Do you ever get bored during games? I'm playing one right now, and it's boring me to death, and I'll probably lose because of this. What typically happens in these boring games is that my opponent starts out really fast, playing lots of quick moves, and then when he gets into an obviously disadvantageous situation, he starts taking forever. There are quite a few variations from here on - and although I've never started posting in the middle of one before, what typically happens is that I start making slack moves or I blunder or I just piddle away enough points to lose. For cryin' out loud, I'm already done this post and the game STILL isn't over.

Edit: This game keeps getting worse and worse. Now the hopeless invasion. I mean, I have huge eyespace, and he's thinking and thinking and thinking. I feel like such a jerk. I'm doing all I can not to trash talk. Then I try quick coup but it goes awry because among so many useless moves was one that cuts off a large group of mine and I lose it. I pull myself together, knowing how miserable I feel when losing these sort of games and he drags into 1000 byo-yomis and I end up winning by 10 points.

I guess that this sort of thing happens fairly often, though not quite so extreme. When a game starts to feel uninteresting, I just easily lose first interest, followed by concentration, and lastly the game. I guess part of it is underestimating some opponents, but it's not just that. It's a style of play that lulls me into not caring until it's too late. Does this happen to anyone else?

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Patience, grasshopper.

daal, I know a pro can get bored in a game. Example: a pro is playing a "teaching" game with
another high-dan (but not pro) friend. Say this friend is near pro level, so 2 stones is already
too much, maybe even 0.5 komi is too much. So the pro plays full strength -- they both do --
as a sort of training for the amateur friend, for some up-coming tourney, say.
And suppose this friend does not start any fights; rather, all the
moves are honte, taking territory, etc. The pro could find it "boring" in the sense that
there is no crazy, messy fight! But not because of the opponent's thinking time.

For me, it depends mostly on my own mentality before I start the game. And also to some extent,
the opponent. If there's a huge difference in level, for example, my opponent is a very
beginner, that could happen if he's taking too long; I may even suggest he spends less time
on each move, if I sense he could be wasting both our time.

However, if I sense that my opponent is also very serious about the game,
and our levels are about the same. Then, even when his situation appears not good --
maybe especially when his situation appears not good, that's when I should remind
myself to be extra careful, lest I fall asleep and blunder.

[ Analogy time: if you were in a physical duel, fight to the death, and your opponent
is hurting but not quite down, that's no time for you to get "bored" --
the next instant, you may be dead. I try to play my serious games with this mentality,
but I also fail at it a lot. ]

Thought about chosing shorter time controls to avoid this?

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Stay out of my territory! (W. White, aka Heisenberg)

I don't get bored in such games - though even when I'm being extra careful, I still occasionaly blunder - but not because I was bored. I'm also not talking about games with beginners. I usually pay attention there because I want to be able to make some constructive criticism afterwards. It's more like when I wanted to play a serious game, and my opponent wants to play blitz, but then when he has made some serious mistakes, suddenly discovers that he has a bunch of time on his clock. I realize that such an opponent is like a wounded animal and I ought to be careful, but my interest in playing seriously has already evaporated.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Yes, I do play some games with shorter time controls, but I really can't play anywhere close to my best under time pressure, so it's kind of a shame when such a game starts out with thoughtful and interesting play and then the quality deteriorates when we hit byo-yomi too early.

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Patience, grasshopper.

I play too fast and I have a friend who plays too slow. He has a bad habit of letting something get in trouble, making it heavy and then trying to save it when I'll just get profit from attacking it. The type of thing where he should just let it go at the beginning and play somewhere else. So our games tend to end up with him trying to save some big mass of game-deciding stones. He is an incredibly tenacious player and refuses to let things die. But he's also clever and finds really innovative ways to pull his stones out of trouble.

So we will end up in games where I will be playing fast, he'll take five minutes on a move. I'll get incredibly bored and when it's my turn I'll make a quick move. He'll take ten minutes on his next move. Then I'll be ready to do just about anything to get out of the game. Sometimes I'll mess something up just because I'm so bored of the game at that point. Even when I play it perfectly and he dies, it's a miserably painful experience because the game takes three times longer than a game with anyone else would.


It's also frustrating because when he does manage to save a group and win he's convinced that he's played really well. I've tried to explain that if he didn't get in trouble in the first place his game would be a lot better, but he doesn't seem to grasp the concept. The idea of giving up stones is something he can't get his head around.

I have played him in a long time and probably won't in the foreseeable future.

I think it's pretty hypocritical to play games with super-long controls because you need the full time to play "at your best", and then find it boring when your opponent... actually uses the full time.

There is also a weird tendency among go players to think that if A plays a careful fuseki and B plays quickly because he's bored and can't focus, then the mistakes B makes are his own fault for being lazy, but if A plays a sloppy unfocused endgame while B is carefully calculating, A's mistakes are B's fault for being a jerk.

(Perhaps connected to the way we lavish attention on 3-pt mistakes in the opening, but mostly decline to point out their endgame mistakes because "it wouldn't have affected the outcome anyway.)

