Why should we believe one word of what you write about go,
are you any good anyway?
Now, that's an easy question, two easy questions
actually but all right. I sincerely think that trying to
find flaws in what I write will help you much more than
to just take it for granted. And, no, I'm not any good
anyway. I didn't know much about the game before coming
to Japan. Playing without thinking too much was my
specialty, fast games and stuff like that. And, I didn't
learn much while being an insei.
But wait, there is one thing which I picked up in Japan
and made my coming here on an Aeroflot airplane with
very cute flight attendants, most of whom were male and
had thick grizzly forearms not to speak of bad breath
and ditto temper, worthwhile.
Being as unreasonable cocksure as any spoiled youngster
I thought I knew it all and had seen it all and that
becoming a professional go player would only be a matter
of time. Well, it took me long enough but I finally got
it that I was totally wrong. While playing in Europe I
often answered go questions from weaker players with
confidence and a complete believe in my own abilities.
After being crushed off the board for three years in a
row I realized (finally, sigh, am I thick-headed or am
I thick-headed) that my former confidence was not based
on concrete knowledge and talent but just my positive
win/lose score (until I started playing with pros, that
is).
What I learned was that for every answer I had ever
given to queries of other players I had at best given
an incomplete answer, conveniently leaving out all the
"buts" because those would lead to hard to explain and
tricky variations, which I felt were there but didn't
understand myself.
At worst my answers were just plain wrong, for example
showing a variation which heavily depended on poor
counter play by the opponent. I learned that giving a
complete answer to even the easiest one of questions
requires a very profound understanding of the game.
There are only very few players among the European top
who have such highly developed skills. All the others
are just masters at another necessary ingredient for
becoming a dan player; a rock-steady confidence in one's
own abilities, more often than not based on hot air and
an abundance of chest hair. One former European Fujitsu
cup representative seems to have built his entire go-career,
if not his complete life, on this (confidence, not chest
hair, that is). Every now and then he beats a pro on
even. I guess making confidence your field of expertise
is well worth considering.
How do I get stronger without really trying all that hard?
Ah, that's an honest question which I would have
answered honestly even if I were not under oath. You
cannot get much stronger without putting a lot of effort
into it. It is, of course, possible to not feel as if
you're trying very hard but that's not the same thing as
doing nothing, right?
Getting stronger at go is as riding your bicycle up a
slope which gets steeper the farther you get. In other
words, you need to go for it in the beginning if you
want to get anywhere later on. If you don't gather
momentum in your first year or two I think it will
become harder and harder to improve as time goes by.
To put it in bicycle-slope terms: without momentum you
cannot really expect to get a lot of back wind on your
way up.
Many, if not all, players who made it all the way to the
amateur 5-6 dan level had at one moment or another a
"growing spurt". This phenomenon is extremely enjoyable
for the person who's experiencing one. It is as if your
grade, which was not changing all that much suddenly,
does not mean anything anymore. For example during such
a grow spurt you still cannot win against your old
buddy "A" who gives you 6 stones but player "B", who is
at least as strong as your friend "A" cannot beat you
on even anymore. A little while after that you'll be
giving friend "A" 3 stones without ever having brought
the six-stone handicap down stone by stone first. In a
month' time I've seen it happen that people got stronger
anything from 2 to 6 stones.
The very first year of your go career especially seems
to be the time to have such a rush. Not to say that you
cannot expect one if you are already playing go for
over 5 years but it will be more difficult and won't
come "naturally". This is what I mean by "effort". In
order to "ride the wave" you'll have to drown yourself
in go, play tournaments, do problems etcetera. The most
important thing is that you have to get so far as that
the last thing you think of before turning out the
lights is go and the first thing which comes to mind the
next morning is go too, not school, not your job or your
family. This and a cheeky attitude which enables you to
be completely unimpressed by the moves of supposedly
much stronger players will usually do the trick. Don't
forget your health though as the above approach easily
might make you feel dizzy and sick. Nothing long walks
on the beach or in the forest can't cure.
Doing anything with go is good but I have to warn
against using English written books (other than
game or problem collections, and, sometimes, joseki
dictionaries). As an adult you'll try to completely
digest the contents of any given book before you get
the feeling you can move on. If you're a genius, fine,
perfect, excellent remind me to ask for your autograph
the next time we meet. If your just an ordinary person
like 99% of us hairless apes than you will create
an excellent opportunity to get stuck on some ill
digested extremely important theme without realizing
it. The niceness of most books is exactly what's wrong
with them. And I feel that books which sell well are
enjoyable reads and are so well written that anybody who
reads them imagines himself at least 3 stones stronger,
which is more often than not an illusion.
A book gives you the feeling that you understand more,
the feeling that you really got stronger. I honestly
believe, however, that there is a tremendous gap between
what you actually need to know in order to improve
and the ability of written speech to transfer this
information. Whether this is because the ineptness
of language itself or the low level of understanding
of even top players I am still busy figuring out for
myself.
To take this one step further - (this paragraph is
killing me, I keep adding to it every time I try to
check it) - I vaguely got the feeling that for many
beginning and intermediate players rationalizing moves
too much and trying to put thoughts into words is not
such a hot idea. The "yes, but what if" attitude will
often bring answers which are way too complicated and
more often than not inaccurate. The question itself is,
of course, necessary. To voice it, however, will rob you
of the opportunity to figure things out on your own.
The realization that trying to get "it" without help is
more beneficial to a player than trying to voice ill
formulated questions is in my eyes a gigantic step in
the right direction.
Clear-cut capturing sequences, live and death problems,
that kind of stuff is a field that has a watertight
solution and therefor can be treated with more liberty
as not to see that here you *need* to be as rational
as you can. But once you leave the field of straight
tactics it is once again the best thing you can do to
keep an open mind, at all times.
(I know that I just keep on writing if I go trough the
above again, so I won't. Hopefully Jan will protect
me from bad grammar and spelling mistakes as well as
incomprehensiveness.) - That's the nice thing of going
over pro games: everybody knows that you cannot expect
to understand even half of their moves. So right from
the start you can give up on "I have to understand in
order to be able to move on" idea and you just stare
at the board and enjoy the patterns which sometimes
resemble animal shapes and can look very nice.
Besides, all the information you'll ever can expect to
find about the game is all in the top pro games of the
last 400 years or so. It's up to you to distillate this
vast source of wisdom and get something useful out of
it. Every professional in the world managed this in
his/her pre-pro days.
