In the March issue of Monthly Go World, Kono Rin 9-dan provides commentary on games of several young players for the Japanese National Go Team. He also gives a brief description of their playstyle and provides a neat RPG-like Character/Stat Sheet for them. For instance, Kono Rin states that Sakai Yuki 3 Dan likes tsumego, fighting, and he is good at reading. He rates him:
Opening (序盤) - 5
Middle Game (中盤) - 7
Endgame 終盤 - 4
Reading (読み) - 8
Big Picture View (大局観) - 5
Positional Judgment (形勢判断) - 3
Comeback Potential (逆転力) - 6
Calmness/Composure (冷静さ) - 3
After a bit of self-reflection decided to do the same for myself. I came up with a scale of total points based on the rankings of the 4 players and then I allocated my own stats as a 6 Kyu (OGS). I do well enough in the opening and I have decent whole board thinking, but I make mistakes in tactics and reading throughout the middle and end game. I have basically no ability to turn the game around and while I may play calmly at first, I lose composure easily.
This is such an awesome idea. I don’t think I could do a very good self-rating though. I’m curious whether some of these can be objectively quantified…
Seems like “comeback potential” is one that one could process some AI reviews and get a good idea for. Opening/Middle Game/Endgame too if you had a good heuristic for what constituted each of those…
Why is sjs opening not 10? I think all top 10 professionals have a 10 opening, otherwise they wouldn’t have been there. Especially a monster with this winrate.
That’s an option but the OP had a professional with 5 in opening. Shin can have 10, though I don’t think his winrate is an argument for it - opening isn’t that impactful.
For example, I would stay consistent with Kono Rin’s rating and give myself around a 4 in opening. I lose like .1 point per move in opening. If there are bigger losses then it is a matter of fighting and positional judgement.
Here’s one for me, I think I am balanced but maybe similar to Sakai Yuk’s build.
I think I’m not the one to remind you about the enormous skill gap between “a professional” (most of them) and “the #1 professional”. This applies to all eras, not just the current one, too.
Do you think that being top 5 in the world you can still slack on something like the opening? If it was true then I don’t think the top 100 of active professionals would’ve been spending dozens of hours memorising openings from AI, something completely novel to the go scene. And not just “the openings” but all of their off branches and variations too.
And if you still come out on top against this then you simply can’t call your opening skills “mediocre” by any measure. It isn’t game deciding as you said, but we’re talking about the level where people would read for 2.5 hours (given the opportunity) before responding to a forcing move in order to optimise their play. When the mindset of optimisation is so developed I don’t think there’s a lee way for the opening to be bad. You’d have to specifically go “oh we’re still in the opening, well then I don’t care” and then switch to “how do I get a micro advantage from him playing keima instead of push” at an arbitrary time. I doubt this happens.
I guess not bad, but rather “not the best”. I think I would summarise my point as, you can’t win the opening, but you can lose in the opening, and if you don’t lose in the opening against 85% of your opponents at the top pro level, then you’re opening is close to being the best.
It says “The AI, and opponent feedback, often find my openings respectable. However, I stumble in the mid-game. I can recover out of dogged determination, but my reading sucks. I definitely get too emotionally engaged.”
The estimated total is just an assumption of how many points a player of a rank might having, assuming that higher rank players are stronger. This seemed to be the case in the 4 examples though a 2 Dan had more than a 3 Dan. So it’s not clean as I mentioned, use points you think you need. I’ll have to wait for April to see the next 4 JNGT players.
By the way, Ueno’s little sister was one of the 4 examples and she had very high calmness rating but apparently better than her sisters would be. I’m assuming this is something like non-fighting preference (calmness) but also steadiness (composure). So it’s not like it directly improves performance in all games.
Also, my understanding is that this team is for young players and that it includes non-professionals (of professional strength) and many of them will become pro. At least some of the team is pro.
I for my level (which I don’t know what it is, honestly) feel terrible at all those skills, maybe except comeback potential (but I tend resign early if I feel I’m losing) and big picture (but often I focus too much on a local attack). I just have good intuition and a lot of luck.
Similar feeling here. I think I’m maybe a bit better at endgame than my average opponent, maybe break even on reading and am worse at everything else. Yes, I know that’s nonsense, because if it was true, I would be weaker than other players of the same rank. But that’s how it feels anyway.