I'm not talking about super long time settings - just a 30 min + 5x30sec regular game. The problem is not that my opponent is using his time, it's that his style is to play care-free moves until he's up to his knees in quicksand and then the game gets interesting for him. Obviously it's bad to get bored in the middle of a game, but it takes two to tango. I mean, I play for fun, and it's most fun when my opponent is trying as hard as I am. When this gets off balance for some reason or other, the boredom potential rises. I don't have any problem with an opponent thinking for a long time, as long as it's a sensible position to spend time on. What grates me though is when the moment when it would have made sense to do so has long passed. I have admiration for players who can extricate themselves from difficult situations, but there are also players who will first play carelessly, and then start spending long periods of time playing plodding moves so that when the thinking and/or flailing about starts, I've lost all interest in the game. I don't think it's hypocritical to get bored with a game that I don't enjoy.



I'm not saying that he's a jerk, but in such games, I neither play my best, nor do I have a good time. I'm happy when the amount of thought both players are putting into their moves is balanced throughout the game, be it fast or slow. In the type of game you describe, the thought balance swings from one end of the game to the other. I admit, it's my own fault for losing my concentration in such games, but they are not the games that I like to play.

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Patience, grasshopper.

It's interesting, I find those games to be very exciting. In a lot of ways it's easier to be behind: you just keep trying moves until you're dead. When you're ahead you've got to parry everything your opponent comes up with. Is there a hidden meaning behind each move? What's the exact amount of pressure I need to apply? Where can I can concede points to simplify and just get the victory? I find closing a won game against a persistent opponent to be one of the best tests of my reading ability. Rather than getting bored I try to push myself harder, knowing that I can no longer afford any missteps. And if I lose I'm not disappointed by losing a 'won game', but usually pleased at how close I was able to come to closing out a giant victory.

It still goes back to our mentality (and not our opponent's behavior, to me).
What's this "fun" thing.

Some people seem to feel that a game is boring unless there are big fights going on. It's possible to play a game in which there are no complicated fights, and some pros play this way. If you know what you are doing you can play so that the only way that your opponent can have a "crazy" fight is to play overplays which you punish and the game is over. Actually, there are fights all the time which some players wouldn't call fights, such as territorial positional maneuvers, trading territory for influence, exchanges of various sorts. These games are not boring, they are like walking on a tightrope, the slightest misstep and your opponent gets a lead.

I only get bored if the result of the game is already very very clear and my opponent starts to make extremely pointless moves over and over again. It has happened about half a dozen times in almost five years, only in turn based games. In that case I passed a few times while he was continuing to play pointless moves, and then since it was not a tournament or team game, I just resigned. I think this is a valid option, as we are playing to have fun, and not to get annoyed or bored.

Perhaps I misunderstood, daal - it seems you were already bored when you posted and then the game was still going on 45 minutes later, so I made an incorrect assumption about what time limits you were using. But I'm going to stick to my guns to this extent; whatever time he didn't use in the beginning, he has a perfect right to bank up and then use to extricate himself from his errors later on.

As a competitor I need to make a strictly accurate count to the best of my ability, but as a good sport I try to assume that in an evenly handicapped game, my opponent genuinely thinks he has a chance, and his judgment is worth as much as mine. Having been on the opposite side - opponents who can't lose without informing you that they only lost because they were so far ahead (!?) - I know how unpleasant it looks when someone not only wants to insist he won a moral victory despite losing, but moreover that his counting was much better than the victor's, which is how he knew the latter should have resigned.

It is a little more complex in high handicap games, where to some extent W is making B a gift of his time, but even there, if you are using the right handicap W should have the experience of playing on desperately in the endgame hoping for a blunder, and should indulge B on those occasions when B just can't recognize a lost game.

Just to be clear, while I understand what you are saying, this isn't at all what I was talking about. l don't need a fight to find the game interesting. I need an opponent who isn't just messing around. I admit, that I could be accused of the same in the part of the game where I have lost interest and concentration, but I didn't start the game that way, and I usually don't end it that way either. Am I correct in my assumption that you rarely play online? Perhaps you have never experienced the sort of game that I am trying to describe.

On the other hand I do tend to leave exploitable weaknesses behind, so probably my opponents are justified in hoping to turn such games around, but I do know uninspired dull play when I see it. It's not like I haven't been guilty of it myself.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Getting bored does make me angry at my opponent - but I do know that it's my problem, not theirs.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Yep, that's me. I can play cash games, but I far prefer corpse games.

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

Not playing your games I obviously can't know, so I trust your interpretation, but your description sounds like playing somebody with good fighting skills. They're thinking for a long time, then playing uninspired moves, but the moves happen to combine aji to kill your groups. I expect bad moves from opponents when they play instantly, not when they carefully think them over.

There's a proverb that if a player your rank plays a terrible opening, that has to mean they've got a great middle or end game. Perhaps some of it is assuming a lackluster, quickly played opening means they're weak, instead of assuming that means they're unbalanced and will be much stronger for the remainder of the game?

I have a different problem. I put up games with 20:00 + 5 x 1:00, and often wind up in byo-yomi. Yet there are too many times where my opponents accept that time control, play blitz, and then complain about me using my time! Unrelated but irritating in another way is that too often, my opponents play extremely rapidly and still beat me badly.

Generally, the games where my opponent is using all of his time as well wind up being the most interesting games.

I don't know this one. What's the proverb?

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

Maybe not a proverb, but more like an urban legend.