Poll: Go Ranking & Improvement

General Go Discussion
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Hey everyone … out of curiosity, I decided to create a poll to see how long it usually takes Go players to rank up, and what people’s main strategies are for improvement.

Here’s the poll, if you don’t mind taking a couple minutes to fill it out:

Poll: Go Ranking & Improvement

I’ll share the results in a few days here in the forums! I’m also posting on the r/baduk subreddit and 19x19.

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I submitted mine, is there a way for us to see results? Great idea btw :slight_smile:

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There is a vast difference between 9k and 1k. In my experience the walls/plateaus seem to be at 12k, 8k, 5k, 3k, and 1d. Of course anything passed 1d is difficult.

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I’ll post the results in a few days! Thanks for submitting.

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Yeah, I don’t think I got granular enough with the poll, now that I’ve seen some comments like yours. Well, it’s a start. :slight_smile:

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Mh… while I think it’s a good idea to try and find out about how/why people improve or don’t, I’m not filling out your survey because I don’t want to spoil your results for being an outlier …

  • I’m 60, and I’m ~9k now.
  • Go was first introduced to me 54 or 53 years ago, when I was six or seven.
  • BUT there were long pauses where I didn’t play, some over a decade or more.
  • It was only ~12 or 14 years ago that Go really stuck with me.
  • But still …I have too little time for study and play since my job is eating me.
  • There are a few other things high up on my priority list.

Currently I gain a stone per year, ±half a stone, ± half a year

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Excellent info, thank you. I think there’s a much bigger variety in how people learn, play, and improve at go than I realized. Yours might be an outlier but there are probably lots of other outliers as well that won’t be captured in the poll.

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BTW, I shared this to the Facebook group “Go (Weiqi) Players on Facebook” (7,893 members):

… and to the Google+ Go community (2,199 members):

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Awesome, thank you! I’m not on Facebook so I wasn’t even aware of that large group. :slight_smile:

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Survey submitted

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I wonder if it’s even possible to create actually useful poll. Because some play go casually and some take it seriously, hard to think of good questions.

By the way, if we’re talking about only numbers, for example, “how long to reach SDK”, we could try to get info from OGS API and find something like “average number of games to get from one rank to another”. I suppose it would be easy, if it wasn’t for three independent ratings and new ranking system coming out soon.

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The new system will only have one rank and is being fully back populated so it won’t be an issue.

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That would be amazing. Still hard to filter out those who aren’t seriously trying to improve, perhaps?

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I got offended at the part where the first rank that you are interested in is 15k… I’m currently stuck at 19-20k.

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Yeah, maybe it should have some more ranks too, I think instead of check boxes answers might be fine, then you could say exactly how long you have been playing and your exact rank.
Also, GreenAsJade I used to be stuck at the same rank you are at, if you want any review requests or teaching games I have plenty of free time as it is summer vacation for me :slight_smile:

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You forgot to ask the most important question: “how much effort you put into getting better”

Like, i watch youtube lectures for entertainment, not because i actually try to raise my rank that way ^^

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The other thing I thought of: what other strategy games do you play?

For example, my son is a chess-nut, and he took to Go like a duck to water - he was 17k before he blinked (then he went back to chess).

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One question that I thought of: What is your goal for improving? Get to X rank in X amount of months.
For example I want to be 9k in 5 more months.(End of the year)

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Thanks zendo, I’ve done your survey.
Hope you get some useful data out of it.

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Sorry for the delay, results should be out soon. :slight_smile:

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