Is it impossible to progress quickly with correspondence games?

General Go Discussion
22

That’s surprising me too. Do you have any statistics to show us? Or links.

23

You can click the chat button in the game to go private (Malkalovitch ). Well almost private. In this mode, variations can be made private too.

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24

I sincerely hope that time settings of 1, 2 or 3 seconds per move will be forbidden.

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25

Those would be fine as increment values in Fischer. :smiley:

26

I would bet that in the same time you would progress much further, have you not played corespondence. My out of the blue sky guess would be 12 kyu.

Taking extensive notes would increase the time per game even furthe, so the efficiency of learning would go even lower.

27

I would bet the opposite, what now :stuck_out_tongue:

When you play correspondence you often can play moves when you wouldn’t be able to play live games.

For example, when you’re a student, it’ll be very hard to play during class. But with correspondence you can sneak in quite a lot of moves in breaks etc.

So you can play at least some go instead of playing no go at all.

I wouldn’t be able to play nearly as many games if I stuck to live only.

That’s just silly. Efficiency of learning isn’t measured in the number of games you played. You could play tons of shallow games as many players do and never get any good. On the other hand, studying and thinking about your moves is exactly how one improves. Which is what correspondence is all about.

In correspondence because you aren’t pressured by time, you can think of novel moves, really try to read ahead, practice counting. In live, you don’t have much time, you play mostly the first thing that comes to mind. And even if you do get around to reviewing live game (which many don’t), you’ll review only a few moves, you won’t study it as much as you would in correspondence.

Of course, you can play shallow games with correspondence too. You can spend very little time on some positions and spend a lot on the ones that interest you. You can do whatever you want, instead of being confined by the time controls.

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28

That’s true but it probably it affects more blitz game than live (with a reasonable time setting) ones. I wouldn’t consider games with less than 1 hour per player (+ byoyomi) as a live game.
In other terms I would consider fair a time setting which is in the range of a game played on a true board.

There are also a lot of bad habits someone can get with correspondence. Just some coming to mind:

  • You overthink a position exploring all the variations you can. This lead you to an unrealistic performance compared to shorter time settings.
  • become weaker and not prepared when in time pressure
  • play even slowly when a game is taking a bad shape to consume your opponent’s patience😡
  • use AI to review your game while you are still in the game :rage:
  • you don’t rebuild all the mental connections that lead you to that position and play after a quick analysis of the board
  • you can become bored when obvious sequences happens (joseki, endgame)

Above all, you can see the results of your aimed growth only weeks or months since the moment you decided to challenge your opponent.

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29

If I didn’t read the part about correspondence I’d presume your just having a bad time with opponents. I don’t know why your attributing these things to playing correspondence games.

30

Because I encountered really those situations ( :rage:). In the past on DGS they were called “escapers” or “cheaters” (not using AI obviously but some program strong enough that time available on the market).

Anyway, this is a bit off topic. Coming back to the original theme, I’ve seen a lot of players playing more than 30 correspondence games in parallel blocked around their current rank for years. They play a so huge number of games every day for years that I cannot realize how they can continue to accept that they don’t progress without changing something. Simply they enjoy this way to play Go? Uhm…

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31

There are many go players somewhere in a long step who don’t play correspondence go too.

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32

Not everybody wants to progress.
Some just want to enjoy the game.

I am floating around 8k, sometimes almost 5k, sometimes almost DDK again.
I don’t actually care much about it and I don’t think I will progress further unless I start studying… and I don’t want to!
I even disabled rank display and am very happy about it.

I am so sorry for your bad experiences, but I don’t like when people blames those who don’t progress.

I think so.
I’m among them.
If you want to know more, please ask! :grin:

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33

I’m not blaming anyone otherwise I should start from myself. :sweat_smile:
I think it is a natural ambition to progress in something for which you spend a lot of your free time. But I perfectly understand that you simply enjoy to play it.

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