in need of some pointers

[tonybe]

Greetings! I searched for your username on OGS, and took a look at a few of your games. Here are a few general pointers:

1. A good portion of your recent games are against much stronger opponents (i.e. 16kyu, 3kyu, 2dan etc). While you are just starting out, I would look for games against players in the 20-25kyu range.
2. If you are playing against a stronger player, trying to use mirror-go will often work against you one way or another. I would explore other tactics based on utilizing the efficiencies inherent in the game.
3. In many of your games, you begin contact fighting early rather than playing on parts of the board that represent unclaimed potential. Unfortunately, contact fighting contains many risks and pitfalls, and can be very unpredictable from a whole-board perspective. Try to focus on playing more of a “territorial game” rather than contact fighting to kill or capture your opponent’s groups.

Speaking for myself - when I look back on my early games - I often found myself losing not because I was bad at contact fighting, but because I didn’t understand the underlying flow and language of the game:

• because I couldn’t see the necessities of SENTE and GOTE, I didn’t understand how much risk I was in at the moment, and played the “right moves” at the “wrong times”
• because I didn’t understand what made a LIVING SHAPE or a CONNECTED SHAPE, I didn’t know how to SETTLE MY STONES and so my frameworks got cut apart or captured
• because I didn’t understand WHOLE BOARD PLAY or the STAGES OF THE GAME I would fight hard for areas that only represented a few points, or gave my opponent the whole board advantage, rather than claiming potential efficiently and in the correct order of priority.

It took me a long time to understand the language of the game, and even longer to be able to use to tell the kind of story I wanted to tell on the board. I’ve been writing a (long) series of articles, trying to help beginners wrap their heads around these elements. If you take a look at the Intro here, you will find links to the subsequent articles at the bottom of each given article.

19x19 FOR BEGINNERS SERIES: Introduction: Making Sense of Go

19x19 FOR BEGINNERS SERIES THINGS I WISH I KNEW WHEN I WAS 25 KYU Introduction: Making Sense of Go When I first started learning about go, I did it in the slowest possible way - I was isolated, intimidated, confused, and stubborn. Lacking any local friends to play with, and too embarrassed to play strangers on the internet, I beat my head against the GnuGo AI for a long time - never able to understand why I was consistently losing by 30-50 points. I read books and articles about go - I watche…

Good luck