I don’t know if this is a me problem or a DDK problem. Or because all my Go experience is basically online interactive gobans.
When I’m trying to follow a problem solution in print (or a kifu, 1000 times more difficult), I’m not able to visualise the progression of the moves, even though they are numbered. If it’s empty, I can more or less think “black - white - black - white” in my head and somewhat follow, but when the full position is there I can’t “see” the progression from start to end.
Like the finished image can’t be deconstructed in my head.
Is it just practice and I’ll get it one day?
How do y’all go about it, did some of you get in immediately, do some of you also struggle with this?
I don’t remember if it was difficult for me when I was a DDK player, but I grew up as a go player reading physical books with diagrams showing a numbered move sequence. Those diagrams could be either a part of a game or a tsumego solution.
If the sequence is not too long, I can visualise the progression pretty well just from examining the diagram.
For example, diagrams like these are not difficult to follow for me:
Actually it depends on how much I’m familiar with the pattern, if I’ve already read out most of the sequence or not, etc. For instance this one is obvious:
Yeah I think it’s quite hard also. I think it’s possible to improve on it with practice, but whether it can improved to like the level of a kifu for normal people I don’t know.
Like I think after some practice I can imagine the stones being placed in order in (Davies L&D)
Maybe practicing with kifu could be a way to practice also.
Sometimes with Tsumego, I’m also trying to understand the variation while pretending stones aren’t there, and that can be a bit taxing. With the kifu maybe you don’t always have to visualise all the other reasonable variations.
I think this is fairly normal. I’m fine with a couple of moves, but if it’s more than a 5-move sequence, I’ll often be flipping back and forth between the problem diagram and the solution to get it clear in my head.
Similarly for theory books, I like to see two diagrams for each example, one with just the starting position and then one with the sequence of moves. When it says “in this position you should play <sequence of 15 moves>”, and all you have is a single diagram with all the moves on it, I can’t “see” the starting position unless I lay it out on a board.
Related: What do you see in your head when you read? I was surprised by the responses: generally, people see less than I expected, and I was reassured to find it’s not just me!
I actually started to be able to read old kifu more or less after replaying many of them, back then there was no easy way to find old kifu, and they were almost all in the “dense format” or usually split like every 50 moves or so. And it is not always easy and has a lot to do with how you are familiar with the fuseki, joseki, and the trend of plays of the kifu. (sometimes the most difficult ones to follow are actually kyu players’ kifu, since they might choose some bad responses and out of the zone of my focus). Also, I think training to read this type of kifu, helps with what pros have advised, having more than one goban in mind for complex tactical reading. When I read old dense kifu, I definitely have an independent goban in my mind somewhat isolated from what I see.
Historically, when they were printed in newspapers for general viewers, they would print moves listed with coordinates beside the kifu, and in chunks (like 20 30 40 50 moves at most in one chunk, with limited space to list all the moves)
You may want to spare the time to do it, or simply find it convenient when in a city bus but
Even pro writers did advise to put on the board (may be extended to the screen) what you see on a book page. They consider it to be much more efficient for understanding and progress, so we could add for readability.
This is fascinating, I was also wondering the same thing, about whether it also helped me to hold more moves in my head, as I studied kifu of Go Seigen and other pros in this manner from dense diagrams, since very early in my learning Go.
I feel like it helped a lot with the being able to hold moves in head or visualise in general, whether or not I would have been able to do so a little more easily prior to doing that, and I can also hold “dense” diagrams without problems.
By the way, where do you find the old kifu, or records of ancient games like this ? Especially for very (centuries+) old games recorded like this, I’m fascinated by them and would like to find more (I have some records of Huang Longshi, and of more ancient games with the old system of star-points already placed, shared by Go friends), are there any records online or is it only in more specific books, old newspapers, etc ?
There are databases of old newspapers, and usually, you need to have access via academic credentials. Also, there are digital collections and databases for old books and records, mostly accessible via academic institutions. (I think people can also buy the usage or database access, but they are very expensive). And sadly not all of the old records were digitized and scanned, sometimes you simply have to physically go to the libraries hosting them to have access (and they usually have regulations about what can be filmed/copied, and need to pay for the copies).
BTW, searching for them is hard even with access to database, since digitized images and OCR often contain lots of errors and missed words. Often I had to manually scan pages after pages using published dates, instead of keywords. This is especially hard for kifu in newspapers since sometimes they don’t even have a title but just images and moves when the match was ongoing halfway.
A lot of the old books or newspapers would try to cramp as many moves as possible to save money, and their practices got inherited in many books published later. But overtime, Go books and Go textbook editors start to split game records into chunks to make them easier to read for a wider range of players until digital records became popular. And we are left with various ways of printing kifu from various eras.
BTW there was a time at the height of the newspaper Go they would just print a few moves each day, and stretch out the game. And the most outrages example, printing just one move.
I am fairly certain pros’ advice for maintaining many mental gobans in mind constantly is not for everyone. It has more to do with whole board position assessments (comparing various whole board evolutions), and calculating yose (see the final shape of the yose to easily count them). Often it is also useful for ko threats count and evaluating big exchanges, like playing two moves, and the life and death of the whole group can completely change, but before you play the ko, you have to be more confident that those different scenarios would end up where.
But even I couldn’t keep them up easily throughout a game. Mostly I would be able to compare swaps and exchanges like different outcomes, and of course, visualize yose to get a better estimation.
Absolutely, because I’m not even sure what this means
Like, reading out simultaneously different gobans as they progress in their mind? Instead of “rewind and try again”, actually start a new picture for each variation?
It is sort of related to how players remember the game. Like on real board reviews after the game is finished, we usually can slice to a certain point of exchange and flip through various branches, those slices of local shapes/patterns are there “imprinting” in the short term memory. Sort of like when you hear a song and some of the melodies just stick to your ear. And in the case of Go, it is the local board positions that stick to your mental Go boards. And it doesn’t take much effort to recall them back. And during the game, this ability to “envision” future scenarios and recall them in an instant is pretty useful.
