Inexplicable rank decline, boredom & how to combat it

Dwyrin agrees with you. He has commented that he thinks players don’t play as hard in unranked games.

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Just for clarity, I don’t play unranked: I play ranked but undisplayed. :grin:

I actually take a look at my opponent’s rank after a game, just for curiosity.
It’s just relaxing (for me) not to know it in advance. I think it helps me putting more effort in choosing my moves and less anxiety about the outcome.

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That makes sense. It is a bit like playing Texas Hold’em Poker with just chips and no money. Everyone goes “all in” even if they are holding a 10-2 hand :roll_eyes:
When we put the blinds even at 0.02 and 0.04 euros everyone suddenly becomes Dani Negreanu and get out the sunglasses and baseball hats :smiley:
It is not so much the amount that is at risk, but the very existence of the risk itself that creates that edge, that feeling that “things are serious here”, even if you are in fact risking 0.04 euro or 0.04 kyu in terms of rating.

P.S.
Funny enough, the same thing was something the supermarkets figured out to stop people from taking too many free plastic bags at home. They started charging money, around 0.03 to 0.05 euros for each bag, which means that you can still take as many as you like, but suddenly you have to pay like 20 cents for five bags or something like that. It should not have worked, if you think about it rationally, since they are still very cheap but not free anymore ! So, once that measure was enstated almost everyone was like “what? an extra bag for 0.04? oh nonono I’ll carry those products with my teeth, thank you very much” :stuck_out_tongue:

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To be fair, considering a person who takes 2 bags each time they go shopping, let’s say four times a week, that’s 20 euro a year. Do that for the roughly 50 years that you probably visit the supermarket, and it amounts to 1000 euro.

One of those sad kind of statistics to realise on your deathbed, if you’ve wasted a small holiday’s worth of shopping bags…


The real reason for me not to get those bags, is motivated by visiting beaches that aren’t cleaned daily during an actual holiday.

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I’m sorry to hear that you’re bored buggy, i wish i could help you somehow. I know ogs ranks are currently really tough, im myself struggling to upkeep my 5k rank, while i had pretty solid 2-4k rank before 2020 rating update. Maybe the next rating system doesnt feel that hard ^^

What i have done is hiding the ranks and ratings from the site, and just play for the fun without knowing (and thus caring) about how strong are my opponents. And i guess i use way more time and energy for chatting about non-go-related nonsense, which limits the fatigue from just talking about go.

Maybe a catpic will help you feel better?

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Taavi always makes me feel better :3

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I think I’ll take up correspondence again. It’s nice to have time to think about my moves.

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Do you even know for sure if its your strength that has declined? What if the corona situation has given everyone more time to play and thus get stronger? The only reliable method of measuring one’s rank is do something like 100 games vs a bot that is within a few stones of your strength.
Edit: ok, since the timescale is only 1 month I think this may not apply
Edit2:
Since the corona I have not played even once IRL. Just on the internet. I suspect I may have slightly declined in rank. Is the lack of IRL practice possibly related?

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You can progress by having a break.
It can be to play too much online too, who knows?

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And some people say that ai’s don’t help you to understand the game/don’t explain themselves etc.

I actually enjoy reviewing my games either with people or with katago. I feel like even taking one small thing from every review has to lead to positive progression.

A better followup question is which 1d is it easy to get to? OGS, KGS, DGS, IGS, Foxy, Tygem Wbaduk, AGA, EGF etc.

I am considering doing this myself for future games. @bugcat I took a break from correspondence myself. I have other things to do, and I was getting tired of making 10-20 moves per day and I wasn’t clever in signing up to yearly tournaments that start new rounds without warning. I think a couple of silly losses and too many new games just made me quit it all and drop from 4kyu ish to 8kyu. I would probably like to try rank up again but the current version of the ratings seems a bit offputting - hence I might just hide it but still play rated games for the matchmaking aspect.

For me I didn’t get sick of go, or sick of not improving, but just playing. I think just doing puzzles, reading books, watching videos and posting ideas to our Team Go game, visiting forums got me wanting to play some more games.

It might not be fun trying to get to 4kyu through live games where I’m likely to be under time pressure (planning to play some blitz too to help with byo-yomi management) so it could be better to hide the ratings like @Lys mentions.

I think I’m still improving though even though some ratings aren’t really changing - (I had a tournament game where I beat an irl 3kyu, lost to an irl 4 kyu on time while I had a 98% winrate, and won a 3 stone handicap game vs a KGS 1d by 0.5 points which shot me up to 1k?.

I don’t think I could necessarily beat the 3kyu again, or finish off the 4kyu game and still win, or beat the KGS 1d again and I don’t care much about the temporary KGS, but I still think they were positive signs of improvement. They make the silly mistakes/silly reading mistakes that can and have lost games not feel so bad :slight_smile:

I’m not sure if any of that helps in any way, but on the other hand @bugcat we could have some 8kyu battles :slight_smile:

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There’s a lot of good advice in this thread. I’m glad you haven’t given up go for 900 years.

