I have been playing for about a month and would appreciate any help to improve. Correspondance or live games are fine. 
Many Thanks.
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Hi there, having taken a glance at some of the games you have going on (Corrospondence), i think the best advice i can give you for now is this… Keep playing.
The first however many games you play, are simply going to be about familuraising yourself with the game, and how its basic and core rules play in to the game. Its about getting a feel for it all.
That being said, asside from just palying more games, what you can do is go problems. There are super basic go problems out there, that will help you immensly i think. So i reccomend… Tsumegohero, and Goproblems.com. Other links and such can be found on OGS, All the links!
There are also go problems on OGS itself in its puzzle section, and there should be some simple go problems on there too.
But the best thing, is to keep playing, and trying to learn as much from your early games as you can. Pay attention to how your opponant is able to beat you. Try and work out where you may have gone wrong. And most importantly, look for the things that you think worked out well.
I hope this helps you.
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Beyond that, I’d say to focus on two things: recognizing ataris, and playing big moves.
The first is the first step in learning how to fight: just try to be super aware of when one of your groups only has one liberty. Beyond that, look at any groups with two liberties and ask yourself: “what happens if my opponent ataris these stones?” Just doing that will win you games that you would otherwise lose.
Playing big moves is the start of learning direction of play. Basically, ask yourself if there are any life or death situations on the board. If there aren’t, find the biggest open side of the board and play there: either creating an enclosure on the edge of the open space (especially if there’s an open corner), approaching your opponent in the corner, or just playing in the middle.
At your level, your main goal should be learning to do those things somewhat reflexively. That mostly just takes repetition: play a bunch of games and just aim at doing those two things somewhat quickly. That should probably be sufficient to get you to 20k or so.
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I’m sure you’ve heard by now that you should lose your first 50/100 games as quickly as possible, and I can say for me at least that is proving to be useful advice. I’m at around 70ish losses so far. While it doesn’t feel like I’m improving while I’m in the middle of a game, going back and looking at games just a few weeks old I can really see a difference between how I played then and how I play now.
I will say, though, not to lose just to lose. You still have to give the game your best effort, and review your game when finished! Try to see why you lost and the things you missed.
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If you’d like feel free to send me a corr challenge with your preffered settings
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Thanks, I’ll look at some of the problems on Tsumegohero.
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Challenge sent! Thankyou.
You said “or two” … I’m happy to play a correspondence teaching game.
I prefer the “talk about it as we play” style, and I think learning is best served if the game proceeds at at least a turn every day or two.
Send a challenge if you are interested.
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You might some of the information in here helpful:
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