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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

When is someone not a beginner?

Ok, ok... all new tangent.

I suppose it depends what you want. I reached 8k by blitz alone (and I've met a few people who say they got much stronger by blitz alone).

Consider the case of a complete beginner who misses ataris. While it's true that they would eventually mostly spot the ataris after looking at each intersection individually if they took a minute per move, that is somehow the wrong thing to train. The correct thing to train is that instant *ping!* feeling you get in your head when a group comes into atari. In this way, the beginner has streamlined the process of reading, and can now read one move further ahead in significantly less time than before. So you would of course tell the beginner to try to spot ataris while still playing at 5 seconds per move, and very quickly various atari shapes would fix themselves in the beginner's head simply by repeated failure. That seems to be how most learning works - you learn most efficiently when trying to do something that's only slightly harder than you know how to do.

Well, your case and mine are the same: people 6 ranks above me probably spot some shapes instantly that I struggle for a while on, and it's simply not efficient for me to spend 15 minutes trying to read 30 moves ahead along 5 branches which contain double hanes and squeezes and snapbacks in the corner. If someone pointed a gun at my head and told me to read it out, I probably could, but it's too hard to be useful. Most of my time will be wasted.

In the same way, if you can't work out whether something's a snapback or not, don't spend 10 minutes trying to work it out - spend 15 seconds on it, go with your intuition, and review the game afterwards. After 10 games like this, you'll be able to spot snapbacks easily. If you can't work out whether some cutting points are dangerous, do the same.

(By the way, "blitz" is very much a relative term for this kind of reason, and the kind of reason the Korean 5 dan mentioned - the stronger you get, the more you can usefully think about.)

I notice my post was entirely about local reading, which may well serve to back up Bill Spight's point that kyu players don't look around them very much. I think the same sorts of things can be said, though - my intuition for when a situation can be profitably ignored and tenukied has improved mostly through getting it wrong over time, rather than through spending 15 minutes each game counting the precise point swing if I tenuki. Or something.

That has hit the nail on the head for me. Thank you.

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Regards,

Peter

This is a really good thread. As a beginner myself, I just want to thank everyone for their insights. It has given me some valuable nuggets of wisdom to absorb.

The way grade inflation works, we're expecting it any day now in Japan!

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21