We all have moves that we prefer over others for reasons of style, or aesthetics, or simply habit.
I wondered how these move choices differ in regard to rank and when one began playing.
Here are merely some ideas I had of pollable positions – feel free to add others with their own numbers.
For each position, specify A if you almost always play A, B if you almost always play B, AB if you play both A and B often, Ab if mainly A, Ba if mainly B, O if neither A or B are your usual move, and X if you have no opinion.
Black is always to play.
Chat is of course encouraged.
(My preferences in these first 15 always contain A because that’s how I configured the options.)
If you want the results to be conclusive, ideally you want to avoid influencing the test subjects choice in any way. The introduction already tells the reader something about your preference bugcat. Additionally the resulting data is visible for the reader as well. For these reasons I’m hesitant to insert my data.
I entered my data. At position 6 I assumed that a pincer was in place along the upper side (personally I would not play the kick in the corner on an almost empty board). In that case the keima puts more pressure on white.
The kick in the corner can also be good if black wants to settle quickly, in wich case option A makes more sense.
As so often it strongly depends on the rest of the board.
For position 6 I assumed no pincer in place. The kick and jump (A) is just a new AI joseki to take the corner profit and prevent white’s pressing move (hopefully in sente).
I assumed that no other stones were present in the quadrant (up to the mid lines of the board), except for position 14, where there should be a white stone on the 4th line on the upper side (otherwise this joseki would be a mistake in direction by white).
And for positions 12 and 13 I assumed the ladders are good for the side that has the 4-4 stone.
From the current data, higher ranked players seem to be more flexible and open to different options (depending on the whole board), while lower ranked players seem to be more fixed to one line of play.
Are lower ranked players more dogmatic or is it just that they have less knowlegde of joseki variations? Perhaps both?
No it’s just fundamentally flawed to ask like this, because joseki are only “locally” considered here.
A lot of the differences can probably be explained by either “im more familiar with this joseki so I’ll go with it” or that we each made different assumptions about the whole board state.
A lot of these joseki are “do you want the inside or outside” and in a real game one is more preferable to the other depending on the entire board position. So for this, I just went with whatever seemed more fun/Interesting. I typically went with the lighter play and the options that gave more cuts.
It would make more sense for a “you have sente, and there are several big moves on the board. Where do you play?” Styled quiz over this if you want to draw conclusions from it.
But then most of the answers willl just be “depends on the board”, which doesn’t really give insight on playing style.
“What else could affect the answers we choose?”
“Is there another way to find out play style”?
“How would I determine play style? Would I get different results from bugcat?”
There’s a lot of things to ask when trying to set up data collection from humans and draw a conclusion. I’m not trying to discourage this kind of thing, but I want to be sure we can use the results in a meaningful way.
I guess there is some sort of lesson here: I know that there are board configurations where B seems more preferrable to me, I need to reconsider this in the light of knowing that Dans don’t expect this to be the case!
Yeah I definitely won’t go near nadare. Since A is “escape from nadare” that is what I will chose.
The thing is, I couldn’t remember ever facing a 5-3 opening (unless maybe Kosh did it to me perhaps, now that I think about it?) and so A seemed more solid and “corners first” hence basic instinct, that’s all.
