Good form on that Ad Hominem, but I think the landing was a little off. 8/10

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

Ah, ok, no problem, I was primarily responding to "...If you recognize good shape, you might not need to read..." - Everything else I agree with completely

The level of your reading is simply the factor that defines probably around 90% of your playing strength. I made the mistake of studying high level strategy, fuseki, etc. from books at around 5k and I think it was a waste of time. The almost the only books needed until maybe kgs 3d are problem books. It really doesn't matter what you do strategically if your opponent has stronger reading skills than you. Your frameworks will be paper and it will be difficult for you to survive the whole game without making a blunder.

The way I see it is it seems some people in this thread are just trying to justify to themselves that they don't need practice reading for it is hard work. Sure, it's nice and relaxed to read a strategy book compared to wrestling with tsumego, but it's also mostly useless.

That's kind of my point. As I said, perhaps I wasn't clear:


What I meant by this was not that you can't memorise sequences or have good pattern recognition skills. What I meant was that you must then follow this up with reading (is this joseki good in this situation, can this knight's move be profitably cut, do I want to take thickness or territory?), otherwise you are simply guessing, and have no guarantee that your strategy will come into action. Pattern recognition itself doesn't help you put your strategy into action, precisely because it's kind of vague - it helps you decide which of the few hundred empty points on the board to read out. Pattern recognition itself is borne of and strengthened by your reading skills!

Having a strategy in mind is no good if you then follow it up with the wrong shape or joseki - that's well known. As far as I'm concerned, if someone plonks a 3-3 behind my 4-4 stone, I don't choose a joseki at random; I think "do I want a wall? If so, in which direction? Or do I want to double hane and try to take the corner back? If I do that, and my opponent just cuts and connects, do I have the ladder? Do I want to finish in gote, or can I give up some points for sente? Is there a pincer stone that might make that cut annoying?". If you don't do this, you are not reliably putting your strategy into action. If you do this, in an attempt to put your strategy into action, you are probably visualising what they look like on the board, which is a start (and I would say that was a kind of reading - you're reading out a local pattern in a global situation). But the only way to then ensure your strategy will succeed is to check whether your opponent has any devious tricks up their sleeve to thwart your plan, or work out what happens if they play out of joseki, and this is definitely reading.

I think Phelan's point is that choosing from a set of memorized invasion sequences for the hoshi, isn't exactly reading novel situations out, and is another method of executing a strategy, which by the way is very popular amongst players of all levels. Of course there are minor details like order of play, none the less in that framework reading is secondary.

An amateur was showing a game of his to Rin Kaiho and said as an excuse for a mistaken line of play, "Well, I only got the order of play wrong."

Rin replied, "Go is the order of play."

(Anecdote courtesy Bill Spight)

Ok, this seems more like what I had in mind, yes.

I still don't like to call that kind of visualization reading, since it's very different from looking at the situation move by move, and branch by branch, throughout a move tree.
I'm much more focused on the visual aspect of Go instead of the "reading the move tree" aspect, and the fact that I can play Go like this, when I couldn't really apply it in Chess is one of the reasons that made me switch.
So forgive me if I sound a bit defensive.

I do agree with you that reading is necessary to guarantee the moves work, and that visualization only helps shortcut the reading by making sure you focus on the more interesting moves first.
I'm pretty sure that one of the reasons I haven't been advancing lately is that I have little patience for doing tsumego at the moment.

_________________
a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

... and reading is just trying to anticipate your opponents responses?

While you have the gist of what I said right, I'd never say that reading is secondary. Reading is Go. I might not like it, and you might not like it, and I might prefer other tools like visualization and shape, but without reading, we'll never play as well as we could.

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

You and me both. And everyone else, ever.

Speak for yourself, I do my problems, but what you said about memorizing Joseki and pattern matching is still true. I however, don't see the point in doing problems, many of which don't make sense out of context of a decent strategy or shape, which I stated as such in the start of the thread.

If you don't feel like doing them because you don't see the point, then don't do them. No one is holding a gun to your head. But if you feel like you're stuck at a level, and everyone tells you 'this is the way to get stronger' and you don't do it, don't blame them either if you don't improve.

Effective Tactics in Go require reading - either on the spot or memorization ahead of time. A Tactic designed ahead of time is still not a Strategy.

Choosing whether or not to apply one tactic or another may cross the line in Strategy, though. Certainly if you want to win at Go you need to make informed decisions about what Tactics to apply, so there's always some Strategy at play. How deep one's Strategy can grow and have any relevant impact on the game, however, is usually a matter of the reading ability of one or both players.

Strategies that your opponent can defeat due to a disparity in Tactics fail, and this is almost entirely a function of reading.

Some Strategies require more complicated Tactics to execute successfully than others.

Plenty of well-executed Tactics can lose you the game due to poor Strategy in choosing where and when to apply them. (Come out ahead locally at the expense of falling behind globally)

- Marty Lund

why can't kyu players change a lightblub?

because they can't see the ladder.

Funny, but untrue. I've read reports, in this forum, of people that like to do problems, even more than playing Go. I think I remember some that didn't even play Go at all and just liked the problems.

I know, right?

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

You do problems even though you don't see the point? Why bother?

I think I know what you mean though about problems lacking a context. You might be asked to cut black for example, but so what? Cutting isn't to be done for it's own sake, but rather in order to carry out a plan. This plan (maybe a better word here than "strategy") doesn't exist in the problem, which might make it's value seem negligible.

In a game, one's plan might involve cutting off part of an opponent's group or getting thick in sente or escaping with a weak group or whatever. Having previously done some tesuji problems dealing with these sorts of situations could prove helpful in a number of ways. It might save time if you happen to remember a particular tesuji, it might give you a starting place to start reading if your plan is feasible, it might make you aware of a trick your opponent may have up his sleeve.

While you may be right that it is rare in a game to encounter a specific problem that you've done, I think it's still valuable to have some practice with similar situations. The game is the context.

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Patience, grasshopper.

I just think that the solutions to some problems aren't consistent with certain strategies. For example two strategies one emphasizing lightness and flexibility and another thickness and influence will have different tesuji and it isn't a good idea to mix the two, they are incompatible, hence it isn't a good idea to study both tesuji.

Can you give any example of that? It strikes me as probably false, though it would be cool if there was an example.

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Occupy Babel!

I'm curious - do you plan to play both against opponents who use strategies that emphasize lightness and flexibility and against opponents who emphasize thickness and influence, who might use tesuji that you haven't studied against you?

How do you prevent opponents who have studied tesuji that you haven't from catching you unaware and using them against you to great effect? Do you study them at least enough to recognize the situations where they might be useful and try to avoid or defend against them? And if you try to avoid and defend against them, without detailed study on precisely when one of these tesuji can be effective, how do you avoid wasting moves defending when you don't actually need to?

Or do you think that you can control the game to such a degree that the opponent's strategy mostly doesn't matter, so that the tesuji that the opponent has studied and that you haven't studied aren't relevant? If so, how do you stop your opponent from doing the same to you, and making the tesuji he's studied relevant and your tesujis irrelevant?

Or maybe you do something else besides either of these?