Can you explain this thoery a little bit more? It would seem that practicing Blind Go would help you improve your memory. Much like the game of Memory helps you to improve your ability to hold onto information and recall it later in the game.
I thought that reading was anticipating how your opponent will react to the moves that you play. Being able to anticipate your opponents response for many of the following turns in the game. For example, reading is the equivalent of using Conditional Moves in a Correspondence game on OGS, plotting 10 moves in advance, and returning to the game later and finding you successfully anticipated (read) X amount of the moves your opponent responded with.
I understand that if you aren’t using a tool like OGS’s Conditional Moves or Analyze Match, you would have to hallucinate the following moves. But unless you are recording your projections on paper each turn, I find it very hard to believe that anybody could successfully estimate how well their reading has improved, based on their deliberate practice hallucinating X of your opponent’s upcoming moves.
If you deliberately imagine the next five moves the opponent will make, but do this each turn throughout the game, how could anyone be expected to know, successfully anyway, that their reading had improved? At best we can feel we have improved. But without some form of tracking data, I don’t think knowing is even possible. To illustrate my point here are some numbers.
Obviously real life games would vary a lot. But this isn’t meant to be a realistic simulation. More of a sound guesstimation. What Black is trying to imagine and maintain in their memory each game…
Game Number: 50 (reading takes practice, right?)
Board Size: 9x9
Player: Black
Black Moves Per Game: 35 (35[B] + 34[W] = 69, game ends w/80% board coverage)
Tries To “Read” X Move Ahead: 5 moves, (black + white moves = this total)
- 35 Turns Per Game (multiplied by) 5 Moves “Read” Into Future Per Turn = 175 projected moves.
- How many did Black get right on each turn?
- 175 projected moves (multiplied by) 50 matches = 8,750 total projected moves
- 35 turns per match (multiplied by) 50 matches = 1,750 total turns.
More importantly what Black is trying to truly remember is how many moves he projected correctly ahead on each of their 1,750 turns. And 50 games is super small when Go players recommend that you need to practice to improve. And that is just on a 9x9. The bigger the board the bigger the numbers. You’d have to track data to have any idea if you were improving.
@rishin I’ve been playing about 6 months. However, I’ve spent a lot of time researching the topic about how to get better at the game of Go. I’m currently at 15K strength. I learned a great deal about how to play better by playing Correspondence games and using the Analyze Game tool on OGS. I try to predict how the game might play out. I try several possibilities, playing 15 to 30 moves for each variation. Then I play the first move from the best variation. It teaches me to “read the board” better (predict how the game is most likely to progress). Also, it teaches me a lot about what kinds of move tactics and stone placement patterns fail the most and why. I cannot recommend it enough.
For the 9x9 board, practicing Go Problems is a quick way to train your mind to recognize common stone patterns and how to beat them. I recommend Cho Chikun’s Encyclopedia of Life and Death . It starts at beginner level and progressively gets harder. When it gets too hard, you can just start over from scratch, working through them again. Each time you do this you should be able to go further than you did before. There is definitely a proper way to do Tsumego, and a wonderful treatment of that topic can be found in the free Go book, 81 Little Lions: An Introduction to the 9x9 Board for Advanced Beginners , by Immanuel deVillers, page 20. This book is a gem and I recommend you give it a look.
I personally believe that playing Blitz games helps you to develop intuition in a way that “reading” alone does not. Perhaps they are two sides to the same coin. I play a lot of 10 second move blitz games. You don’t have time to analyze and think. You have to rely on your gut a lot more. When you first begin you will likely be awful. But you will improve over time. I rarely play normal timed matches.
On the opposite side of the spectrum I play lots of Correspondence games, analyzing each move I made, multiple times, until the end of the match. I also only play on the 9x9 board currently. I flirt with Tsumego on and off. But I can tell you, without a doubt, that my game has improved at living in corners and stopping my opponent from building two eyes. Before Tsumego my ability to stop an invasion was a joke. They really are important. However, I’m only on Puzzle 70 of Cho Chikun’s puzzles. But I’ve played through them 8 times. Before I master harder puzzles I want to have a quick reaction time on these early ones.
Overall, my ability to “read” has really improved. I regularly use conditional moves and will often read 5 to 7 moves ahead before my opponent does something I did not anticipate. In fact, you can use the Conditional Move tool to try and track your own progress at reading 
. I will say that I invest a fair amount of time into deliberately practice Go. I don’t spend much time in Go literature yet. I figure once I feel more comfortable on the board, or perhaps when I hit 9K, that I will begin furthering my Go education. For now I’m just focusing on the basics. But if you aren’t trying to focus and trying to remember and paying attention to your own progress, competing with yourself like it was a game, you will progress much slower than you have the potential to. Deliberate practice is essential.
