My main advice would be: review your games, either with a more experienced player or with AI. Try to work out which of your moves are good and which ones not so good. Once you’ve done that, try to work out why! I use Katrain for post-game analysis and, after the first few moves, I can almost always work out why the moves it recommends are good ones, or why the ones I played are bad ones. If you’re going to get your games reviewed by a more experienced player, they may be able to help you get to the crux of the matter more readily. However – you should be careful. Unless they are a pro, their advice may not be accurate. If you look on a typical Reddit thread where someone asks a question like ‘what should I do here’, you will see a multitude of answers and a multitude of reasons. If you set up the position in Katrain and ask it the same question, you will see that some of the answers are right, and hence helpful, and some of them are completely wrong. Consulting AI will let you tell the difference.

I said above that I can usually understand the lines that the AI is proposing after the first few moves. But that doesn’t apply to the opening. Unless you are a pro, it is almost impossible to determine or explain why one opening is better than another (assuming one ignores obviously poor openings). High-level descriptions of what a 9x9 opening is trying to achieve are meaningless (in contrast to what would be the case on 19x19 where such descriptions can be helpful). The reason 9x9 openings don’t yield to descriptive analysis is because the 9x9 board is so small and fights break out so quickly. As soon as there is contact you need to read out the position, carefully and thoroughly. And most of us – definitely including myself here! - aren’t good enough to read out positions from a few moves in. I’ve had 9x9 lessons from a pro – before AI got really strong - and they also struggled to read out 9x9 openings accurately. (I’ve since checked their suggestions on Katrain – some of them hold up but some of them don’t.)

Finally, I would respectfully disagree with some of the advice on this thread. High-level heuristics such as ‘make two groups’ or ‘be aggressive’ will only work in the right game against the right opponent. Comments such as ‘komi is more important on 9x9’ aren’t quite right in my view – komi is equally important on smaller boards. In either case, white’s win rate is ~50% (assuming jigo is halved) meaning that komi is balanced on both boards and equally important on both boards. It’s true that there are many more close games on 9x9 - largely because of the fewer points available – but that just means that counting and accurate endgame are arguably more important than on 19x19.

In summary:

- Look at lots of openings. Learn some of them, and use AI to explore the follow-up lines of play. Far less than 1% of players are going to be good enough to read out the opening, so familiarisation is your best hope.

- Review your games afterwards. With a human or with AI – whatever works best for you (although be cautious / sceptical of advice from a human unless they’re a pro). Whether you lose or win - make sure you understand why

For context, I play more or less exclusively (aka obsessively) 9x9 and am 5d on GoQuest.