji

Elementary GO Series, Vol. 3 - Tesuji by James Davies

This is a book that takes a while to get through. Every few pages a new tesuji is shown, and then there are problems for the reader to solve using the new moves.

I originally understood tesuji to mean "trick play". I thought it was something that happened on rare occasions by masters of the game. But tesuji are really not tricks as much as known positions of stones that lead to some kind of a forcing play or capture if you know the pattern. I would call the Ladder and the Net some basic tesujis. I guess my point is that I assumed I didn't really need to read a book on tesuji since it was just some weird trick plays - well, I was wrong.

Tesuji is a book with a lot to offer. Davies details quite a few tesujis and then gives some great problems to help you practice. I am nearly done with my first pass through the book, but I can tell I need to revisit it regularly. Why? First, I have forgotten some of the patterns already. Second, I did a fairly poor job at the problems. In general, I could guess what the critical first move of the sequence would be, but I wasn't able to see the "forced" response or get the chain of moves through to the solution. I think that as I absorb a few of the tesuji in the book, I will be able to wrap my brain around a few more, until I eventually have more or less memorized the tesuji in the book. The fact that I can't read the problems out to the end tells me that I need to improve my reading - or simply that I am a 15 kyu, and I have a lot to learn.

Despite the book being a pretty strong challenge, it has already paid off in game. Here is a game where I recognized the opportunity for a "Nose Tesuji".

Here is the position where I recognized that a Nose Tesuji was possible. A play at 'A' by white is the Nose Tesuji - I guess getting the name from the fact that the 2 black stones stick out like a nose. The set up wasn't quite perfect yet, so I played a stone to set up the trap...


White 1 below doesn't seem to be an attacking move, but it isolates the black stones at F13, G13 and sets up the tesuji. I am guessing that my opponent doesn't know this tesuji, so he isn't prepared to defend against it. His Black 2 doesn't affect the tesuji, so I spring H13 on him...


The Nose Tesuji reduces his group to two liberties and by struggling to escape he loses another liberty. Now the 5 black stones are in atari - nice job Nose Tesuji!


Having read Tesuji, and having seen the praise it has received on GoDiscussions, I believe it is an essential book for a player's GO library.

Janice Kim Vol 5 and Shape

Janice Kim's "Learn to Play Go" Volume 5

I zipped through this book and found it light but clear.

One highlight: This book does a nice job of talking about a tough GO term - "shape". I have struggled with understanding what shape is in GO. I have learned a few things about it.
First is efficiency. You want to get the biggest bang for the buck when placing your stones. If you play extra stones in an area that doesn't need them you become inefficient and "overconcentrated".

(Here is an example of what Janice Kim talks about.) What is the most efficient way for white to capture this stone?


The most efficient way is to surround it and cut off its liberties directly. This makes the Pon Nuki shape (or "Death Star").


Look at the shape below - it used an extra stone to capture the black stone, so this shape is not as good at the pon nuki above. White should have played that 5th stone somewhere else to be efficient.


Next, shape as a concept has to deal with the proverb "My opponents best move is my best move." Shape isn't something that deals with one player's stones while ignoring the other player's stones. I really didn't get this at first.

Look at this shape. A play at 'A' by either player will create the pon nuki shape. White may really want to play at A to make a Tiger's Mouth. Black may want to stop the formation of that white Tiger's Mouth. So, playing at A is "good shape" for either player.


Other good shapes are listed on Sensei's library. (Here are some.) I still don't feel 100% comfortable that I understand shape on the GO board, but I am starting to grasp the basics.