🤯 Why do Go players drop out? Addressing anxiety and stress in Go

How I’ve overcome these fears:

  1. Fear of uncertainty: when I was a beginner, at many times I didn’t know what to play, especially during middle game. Things improved after I read books: then I could experiment ideas explained there. Now I still sometimes have no clue what to do but the AI can give answers at the end of the game, which is reassuring.

  2. Fear of defeat: whenever I’ve lost too many games on a server, I switch to another. Also, I don’t think we need to “pinpoint” where things went wrong. Go is a long game and stronger players get a small advantage at each move, throughout the game. So I take the opportunity at the end of the game to examine AI’s moves and concentrate on 2-3 moves that I didn’t think about. It doesn’t matter if these 2-3 moves were turning points or not. The fact that these moves didn’t cross my mind shows that something was lacking in my conception of the game.

  3. Fear of judgement: I don’t have that kind of fear during the game. On the contrary, when playing against someone of similar level, I’m often amazed at the fact that they seem to make many big mistakes, and yet the game is close at the end…

  4. Fear of time pressure : no problem, just choose adequate time settings. For live games on OGS I choose at least 20 minutes main time + 5*30s byo-yomi. On Fox I choose 20 minutes + 1 min byo-yomi: I rarely use all my time but when I need to read a difficult position I have plenty of time and am not under time pressure. But the best is still to play friendly games in my go club in a relaxed way, without clock.

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