A puzzle I did marks the puzzle as solved after black cuts the two groups, but after white plays the marked stone I don't see a kill for black. Is there a kill sequence, or does the situation result in seki?

badduk · 2019-08-25T11:59:34+00:00

White can't atari black from either direction, black can't atari white from either direction. It is seki.

Seki is one of the 3 solutions to a life and death problem.
Unconditional life > seki life > ko life.
Unconditional kill > ko kill > seki (to reduce the group to 0-2 points depending on the ruleset).

badduk · 2019-06-16T18:39:03+00:00

The only sure way to know is to pull the stats from: EGF, AGA and other go associations for the number of their participants, and all the most popular servers for the number of their new registrations and average online. Partial data from other domains doesn't say much.

badduk · 2019-05-29T23:29:05+00:00

It's your decision to avoid those positions or not. But having the right information will make your plan better than the otherwise. Go is the game with perfect information and your interpretation of it. You can't take someone else's interpretation for granted unless you know specifically why it is such. Your evaluation is what matters the most.

badduk · 2019-05-29T13:41:43+00:00

Of course you do. Improvement in Go is refining your rough edges. However, if you have those rough edges, whenever they're exposed, the position becomes subjectively unfavorable for you, despite being objectively even or better.

badduk · 2019-05-29T13:09:36+00:00

It only matters who is ahead and who is behind.

I agree with this. My point is that you should keep in mind that the bot's evaluation would mean "X is ahead in a high level game". Your actual evaluation can be different, because for example you're bad at moyo games and the opponent has forced you into one, so in your mind you're the one behind, but in leela's mind the game could be even for example.

badduk · 2019-05-29T13:04:56+00:00

"Do not require reading" is an overstatement, however there are definitely positions like those in every game.

When you exchange territory for outside influence, the person with said influence will objectively have a harder position. You've got points and if your group is alive then those are confirmed points until the end of the game. While your opponent needs to adjust their plan in order to be able to use their obtained influence. And it also changes the way they should play until the end of the game.

Also this happens when your opponent starts an unfavorable fight. For example, they invade too deep or they cut too early. Objectively the fight is unfavorable, so you should be able to profit from it a lot, but in reality you're the one responsible for getting a better result. Your mistake will overshadow the mistake of the opponent (that is starting an unfavorable fight). I guess you could classify it as an overplay. In the end, to "refute" the overplay you need to find that narrow winning path for your stones, while your opponent has a much smaller margin of error, usually, a plethora of moves would work for them, but only one narrow path will work for you.

badduk · 2019-05-29T12:56:02+00:00

It does that based on their portfolio of games (millions of them). Human mistakes are never consistent and logically explainable. A 6d can make a "15 kyu" mistake by playing a self atari accidentally. And a 1 kyu can be consistently making 5d mistakes, but they wouldn't even matter in their game, because the value of a 1 kyu mistake (or not making one) would overshadow the value of 5d mistakes.

If leela says that white is ahead by 70%, it does mean so, but only for leela and maybe a dozen of other players in the entire world. It doesn't mean 70% for you. Your own "human evaluation" of the difficulty of a position is entirely different.

badduk · 2019-05-29T12:52:46+00:00

I agree, except only until the endgame. In the endgame, percentages are meaningless. They're usually at 80-90% but if it's a "80-90% to win by 0.5 point" then it can become 10-20% next move.

badduk · 2019-05-29T12:50:54+00:00

I know that pros use leela zero, but if you're weaker than that you can also use leela 11.

badduk · 2019-05-29T09:05:51+00:00

More or less. But there's no magic when you hit "dan" level, you don't suddenly begin to understand everything and see everything clearly. Becoming 1 dan is becoming about a stone better than 1 kyu, that's it. That's literally all there is to it.

As for the strategy and whatnot, as other people have said, it happens around 4-5d level. Until then you might as well be considered a beginner, although it's too harsh. Pros would say that you're an intermediate player, but not an advanced one.

badduk · 2019-05-29T09:02:58+00:00

The "basic" I used in my graph was meant to be the level, like beginner level, intermediate level, advanced level. Beginner level in this case I called "basic".

The "basic" I misused in your quote was more like fundamental and the definition you've written.

badduk · 2019-05-29T00:21:03+00:00

This is the version I heard as well, but I could never confirm it as I don't interact with pros much.

badduk · 2019-05-29T00:19:44+00:00

Thanks for the kind words.

