You have a tendency to play bots that are at least 3 to 5 kyu grades stronger than you are. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that you lose the majority of your games. Also you noticed that the already mentioned quirky playing style of bots doesn’t do your style any good.
Play only humans. How about playing a teaching game with an opponent that is just a little bit stronger than you. Or putting a game up for review on the forums. There are enough players who will take the time to give you feedback.
All those tools you mentioned (books, video’s) are perhaps useful, but I advise you to concentrate on a few games per day, where you take your time to consider your next move carefully. Quality over quantity.
By the way, the advantage of a steadily dropping rank is that there comes a time that it will go up again. There must be some comfort in that.
Fighting humans may be intimidating, I’ve been there!
And it can also be less convenient, since bots are always available and they play fast, so you don’t have to wait.
But humans are able to fail in such creative way that bots can’t ever imagine!
Fighting humans lets you recognise your own bad habits in opponent’s play and exploit them.
It’s a sort of double learning: “I wouldn’t do that move and I’ll show you that you shouldn’t either”.
“Oh, you think that’s wrong? Well, prove it!”
That’s also a way to understand WHY those are mistakes: finding the way to exploit them, makes you stronger also at defending your own weaknesses.
I reckon myself as a weak SDK, so I’m not really in the position to give advice, but I can tell you that hiding ranks was a huge improvement in avoiding anxiety and accepting outcomes.
I check ranks just after the game is finished. Sometimes I win agains “stronger” players, sometimes I lose against “weaker” ones, but that’s it: our style of playing is too rich and faceted to be fully summarised as a single number.
Ranks can be useful at avoiding players just too strong or too weak, but a couple kyus more or less aren’t that big difference.
Last tips:
haylee’s question: “Is that sente?” after each and every move of your opponent
dwyrin’s sentence: “I’m not trying to kill” every time you’re attacking a group
you’ll always find in the forum people willing to comment your games and give advice
Really true but they are available at any time. I play stronger ones because they are, well, stronger and not annoyed when i resign. I do not mind loosing games when i can understand why. For the style - i do not try to copy the bot style (hope at least but see below).
What is true is that after returning to the human race after lots of bot plays i just get “wiped away” by players of any strength… so apparently anyone telling me to play more humans is correct…
I have been always carried away by my ambitions.
There’s this saying: “just keep smiling and be happy, it could be worse. i kept smiling and i was happy and it got worse”.
So, can i play a teaching game with you? Where can i find you?
Why do i have this picture of Jack Nicholson with his Axe before me?
I already have a list of items to check for each move - and constantly ignore it. Maybe increasing my discipline would bring the most effect for me at the moment.
Sounds about about right. Dwyrin likes killing groups. Oops, I’m sorry, he doesn’t kill groups, they just run into his knife. They run into his knife 10 times
