Stuck around 8...10 kyu - how to improve?

The review doesn’t work for me? I guess i have to be member or pay something?
Is it any useful at all to play much 9x9 games? I mean 19x19 is something completely different as you have much more territory in the middle.
I tend to play many fast but small games - any good?

you can download free Katrain or use free online Ai Sensei


9x9 is good start but it would be boring to play so small board forever

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9x9 is certainly interesting but there isn’t a lot of learning material on 9x9, so it’s easier to learn 19x19.

Whatever you try, you reach a point where progress will come with investment
Time and real effort from youself.
Investment is usually well rewarded in go at least, like having a better reading by solving problems as one example.

It’s up to you of course to balance fun and studies.

Seems to me you want to prepare yourself to play the big board. If so, just jump to the big size, it’s real fun!
Playing fast is ok, try to detect a few failures each time so you won’t do them again, or you may get some bad habits hard to quit.

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I played 19x19 many times before with real humans (30+ years ago) but i think its too boring against a computer (takes too much time). Thats why i play many 9x9 very fast - maybe too fast to really think it out. So i do some real bad mistakes sometimes - i wish there would be an undo button :wink: When i take little more time its much better…

So it seems you’re happy as you are now: playing fast 9x9 games against SDK AI.
I wonder why you want to improve? It probably requires you to change your routine and AI will not care if you improve to (say) 7k. And you don’t seem interested much in playing on larger boards, where strategy becomes more important (9x9 is mostly tactics and reading with little strategy).

I have played some correspondence games on 19x19 against allegedly stronger player and wondered why they play unnecessarily aggressive and did not seem to be able to read basic stuff. Then I checked their record and realized that their rank was almost exclusively based on playing fast games on 9x9 so I am very skeptical about any rank that is almost exclusively based on fast 9x9 games.

destroying more groups than necessary may be fun. It will actually work on people who have too little experience of defending vs aggressive players
9x9 not necessarily have anything to do with that

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I was more thinking of attacking without having a base or counting the liberties of the stones attacking which just results in them all dying if the player who is attacked stay calm and keeps the stones connected when defending

alternative of base near side is any stone that able to run away into the center
invasion sometimes cost you nothing and may be used as ko threat later


usually works vs lower ranked opponents anyway
image


may have not enough points in the end if they play too passively when not ahead. To know if they are ahead or not they need to count. While attacker don’t need to count anything, they just maximize, maximize, maximize

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In the end I had over a 100 points more despite that my opponent was supposed to be stronger than me.