🔥 Try the Ghost mode in our Skill Tree: gomagic.org/go-problems/ This is an advanced feature designed to improve your reading and visualization skills by making stones invisible after placement. ✨
This is exactly where my pea brain fails me. I can visualize maybe 2 moves in the future, but 4 or 5 out seems like advanced quantum mechanics. I am hoping that kind of foresight comes naturally with practice because otherwise I'm afraid I'm not going to progress far.
It also helps to keep playing or doing situation puzzles. Experience will help reduce the amount of moves you have to play ahead in your mind because you've seen what happens before.
Tsumego with a lot of forcing moves are great for training this. Find a collection of connect-and-die puzzles and work through them. Since many of the moves are forcing throw-ins, you don't have to worry about variations, just about seeing the stones all the way to the end.
As a complete beginner(maybe played like 5 19x19 games and a good amount of smaller ones), I think it's less about reading individual moves but more about seeing shapes and what the important points are that keep your shapes alive. Of course that gets pretty complicated with complex capturing races and all that but if you look at it that way you can drastically reduce the number of moves you need to keep in mind.
In chess and Shogi i can calculate well, reslly far ahead, and I start at a better place than most when i first started. But with Go since the game is so simple, to the point where both players' moves are homogenous and nothing is truly evident until further ahead into the moves. It provided way more complexity than other games with directly understandable plays. When a Gold is dropped near to your King, or when a Bishop is pointed to your King. You know that you're in check and you need to get out of it. When an opponent's stone is placed somewhere near your own stone, you wouldn't know exactly what you're in trouble of unless you calculate it. So if you go a step back, the beginner will not realize some points to be immediate threats unless they know that pattern leads to a kill. it's so difficult for a beginner to understand the intention of the moves to be made. Hence when solving tsumego, there's a huge breadth of calculation to make which would be too much, the reason is the Go newbie doesn't know what moves to NOT think about. The first example that was shown here does exemplify this phenomenon. For a Go newbie to understand a specific point to be the most important they would need to go through a ton of puzzles failing and committing to memory live and dead shapes. In the end it's reduced to the player preventing the other player from getting a certain shape OR the player itself making the shape they wanted and that's where the intention comes in.
That's why a Go newbie would probably need to start with problems that are 5 times easier than the ones shown in this lesson. There are always problems out there that are within a player's reach. Just gotta find the right ones.
That's because opening in go is more about experience than reading. Then in the middle game is where reading gets more important and gets more similar to chess, but even at this point is a mix of experience and reading
Such an important step to take and I know doesn’t come easily or quickly for a beginner and not without a lot of sighs, head banging and eventual ah-ha moments. Watching this gentleman’s vast array of great teaching aids and excellent presentations definitely helps in developing this much needed skill and I found that his positive, but easy style, of teaching alleviates much of this stress. That’s why the Go AI is so damned good, as it can probably analyze more than 100 moves ahead, where I found it hard to actually visualise more than one or two at the start and that was still rather fuzzy. Everyone says it definitely comes with practice but I repeat that this man’s tremendous teaching skills seriously aids that development in a logical step by step way that thankfully helps develop that required skill immensely. Great stuff!
Thank you, very nice. One of the issues I have with visualizing problems like this is that I'm often quite unsure of whether I'm playing both colors correctly. It's often a bit frustrating to 'solve' a problem only to afterwards realize I've only 'solved' it as long as my opponent plays badly. (Or that my solution doesn't work because I've missed a shortage of liberties or a sudden connection or something) Though I suppose the idea is to view these mistakes as a learning opportunity as well...
Hey Go Magic, I'm so glad I have disocvered your channel the past 2 years now. I have to admit, I love how clearly you explain all of the rules within the game of go super simplsiticy for my pea brain to functionally understand with. I've had my interest of go in quite awhile and recently discovered a go community around my area that I plan to be apart of someday. Thanks for all what you do and making learning the fun game of Go very easy and simplistic to grasp without any fluff or confusing to learn. Huge thanks. i'v even created a playlist I go back to quite a lot to refresh my learning ability with from time to time.
@@neerkolihey, If you still have problems with bots in ogs , I came with the same situation a while ago and solved. Just try to change configurations a little, some bots have restrictions like not playing private games, or certain boards or non ranked. cheers
i think i may have aphantasia which makes it very difficult for me to visualize things in my head like this, even while looking at a problem or the current state of the board. i can maybe visualize one stone placed at a time, but struggle with holding multiple stones across multiple variations in my head at once. will practice really help visualize these things better, or will i just get better at pattern recognition to find the right move given the shape of the stones on the board?
Visualization is by far my biggest shortcoming as I've slowly learned this game, or rather my complete inability to visualize sequences and variations. I have kind of developed an instinct for how things might go through trial and error and got fairly decent at solving easier go problems. Visualizing though, its like my mental go board is so blurry and the lines wobble, bend and loop all over the place, lol nevermind trying to imagine the stones. over 1 year later and it still hasn't changed. Somebody told me that if I haven't caught onto visualization by now, I'm better off focusing on honing my intuitive instinct instead. Is the inability to visualize common among players? (I think my brain might be broken XD) That said, this vid is still quite helpful.
