I recently played a game in which I got crushed. In how many ways did I set myself up for falilure?
Here is the game:
Here
You play in a place with only one liberty
So you get captured
Now the position is worse as before. You just helped your opponent
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Welcome to OGS! If you are new I’d mostly encourage you to play more games! You will learn a lot just by playing. But I can make a few specific suggestions.
1. Have a plan to control half of the board
In a 9x9 game as White you need one or two groups that together control a little less than half of the board to win. (Three groups almost always loses; Black usually needs to stick to one group and has to control a little more than half.)
You stayed in the upper-right until move 22 - that’s not going to work.
For example, on your second move you could have played any of these moves instead of the one you chose to stake out a clear claim to the upper half:
2. Respond to attachment / play where the other player wants to play
This shape that you made is an immediate threat and deserves a response; Black could have tried one of these marked moves for example:
Since Black didn’t respond right away, you should have taken advantage of that by playing on one of those spots instead - that’s a general principle!
3. Avoid the first line until the end
This move stuck out for me:
First line stones are weak since they start off missing one liberty. So don’t play them until there’s almost nothing else to do. (Like invading some other quarter of the board!)
And this one was especially weak, having only two liberties. It was doomed from the beginning.
4. Reading
This is harder and maybe just comes with practice. But I see that a lot of your stones died in ways that you should be able to work out by thinking “What if Black attacks me there next?” Check every group with only 1 or 2 liberties. Follow the train of thought a few steps ahead and if you see a sure way for Black to kill you, assume they will take advantage of it and play somewhere else.
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Yeah, I noticed that too. I did make hasty and rushed moves due to the timer. Is there any way I can learn to either think faster or mind the timer less?
Ok, thank you for the tips!
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I don’t want to encourage you to play too slow. It’s a common problem with beginners who want to understand everything when they can’t. But you can have a look on very basic things, a kind of check up
Check first if you feel your move is the biggest on the board (based on your intuition)
Check the liberties. Who may eat who (not the goal but the cement of the game)
Check what is separated and what is connected
Then make a decision
Play relax, don’t bother too much on time (but don’t fall asleep lol)
Enjoy the game!
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A good way to improve speed of play is to do tsumego (go problems), which will train your eye to recognize common shapes (which means you will already know what to do when you see them, without having to read them out each time).
A good place to start is with “Cho Chikun’s Encyclopedia of Life and Death: Elementary” (Play Go at online-go.com! | OGS).
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Thank you for the tips! I really apprieciate you telling me all of this! (I know I used "thank you for the tips twice, but I don’t know how else to put it.)
I tried out a few of these puzzles, but the soulutions seem random. I had to do a guess and check method to solve most of them. They aren’t very intuitive. This is probably because of my inexperience, but will you please tell me what is going on?
It can take a long time to start making sense of these life-or-death puzzles - both the “to kill” and “to live” variations
The thing is - when a group is near the edge of the board and surrounded - one has to play very carefully in order to make 2 eyes and stay alive. The crucial points you will need are called “vital points,” and tsumego are all about finding them and exploiting them.
If you’re playing the “to kill” variation - the trick is to play your moves in such a way that your opponent can no longer benefit from those vital points - either by playing on them yourself, or playing in such a way that the eye-space your opponent will need will be filled in by the stones they use to capture you
If you’re playing the “to live” variation - then you have to find those vital points and make sure you play forcing moves so that you can access them before your opponent blocks them
Either way, it can seem very counter-intuitive because you often have to make a series of seemingly-unrelated forcing moves in order to paint your opponent into a no-escape corner (“to kill”) or end a series of forcing moves with your stones on the vital points (“to live”)
Working the HINT button on each individual puzzle can help, but the most important thing is learning how to see those vital points, and understand how a living group needs at least 2 independent eyes to make life. Good luck
If your best efforts to understand more than one or two problems in a set get you nowhere, you should look for an easier set. It is good to mix a lot of problems you find reasonably easy after a moment’s thought with one or two that challenge you to read close to the limits of your ability.
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