How about a little Scrabble, chess, and/or Battle for Wesnoth? :slight_smile: :wink:

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@bugcat I didn’t read too carefully what other have answered to your question, but I can say that I faced already the same issue and currently I’m in a stagnant ranking.

I believe to have understood some of the causes that are at the origin of my problems.

I developed very good basis in the opening and big places to play during the fuseky, than - having the feeling to have enough advantage in points - I was conducting the game until the end avoiding any complications. This was a strategy that worked well for me from DDK to SDK but at the end you are going to face opponents that don’t let you play anymore as you like. They anticipate invasions, splitting, and start attacking you in the early stage of the fuseky.

So, to face this new scenario, I started studying new advanced ideas and I tried to apply them to my games. But… leaving the old way for the new one is something that can have side effects.

One of those collateral effects is that I stopped to apply those golden rules that should be carved into the granite for any SDK player. I was concentrating only on the new ideas but not adding those new ideas to my previous style.

Then I started loosing games in a bad way. I started to loose confidence in my reading skills at the point that in certain situation (typically the end of fuseky, or the start of the middle game) I was really blocked unable to decide which move would be the best to continue.

Taking apart the frustration you face in these period, is important (I believe) to start thinking what you stopped to do in your thinking. Since before you were making the right things, it is sure that something changed in your style.

I never used AI in the middle of a game to see what to do. I consider it not fair. Better make this analysis at the end of the game even if not always I’m able to understand AI suggestions.

I can only say that this is normal. It is necessary to progress beyond your actual rank or style. And I’m now seriously evaluating to have some private lesson from a pro just to have a dedicated tutor for some adjustment of my basis.

I also think to play less games (no more than 5 in parallel) paying more attention to what I’m doing in each game. Follows more than 10 games in parallel is a task that goes beyond my possibility to remember all the strategies in each game.

Hope this help and please let me know how it evolve in the near future. I’ll do the same.

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What do cats have to do with Go?

(I do not know. Perhaps you could come up with your own answers.)

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As someone with a cat & go profile picture here on the forums, I feel obliged to respond.

Firstly, cats were already in good position to be connected to go, simply by virtue of also being Very Popular on the Internet.

Secondly, cats take a genuine interest in a goban with stones on it. They want to investigate, and until they learn the rules, they try moving the stones around.

Thirdly, gobans are an appropriate size for sitting and laying on, even if there are no stones to disturb.

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Now almost 9k. When I get to 10k, I’m going to play all the DDK leagues and get really into the weak player’s aesthetic~

Soon, no-one will remember I was once a 3k ^^

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I said I would keep on trying, but it’s just not fun for me any more. I can only play much more weakly than I could two months ago, for a reason I don’t understand. It’s much different to lose strength and be aware of what you lost than to never have had it in the first place.

It’s boring to lose again and again, and it’s depressing to have a winrate graph that goes straight downwards. It’s a shame, because Go was one of very few things at which I had any skill, and I’ve given it huge amounts of time over the past four years despite rarely making progress. I wanted to hang onto that. Even though I’ve got nothing much else to fill my time, I think it would be more comfortable to do nothing than something I used to enjoy that now makes me sad.

So, I’m going to put this stage of my life to bed now and set out on a new one, although I don’t expect it to be any more successful. It’s been fun, but the time has come for me to step out.

Farewell, Go!

image

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I’m sorry to hear, bugcat. Here’s a kitten pic. My housemate’s cat had kittens, and they’re just about 5 days old now. I was going to take some kitten + goban pics…

I’m curious about why there could be such a significant decline in strength. It kind of sounds like depression. Have you been feeling alright otherwise?

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@bugcat, I hope you can make it “au revoir” and have another try after a break.

I’m feeling similar, having made it to 11k from 6k not long ago. In my case I think it’s mainly work taking over my brain space but there is also an element of something like depression creeping in for me.
Another thing is overconfidence somehow and a feeling that I don’t need to make so much effort in my games. When playing at 7-9k correspondence it feels like one mistake can be decisive now since opponents don’t make the kind of mistakes that would hand me games. So by not really focusing on each move, at some point I’ll do something daft and lose (again).
I tried to take a break a few months ago and got down to one or two last games to finish but somehow got sucked back in to too many tourneys. I’m not really sure how to extract myself though as I don’t really want to mass timeout but doing otherwise takes a long time (especially as I’m in the tylc!) and making moves is starting to feel like a chore.

Anyway, hoping it’s not too late I just wanted to let you know that you are not alone and that I hope you give Go another go in future.

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Buggy, you will be missed ;__;

I hope you all the best on whatever you decide to put your energy and focus from now on, farewell friend!

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If you change your mind in the next few days and just want a game (blitz,live, correspondence) where we could chat while playing, discuss things to improve on etc - there’s still a high chance you’re better than me despite what the ranks says - but possibly we both have similar things we could improve on.

Let me know anyway :slight_smile:

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