Did you know Japanese insei are instructed to memorize pro games? I learned that fact a while ago and it inspired me to give it a shot. I spent a couple months memorizing pro games, one every day and during that period I had more growth than ever before – or after. I’ve tried to share this idea to others, but the notion of memorizing games seems very daunting to most people.
There’s an easy, almost zero effort way to do it: Sabaki’s guess mode. Open up an sgf, enable guess mode, guess through the game and repeat until you can reproduce the game with minimal mistakes.
Just the act of finding the moves yourself and repeating the actions makes you remember the game. It also builds understanding and intuition as you see and feel how the shapes play out.
Step-by-step guide
Install Sabaki using your platform’s installer. If you are on Windows and unsure, pick sabaki-vx.y.z-win-x64-setup.exe.
Find an SGF. I recommend Go4Go. You will need to create an account, but the site is free to use otherwise. Just find an interesting game and hit Download SGF File. (see images below)
I’ve been using SmartGo’s guess mode as well on iOS. Sabaki is good choice on the desktop/laptop it seems.
I might also add how you can use your sgf library on OGS:
Go to your sgf library
paste or upload the file, whatever is easiest
Try to recreate the game. Barring the first move, whenever you get the next move correct you’ll just see the move placed on the board, but whenever you deviate from the correct moves, the variations will show numbered moves so you can backtrack. E.g.
It was recommended to me as generally I’ve been trying to work on reading, which is a mixture of memory and visualisation. It also help to remember my own over the board games for later review.
I suppose we could also have a whole side discussion about how to actually remember a whole game.
For me anyway, the first thing was to imagine the whole game like a story: You don’t necessarily remember every move individually, but each start of a sequence plus an idea of what it means or the result or some mnemonic like that helps you piece together whole sequences into a full game.
Some games are easier than others, so it might be worth finding one you like, or a player you like for an easier time. I think if it has memorable moments, something you’re surprised by or something you expect and agree with, mixtures like that make it easier too.
As a first step learning the game for the first time it won’t. As a convenient way to practice remembering the game for example on mobile, I like using it.
You made me want to try it myself. Last time I tried this was when I was 9k. It was fun, but I doubt it was more useful than playing or getting reviews, along with reading books and trying tsumegos for the first time.
I’m curious what was your rank improvement and what was your rank before that? And why didn’t you study this way again after that period?
You said it was a while ago. How long ago? Did you ran into a problem of changing meta after AI and struggling to accept new ways of playing as opposed to old school way of playing go?
I remember hearing from Michael Redmond that the way he studied old games he could spend a whole day on single game. Which is, from his words, different from how modern pros approach it. It’s more of information management now just because of sheer volume of game records available through internet instead of direct memorisation.
I believe from my own experience that key to improvement are reading books and participating in tournaments. It would be nice to discover that memorisation (or rather studying games) is extremely effective too.
This was a key part of pushing me from inconsistent strong sdk/weak dan to a very stable 1-2d EGF / 5d fox.
Other life factors made me drop studying go. I picked it up again now, which inspired me to make the post, as I still believe this is the single most effective way to study for me.
Couple years.
I started playing go to figure out why AlphaGo was a big deal, so I never experienced the pre-AI era.
I have not read books. Tournaments are fun, but I’ve only attended a couple of local ones.
Were you memorizing blindly without understanding the rationale behind the moves? If so, how did that exactly benefit your play if you get into situation that requires improvising, which I’d assume it happens a lot of given the very vast size of possibilities in GO, or if your opponent plays the ‘wrong’ move?
I suppose you still got some verbal information from videos or other players? Maybe it’s just me, but your case is very unusual. Or it’s me who is reading go books from time to time being weird .
I don’t try to replay pro games when playing myself. The benefit comes in the form of having better shape intuition, direction of play intuition and a larger toolkit.
Oh, yes. I just have never enjoyed reading or studying. In all things I prefer to bash my head against the wall and absorb whatever knowledge chips off said wall. I did watch a bunch of Back to Basics when I started, since it’s a popular recommendation. Unfortunately I also had to spend half a year unlearning all the bad habits I picked up from that.
Well, I just give the easiest way to download it, since I didn’t know how to elaborate further your step-by-step guide. Anyway, if you read the link, you’d easily see it’s legit. But your cautious can also be said about your posts, which is full of links to executable files to download. What if some website/domain name you linked was actually a copy cat of the original site that contains corrupt files?
@seequ , thank you for sharing this elegant method! I didn’t even know that Sabaki has the guess mode. What pro players would you recommend to start learning from? I remember you recommending O Meien. Modern Chinese or Korean players are usually too chaotic for my smol DDK brain…
Whoever you enjoy, really. I’m a fan of Ichiriki Ryo, Ke Jie, Shibano Toramaru, Cho Chikun, Lee Changho, Kobayashi Koichi, O Meien, Lukas Podpera and a bunch of other people.
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The benefit comes in the form of having better shape intuition, direction of play intuition and a larger toolkit.
