Feel free to review my games. I would love to talk to someone in depth about improving my play as it’s getting too frustrating to even continue. Every game I play I feel like I get cornered by aggressive opponents. I’ve tried to learn shape and play puzzles but I feel like those skills don’t translate into actual play. How do I defend a 13x13 when my opponent plays the straight middle of the board, I play safe in the corner and still get destroyed?
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In this game you’re playing too safe:
For example, Move 16 was basically a pass - it did not achieve anything for you.
At that time, the bottom middle and the lower left corner were both “open” for either player to make territory with.
If you played F3 at that time, you would have increased your score by a solid 6 points and pressured your opponent to reply.
In contrast, your H10 secured maybe one point, and left your opponent free to play anywhere else, including taking those 6 points on the bottom for themself (which they actually failed to do).
Then G4. What was the goal of this move? Did it win any points for you, securing any territory?
Rather than cut and hope for the best, you might have considered playing C5 and taking the right hand side…
So now that you know “shape and can do life and death”, you need to focus on “how does each move that you play increase your score”? What move can you play instead that will increase your score even more?
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I’ve been told I play aggressively before, but I don’t know what intuits that move since I feel like if I try and push for more I get punished. To answer your question, my brain goes into survival mode because I know I don’t counterplay well, so I try and secure the positions I do have. If you look at other games where I try and encroach upon new territory you’ll often find that the territory I feel is “safe” quickly gets turned over, even if it’s a pretty solid looking position
for example: ensoluxion vs. Artur Sankin
I felt like I had an advantage in the early parts of this game but it quickly went south.
You didn’t have an advantage in the early parts. The game was just even in the beginning, as non-handicap games usually are in the early stages.
In the early game you played some overly passive moves, like move 13 (lost 8 points), move 19 (lost 7 points), move 21 (lost 8 points), move 39 (lost 10 points). From move 40 the game looks difficult for black. Where’s black’s territory?
You seem overly concerned with solidly connecting your stones, while not caring much about securing territory. Like on move 39. Why didn’t you block at B10 to create some territory on the left side? Allowing white B10 basically kills all territorial prospects for black on the left side.
Playing too cautiously will allow your opponent to develop more quickly. If you then try to make up for that later on, it may well be too late to catch up.
Playing go well is walking a fine line between safety/defence and speed/offence. It’s quite normal that beginners stray too far from that fine line in either direction. In this game I’d say you strayed too much towards safety.
Like, when you’re running a marathon, you can’t afford to check every step if your shoe strings are still properly tied. If you do that anyway, you won’t trip on your shoe strings, but you probably won’t win the race.
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It strikes me that “passive vs aggressive” may not be the key to unlock the next step for you.
Rather - having a plan for each move. A reason. Otherwise you could easily play agressive moves that don’t really help either 
I’d focus on the Move 16 in the game I mentioned.
It’s not about aggression or defence or counterplay or anything sophisticated like that.
Especially in the first half of the game, it’s about claiming territory.
It would be helpful to find a way to illuminate that F3 at move 16 is waaay better than H10.
If you can’t see this, then it’d be good to ask questions about it, I think.
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Both of these games were rather fast time control. Such games test whether you have a good intuition and fundamentals. But at 25k-30k, you likely need to build up these skills first. I recommend to play slower games, and take a bit of time to consider
- are there any immediate threats or important fights that you want to react to? (similarily, do you need to react to the last move, or can you ignore it?)
- which parts of the board have many stones / which have not so many? (The second is often where you can still grab big points)
… and in close-combat, try to count liberties and read-ahead as much as possible (e.g. around move 81 in this game Trọng vs. ensoluxion)
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Yeah I’ve never found it to be a useful distinction, and it’s more like a proxy for “a move I like” vs “a move I don’t like”, and a move a person doesn’t like or doesn’t know how to answer will often be labelled aggressive, like an probing move or attachment
^^
It gives you something to go over as well after the game, did my reason make sense or work out. Did I need to protect there, is what I was worried about a real threat etc
I assume you did the OGS tutorial under the Learn tab. In addition to that, mark5000’s puzzles on the first page of the Puzzles tab (Exercises for Beginners, Stone Development for Beginners) are essential.
Aside from all that, the most important next step for me, when I relearned go in 2016, after being away from it for 40 years, was killable eye shapes. See this web page: Killable eye shapes at Sensei's Library. These don’t take very long to learn, and they make a tremendous difference in understanding the space on the board.
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I think there’s something more fundamental going on here. Before you start thinking about safe/passive/aggressive/territory/strategy, you have to start noticing things. No amount of strategizing will help you if you’re not seeing the board clearly to begin with.
Examples from Trọng vs. ensoluxion
- Move 21: Your stone is in atari.
- Move 25: You could have put two black stones in atari.
- Move 33: You can capture the black stone at M5. This is less obvious, but you’ve played enough
games that you should have seen this sort of thing before: stones on the second line are easy to capture. - Move 41: You can push into black’s territory by playing E9. Were you afraid that black would play G9? If black does that, you can capture the black stone.
- Move 52: You just put down a stone where it can be captured right away.
- Move 81: If you play B12 next, you put five black stones into atari and they can’t escape.
- Move 120: good, this time you noticed!
Examples from ensoluxion vs. Artur Sankin this one is a little more complicated
- Move 47: This stone can be captured. It’s actually a good move if you can see the correct followup. But it looks like you just didn’t notice the atari…
- Move 49: Instead, you should play M3. White can capture your stone at M5, but you get to capture seven white stones around L3 in exchange.
- Move 51: With the M5 stone surrounded, this is going nowhere.
- Move 65: Again, this technique can sometimes work, but it looks like you didn’t notice white’s atari on the next move.
- Move 69: You didn’t notice the four black stones are surrounded?
How to improve this sort of thing? Most people seem to pick it up just from playing a few dozen games and reflecting on what happens during those games. Playing online means that it’s easy to review afterwards: just scroll through the moves and see what you notice on a second look. Look out for places where your stones got captured: go back a couple of moves, could this have been predicted and avoided? Also see if you can spot any missed opportunities to capture the opponent’s stones.
Nowadays you also have access to AI review. Use with caution! If the AI is showing you how you could have captured something, or saved your own stones from capture, you can learn from these examples. If the AI is showing something more complicated, just ignore it for now and move on.
Solving lots of problems can help too. Nowadays people seem to prefer apps to books; I’m not up to date with the good apps, but there’s other threads here where people have recommended some. You’re looking for problems that you can mostly solve in half a minute or less; if you’re staring at a single problem for minutes, it’s above your level and you should fine something easier.
Also take a look at the patterns at Basic Instinct at Sensei's Library.
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