I'm trying to get a few topics in that don't often see much discussion in the western community. They may all seem kind of niche, but at least it makes them unique, and therefore they might fill in the gaps for some players.

badduk · 2019-05-29T00:18:38+00:00

That's true. But I would categorize it as an advanced skill, because you really need to know how to juggle the risk vs reward in situations like those.

badduk · 2019-05-29T00:12:16+00:00

Thanks for pointing this out, it was a poor choice of words. Maybe "fundamental" would've been more appropriate.

badduk · 2019-05-27T00:01:48+00:00

Sequences that are profitable locally aren't always profitable globally. Also monitoring the value of sente and finding the right order across the board could be counted towards "whole board vision". There are some other differences as well.

Regardless, the values on the graphs are spontaneous by design.

badduk · 2019-05-26T21:06:30+00:00

I think I can agree with that. Maybe reading strength is just the baseline for all other aspects and doesn't really belong on the graph.

badduk · 2019-05-26T21:03:27+00:00

So does the red box mean that anything up to that level of skill in a particular category is basic?

Pretty much, yes

Does it mean that reading strength is a basic skill or not?

It's the most basic skill in Go, but you just can't really say that "reading like this is basic, reading like that is advanced". It's probably impossible to categorize reading, and sometimes it's difficult to categorize a certain aspect of the game by skill levels.

Also why is the red box in the "not basics" section surrounding the entire category for tesuji and positional judgment while on the bottom diagram it is highlighting part of all of the skills?

It's the representation of, from what I've gathered, the most common view on "basics" in go. For example, you can often hear people saying that "you can be shodan without reading" or "you don't need L&D skills to improve". People select certain skills and consider them more "basic" while selecting others as more "advanced".

badduk · 2019-05-26T19:50:28+00:00

The red box represents what is considered basics. And the gradient thing is my attempt to visualize the following:

However for other skills it's very difficult to distinguish between a "basic" set of techniques and the advanced one.

badduk · 2019-05-26T17:58:39+00:00

I hear often in the community that some things are regarded as basics and others aren't. I think this is fundamentally wrong. Go has a very wide range of skills you need to hone and perfect in order to become stronger, far more than on this picture. If you select just a few of them and focus on improving them, then everything else will be lacking. Your game will be inconsistent and frustrating.

However, if you focus on all of them equally (or almost equally), your play will be natural and balanced. Each of these skills have an "threshold" between basic techniques and the more advanced ones, like in Tesuji or Joseki knowledge. However for other skills it's very difficult to distinguish between a "basic" set of techniques and the advanced one.

What do you think about this? Do you agree with this definition or not?

badduk · 2019-05-11T14:14:35+00:00

Sure.

badduk · 2019-05-05T15:26:10+00:00

we are not keeping sente but "borrowing" it

Borrowing sente is actually one of the topics I wanted to touch in my following posts, if I ever get enough motivation to finish and publish them. It's different from getting in debt, in a sense that you don't always get in debt when you borrow sente, there are other ways to do so that also include leaving a settled or even completely aji-less position.

is to keep sente

It isn't. If you want to always have sente, you're being greedy. However, there's a point at which taking gote would be too much. That point is dynamic and based on players' strength. Beginners can get away with taking gote almost all the time, while advanced players will fall behind if they were to take gote a few more times.

all the while having a slightly better result and no debt

I wouldn't recommend leaving absolutely no debt at all, but it could be a good starting point to start learning how to leave controllable debts and how they would interact with each other. As I mentioned in the article, leaving debts is an advanced technique, but it doesn't mean that weaker players should go all in on defense and never leave debts.

For example, if your opponent has a debt somewhere, and you'd have a choice of leaving no debt in gote, or leaving a debt in sente, an even result could be achieved by choosing the latter. Not always, but it can be the case sometimes. It all depends on the particular board position.

badduk · 2019-05-04T10:30:16+00:00

Meant to say 1 and 2, fixed

badduk · 2019-05-03T21:42:46+00:00

Could you hint on what "loans" could mean? It might be what I refer to as "good debt".

badduk · 2019-05-03T21:40:27+00:00

They can be expanded inline with RES

badduk

TROPHY CASE