I started to convince me that playing only correspondence games won’t help me to progress as I want. Uhm… well, there are a lot of reasons why I’m not progressing at the speed I envisaged, even if I spent a lot of time reading books, watching pro games on youtube, and so on. But let me concentrate a bit on the game speed for the moment. The choice to prefer only correspondence games was really a necessity for me because my job and surrounding environment didn’t allow me to find the right time for a 2-hours game with regularity. So the choice of DGS at that time was the only one that allowed me to continue playing with this passionating game just and only when I could. Today, for several reasons, the situation is quite different and I can find the time for a live game (at least 2-3 days per week), nevertheless, I continue playing 99% of the time correspondence games.
The reason why I think now this is a bad choice is that when you become SDK like me, the games start becoming more complex and, often, you have to take in mind a lot of possibilities, liberties, territory counting, alternative strategies, and ideas, but when I have to face 10 different games (or more) at the same time, I am simply unable to remember all those things for each game. So the result is that I play the move that I feel is the better after a quick review of the position without rebuilding all the connections in my head that bring me to that position.
I found myself to play the wrong move after I made a long and complex sequence just to arrive at that point and finally place the stone on the key point I planned, but sometimes I simply forget to do so and forget the history of the game and all my previous thoughts around it.
I realized that a normal game should be played from the beginning to the end having in front the same battlefield avoiding distraction and remaining concentrated so that your thoughts and strategies can remain synched until the end on the same scenario. I feel now that correspondence games are becoming an obstacle for the consolidation of new ideas, patterns, and joseky, and are even worst to learn managing the time pressure you can face in the byoyomi.
What do you think about it? Which is your experience? I’m sure that a lot of you can reach high ranks even playing only slow games, but maybe this doesn’t work for all.