Once you have reached 20k, it´s then time for the 2nd volume, which is still relatively easy, but extremely useful.
Why encourage this? there are plenty of humans to play against, so there’s no reason to resort to bots and acquire bad habits thereby
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I think this acquiring bad habits is a myth. At 25k, you can´t really get worse, you can only get better. Plus the occasional win will increase your confidence.
I worked my way up from 25 to 15k by playing against weak bots, mostly. At 15k I then started playing weak humans. I am 9k now. What´s the fun in playing stronger opponents and losing all the time?
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You don’t have to play stronger humans but yes those bots are surely (and sadly) more available.
An idea is to make some friendship with another beginner like you and go play often together. Even between beginners, it’s much more fun as against a bot.
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Imitation is an important part of learning. If your opponent plays something that only seems good, the risk is that you adopt it for yourself as a bad habit.
The same issue arises against weak human opponents, but the reason it is more pronounced against bots is that they are always consistent. Every game they play the same ideas and make them seem normal. You don’t get the variety of different minds, where some will figure out the refutation and punish the bad habit early.
Just a few bot games here and there are hardly problematic. But I cannot recommend “working your way up” against a singular bot.
Edit: This is just the one side of the risk of learning bad moves. The other side is that if you want to improve, you should expose yourself to a wide variety of opponents. Otherwise, your Go skills will take on a swiss cheese form.
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when I have the confidence I always play against humans,
But because losing against humans is harder to take, I also play with bots (not weaker than me, 25k bots).
is this ok?
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hi thank you,
can you send me those books?
Of course, but you can start with that once you have reached 15k or so.
As a total beginner, I played mostly against bots -not one specific bot, but a variety of weak bots- until I had learned the basics.I didn´t try to learn anything from the bots, though. I was just using them as punching bags, essentially learning to win against no resistance. This got me far enough to then be able to consistently defeat human beginners. Like strenghtening my Go muscles, so to speak.
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Hi. I do not really sell books. But they can still be found at amazon as paper backs, or you can download them for free on a couple pdf sites.
This is the first book in the series. I think all 5 can get you from 25k to 5k eventually.
Learn to Play Go: A Master’s Guide to the Ultimate Game by Janice Kim | Goodreads
you can reach 5k by only playing, but you can’t reach 5k by only reading.
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The Interactive Way to Go, URL: https://way-to-go.gitlab.io/.
Of course you have to practise. That goes without saying, man!
But only practising without studying theory is extremely inefficient. Learning what good shape is from books is worth 5k at least, and learning basic tactics is worth another 5k. That saves you hundreds of games of unnecessary trial-and-error.
That’s not true in the first steps. You need more to see as to think, see your liberties and connections, that level of things. Then you can go for theory.
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Yeah ok, but I assume a practical understanding of the rules, which is what you describe.
Once you have that understanding, a little theory can save a lot of time.
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I think it’s more as just understanding the rules and It can take quite a bit of time. It’s not that I want to say it’s A then B then C but B really need A to be assimilated first. You have to get used to see groups, liberties, connections and such first. And during this time you are not completely helpless because you have some intuition already to use beyond theory. I prefer to say “look at the big picture” or “help you with the sides” as starting to elaborate on third line vs 4th, sacrifices, shichos and geta, influence and moyo vs territory, etc …
There is a huge step here to not neglect or your student may even just give up to shy to ask for his free experimentation first.
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For the shape example: Personally I had much fun searching for shapes by myself, seeing later that they are actually good when good players played the same. In such cases you also know why this shapes are good since you ‘invented’ them, and maybe you create a feeling for what is good shape and what not.
Reading a book afterwards can maybe ‘complete’ the knowledge with missing shapes.
If you read first, you perhaps know the usuall shapes but have no experience in using them and need to rry them out a lot.
Which way is more efficient now? Depends prrhaps.
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I don’t think 25k players have any need to learn, or even understand the rules, because the system has already taken care of it for you.
You just have to play, as much as you can, as much as you can.
Oh well, maybe you need to learn “pass” and “confirm score” because the game won’t end if you don’t.
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I would disagree. It is enough to replay the most ancient games to realize that really clever people who have been playing the game for centuries did not discover all of the stuff that is transmitted through Go theory spontaneously by themselves (e.g., the prevalence of empty triangles in game records from the Ming dynasty). It is not realistic to expect that a person today on their own will spontaneously discover what took centuries to discover only to partially be overruled by the super-human effort of AlphaGo.
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When group of people play only between each other and never seen game from outside they may need a lot of time to increase their skill.
But when you play on OGS some of your opponents seen everything. Just mimic them…