Reading Improvement

[Vsotvep]

Let’s compare two players who score equally on the ‘conditional move’ ability of reading (so both of them can guess their opponents next stones equally accurate.

The first player only reads 5 moves ahead and can read any situation more or less perfectly. The only time he would get into a disadvantageous position is if his opponent has read more than 5 moves ahead.

The second player reads deeper, but a lot less accurate and hence once in a while has a great performance where he would read 12 moves in a row correctly, but in another moment misses a ladder variation that would have been obvious if he had just read 4 moves deep.

Which of these players is more skilled at reading? In my opinion it is the first player.

---

I think judging reading skill is quite difficult, since a good reader is usually not recognisable by the moves he makes, but by the mistakes he didn’t make.

[alasala]

Sure, I try playing people my own strength (which, by the way, is more or less 20k, I think) but since I only play fast games, which are not very popular, I pretty much play against whoever wants to play against me.

[Mulsiphix1]

@smurph

Reading comprises two dimensions; for the sake of argument, let’s call them distance and quality . Distance relates to how many moves you can accurately hallucinate in sequence. Quality relates to how good the moves are that you’re considering at each step.

I think the terms Distance and Quality are elegant. I like this .

 

@smurph

You can improve both by doing tsumego as well as memorizing and replaying games - if you like, you can replay them blindly.

How do you know this ? I had never considered this before . Just by committing other peoples games — stone for stone, move for move — to memory, my own Distance and Quality skills will improve? How can this improve my own reading capability? I’m very curious .

 

@smurph

If you want to know to what degree your Distance improved, you will of course have to measure it (though by measuring it, you will inevitably produce practice effects). There are many possible ways to measure this, and you’d have to study which provides the cleanest or most reliable numbers, but one of the more practical setups would be to lay out problems whose solutions are trivial shapewise and entirely forced.

1. What are ‘practice effects’?
2. Do you know where I might be able to research the subject of measuring reading skill? I find the topic very interesting and have read in many places it the second most important Go skill, second only to Intuition.
3. I understand the words you are saying but I do not understand what you mean when you said: “lay out problems whose solutions are trivial shapewise and entirely forced.”

 

@smurph

The only practical reading test is to do n-move tsumego. The better your Distance, the more variations you can try. The better your Quality, the fewer variations you have to try.

Questions 1 through 3 in the above quote may not even be worth answering. It seems you have summed up your feelings on the subject with this statement. Which I can understand with ease.

I sincerely appreciate that you took the time to write this out for me. I am very interested in the topic of how one progresses in Go and reading is an area I want very much to understand better and to developer further. Your time is very much appreciated. Thank you .

 

@Vsotvep

Which of these players is more skilled at reading? In my opinion it is the first player.

I agree, it is definitely the first player.

 

@Vsotvep

I think judging reading skill is quite difficult, since a good reader is usually not recognisable by the moves he makes, but by the mistakes he didn’t make.

Very well said and a great point!