Which games are best to review?

My tentative guess is that I should be reviewing games I lost, but where I think I played reasonably well. I can identify some of my issues, here, but having a second opinion from a much stronger player generally sheds light on some deeper problems in my play.

Is this a good approach, though? Should I be reviewing a wider subset of my games? I generally probably make similar mistakes, regardless of whether I win or lose, and it’s more a matter of if my opponent can take advantage or not. What type of games do you find are the most useful to review, with the goal of identifying your weaknesses and getting stronger?

(Obviously, the answer should be “all of them,” but I don’t want to inflict that on the review requests board!)

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I guess my first reaction is “Why not?” One reason this community exists is so we can help each other. Players don’t have to comment on the game if they don’t want to for whatever reason, but why not let those of us who would like to do that do so?

Of course, the games you don’t post you can plug into Zen or GoReviewPartner, but you may not get much out of seeing something like “black/white win probability for this variation: 47.6%/52.4%.” Sure, you see you either made a mistake or had a better move, but you may not notice why that variation is better. It could be obvious, like a missed atari or tesuji. But what if the explanation is more like “You need better direction of development” or “You need to take gote here to reinforce your group” or “The key point was important here”?

Admittedly, I cringe at some mistakes made in the games posted here, but really who wasn’t there at some point? I’m about 4 dan. I guarantee you I was a beginner some years ago and made worse mistakes than yours. If no one explained Go concepts to me, I might still be a beginner, or worse—I might have given up entirely.

The only thing I’d say is if you post games frequently, consider posting them to a single topic to reduce spam. Also, if you want to impose a basic blunder check on your games, that’s your perogative. :slight_smile:

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Depends on the purpose and the reviewer.

I think the most worthwhile games to review are those you put a lot of effort into winning (irrespective of whether you actually did). When you fight your hardest, preferably against people who are a little stronger than you (around 2-3 stones). Games that went into scoring (i.e. you didn’t just lose a group and thus the game).

If you can say for each phase what your goal was (ideally writing it down at the time of playing). Reviews do little for your reading skill, that’s best left to tsumego practice, but allow strategic advice.

Blitz games are less well suited for that purpose. Blitz games give some insight into your habits and reading speed/accuracy, which can be useful in its own right, but little else.

If you review games against weaker players, chances are that most of it will boil down to “and here your opponent again failed to punish your move”. If the rank disparity is too great and you just get crushed / lose groups all over the place, most of the time, it would be better for you to study the life and death aspect by yourself.

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@ckersch88

Hmmm… Intuititively id say id want reviews on games, where i failed at doing something (for example effectively attacking for profit) and cant see a way to play better. It s always useful to a reviewer to have questions.

But really, a reviewer who is willing and sufficiently stronger than you, will tell you something useful no matter the game. It should be one where you tried though :slight_smile:.