Comments on improvement methods by James Kerwin, the second Western professional, from AGA E-Journal editions 4th and 24th February 2005.
Getting to 10k
What is the fastest way to improve from 20+ kyu to under 10 kyu?
Play as much as you can, but get the most benefit from your play. You must have the right attitude and not get too caught up in winning and losing. Don’t be afraid of a stronger opponent, and don’t try to bully a weaker opponent. Simply try to play correctly, the best way you know how. This approach will be uncomfortable but you must bear with it. If you play comfortably you will repeat your customary mistakes and improve only slowly if at all. Your discomfort is a sign that you are improving. As Jane Fonda says, “Feel the burn!”
Second, go over your games. Even without assistance you can see a lot of your mistakes if you look for them. And ask your opponent if he or she saw any moves that were clear mistakes. If you have the budget for it I would highly recommend sending some of your games to a pro for commentary. I comment games e-mailed to me and I’m sure many other pros do too.
I never recommend that a player study. You play go for fun, and if study is too boring that’s fine, don’t study. If you do want to study, the most valuable thing is solving tesuji and life and death problems. Don’t do problems that are too hard, concentrate on problems you can solve in 1 minute or less. The next most valuable thing is taking lessons from a pro.
Other forms of study are far less useful, although they have their place. Next best is studying pro games. Go through the game once. Then try to replay the game from memory. When you can’t remember the move, think of where you would play. Once you’ve decided, check the move actually played and compare it with your move. Try to understand why the pro’s move is better than yours. Keep doing this until you remember the game. Books can teach valuable concepts, but they can’t teach you how to implement those ideas against resistance.
Studying joseki in a systematic way is a waste of time, which is why there’s a folk proverb declaring “Study joseki, become two stones weaker!” I recommend using a good joseki dictionary to look up joseki only when they came up in a game and you think you got a bad result. Look up that joseki, understand where you went wrong and what you should have done, and then put the book away.
Getting to 1k
When you’re starting out it’s possible to improve quickly without doing anything special. It doesn’t matter that much who you play. A lot of your progress comes from training your perception to see the patterns of the game more quickly and accurately. But when you have progressed to a single digit kyu ranking it will take more effort to improve than it did when your rank was double digit. It is a general truth in every area that the better you are, the harder it is to improve.
When you get to single digit kyu and above, you should know that the rate at which you can hope to improve depends on the difference in strength between you and your common opponents. You can improve quite rapidly when you are playing much stronger players. If you are mostly playing players of about your own rank or weaker players your improvement will be very, very slow. If you find it hard to get games with stronger players the only way to improve with any speed is to take lessons from a pro.
But in your efforts to get games with stronger players, I encourage you not to neglect playing weaker players too. These games can be very useful in learning how to apply go theory. Stronger players will resist your strategies making it hard to implement them. Handicap opponents offer less resistance, and it’s easier to see how a strategy is supposed to work. In addition, if no one played weaker players no stronger player would play you either, and then where would you be?
If you get a decent percentage of your games with stronger players you can make good progress through your own efforts. First, play as much as you can. But don’t play from habit or instinct. Hopefully, you have picked up some go theory by now: use it to help you think about your move. Know why you think the area you choose to play in is the important area. Knowing the reason you’re playing there should help you to know how to play there.&n bsp; Review your games and ask your opponents for comments or advice.
You do not need to study, but study will speed your improvement. Solving tesuji and life-and-death problems is by far the best study. Don’t try to solve problems that are too hard. You should be able to solve most of the problems in less than a minute. You can spend up to 10 percent of your problem time on harder problems, but if you can’t solve a problem in 5 minutes it’s too hard for you.
The next best study is replaying pro games. Much of the game will be beyond you, but you can learn a lot by looking at the ‘big picture’. Go through the game once just to understand what happened. Play through it again and focus on which areas they played in at each stage of the game. Try to understand why that area is more important than other areas on the board at that time. At the end of each engagement, look at the outcome. You know the outcome of the engagement is even. (Even if the division of spoils was uneven enough to decide a game between pros, in an amateur game it can be considered completely even.) Does it look even to you? If not, reconsider your judgment. Don’t make much effort to understand the fighting or the tactics; they are far beyond you at this stage.
But it is worthwhile to consider the big tactical issues. If a group looks weak to you and is not reinforced, look carefully at the attack and defense of the group to see why it wasn’t reinforced. Or if a group looks strong and comes under attack, try to see why it was vulnerable. If you’re playing the game on a board you can spend up to an hour or even an hour and a half on the game. If playing on a computer, expect to take about half that much time. And don’t forget to enjoy the game while you’re studying it.
