361points.com/blog

Feedback on users’ feedback

There are some interesting points and questions users have brought via the anonymous feedback on the website. I am going to address here 2 of them.

Of course it’s good to get advice from someone who has insei experience. I’m not sure fast games make people read faster, though. I think the temptation is to read *less*. Tsumego training can help read faster, though.

This is about my article titled “To improve at Go, play a lot of fast games”. Just as a reminder, this is part of my guidelines for studying Go. It seems to be such a controversial issue, a lot of people disagree – maybe I should make clear once again that I am not advocating playing only fast games, but I (strongly) believe that playing also fast games is one of the necessary steps to improve. As I explained in the article, “fast” is a relative notion, bottom-line is to gradually shrink one’s comfortable time limits to be able to play faster. Reading fast is of course important, but it’s also very important to know what to read – and that knowledge comes with intuition, not with reading all possible variations. Playing fast games develops intuition. When I first went to Japan in 1990, for the World Amateur Go Championship, as he was watching one of my non-official games Otake Hideo 9 dan told me: “Too slow, Romania, too slow!”

I agree that blindly repeating joseki is bad, but White’s living technique in Dia. 8 is one I learned recently from studying a different joseki! Knowledge still helps you strong players to find the right way, even if it is non-standard.

This comment is about my “Sometimes It’s Better Not to Know Joseki” article. I definitely agree that knowledge is power – the more we know, the more choices we have, normally, but what I described in this article is an instance of me only thinking in joseki terms in a situation when it was completely wrong to do so. I read in the AGS newsletter a while ago a comment of Janice Kim’s on joseki. I don’t remember the exact words, but it was something like “what if josekis didn’t exist”, so basically we just regard them as any other local fights. I liked that idea a lot! I want to thank everybody who left feedback, from encouraging words, to corrections on grammar, to suggestions on what to focus on – I am reading all of them and hopefully put them to good use!

Women’s Meijin – game 3

I added a few thoughts of mine on the 3rd and last game of Women’s Meijin in the tournament page. Just briefly, it is very interesting to study how Black is attacking a group in a sequence of 50 moves or so. It was not clear to me that the result of the attack favored Black in the end – as I was looking at the variations on Cyberoro there were a lot of them showing what looked to me as more profitable variations for Black – but Black keeping the initiative for so long surely payed off on the psychological side, with Aoki overlooking what must be a pretty simple tesuji for a professional.

Site design update

I updated the site design a bit recently, tried to make it more colorful. Since I am not a web designer, I realize it’s very far from looking even remotely pleasant – please let me know if you have any suggestion.