You're not alone! Visualization is one of the hardest skills in Go, and it takes time-lots of time-for most players to develop it. Many people rely on instinct and pattern recognition rather than visualizing every move, so don’t worry about being “broken”!
May I ask what type of board and stones are you using for your videos? Where did you buy it? If you could send a link of the same board and stones it would be great 😊
🔥 Try the Ghost mode in our Skill Tree: gomagic.org/go-problems/
This is an advanced feature designed to improve your reading and visualization skills by making stones invisible after placement. ✨
This is exactly where my pea brain fails me. I can visualize maybe 2 moves in the future, but 4 or 5 out seems like advanced quantum mechanics. I am hoping that kind of foresight comes naturally with practice because otherwise I'm afraid I'm not going to progress far.
In my experience it didn't come naturally. It comes with really struggling against your limit, kinda like weight lifting.
It also helps to keep playing or doing situation puzzles. Experience will help reduce the amount of moves you have to play ahead in your mind because you've seen what happens before.
Yes, it comes with a lot of practice. To some it's easier, to some it's harder. =)
Tsumego with a lot of forcing moves are great for training this. Find a collection of connect-and-die puzzles and work through them. Since many of the moves are forcing throw-ins, you don't have to worry about variations, just about seeing the stones all the way to the end.
As a complete beginner(maybe played like 5 19x19 games and a good amount of smaller ones), I think it's less about reading individual moves but more about seeing shapes and what the important points are that keep your shapes alive. Of course that gets pretty complicated with complex capturing races and all that but if you look at it that way you can drastically reduce the number of moves you need to keep in mind.
Not only in life and death problem, imagine the moves is a crucial skill in midgame. Calculation basically base on this
In chess and Shogi i can calculate well, reslly far ahead, and I start at a better place than most when i first started. But with Go since the game is so simple, to the point where both players' moves are homogenous and nothing is truly evident until further ahead into the moves. It provided way more complexity than other games with directly understandable plays.
When a Gold is dropped near to your King, or when a Bishop is pointed to your King. You know that you're in check and you need to get out of it.
When an opponent's stone is placed somewhere near your own stone, you wouldn't know exactly what you're in trouble of unless you calculate it. So if you go a step back, the beginner will not realize some points to be immediate threats unless they know that pattern leads to a kill.
it's so difficult for a beginner to understand the intention of the moves to be made. Hence when solving tsumego, there's a huge breadth of calculation to make which would be too much, the reason is the Go newbie doesn't know what moves to NOT think about. The first example that was shown here does exemplify this phenomenon. For a Go newbie to understand a specific point to be the most important they would need to go through a ton of puzzles failing and committing to memory live and dead shapes. In the end it's reduced to the player preventing the other player from getting a certain shape OR the player itself making the shape they wanted and that's where the intention comes in.
That's why a Go newbie would probably need to start with problems that are 5 times easier than the ones shown in this lesson. There are always problems out there that are within a player's reach. Just gotta find the right ones.
That's because opening in go is more about experience than reading. Then in the middle game is where reading gets more important and gets more similar to chess, but even at this point is a mix of experience and reading
Such an important step to take and I know doesn’t come easily or quickly for a beginner and not without a lot of sighs, head banging and eventual ah-ha moments. Watching this gentleman’s vast array of great teaching aids and excellent presentations definitely helps in developing this much needed skill and I found that his positive, but easy style, of teaching alleviates much of this stress. That’s why the Go AI is so damned good, as it can probably analyze more than 100 moves ahead, where I found it hard to actually visualise more than one or two at the start and that was still rather fuzzy. Everyone says it definitely comes with practice but I repeat that this man’s tremendous teaching skills seriously aids that development in a logical step by step way that thankfully helps develop that required skill immensely. Great stuff!
Thanks.
No need to analyze 100 moves ahead actually. If you can consistently see 3-4 moves ahead, you can be a decent dan player =)
Thank you, very nice. One of the issues I have with visualizing problems like this is that I'm often quite unsure of whether I'm playing both colors correctly. It's often a bit frustrating to 'solve' a problem only to afterwards realize I've only 'solved' it as long as my opponent plays badly. (Or that my solution doesn't work because I've missed a shortage of liberties or a sudden connection or something)
Though I suppose the idea is to view these mistakes as a learning opportunity as well...
Sure, visualizing the strongest resistance for the opponent is one of the hardest things there, it takes time =)
Hey Go Magic, I'm so glad I have disocvered your channel the past 2 years now. I have to admit, I love how clearly you explain all of the rules within the game of go super simplsiticy for my pea brain to functionally understand with. I've had my interest of go in quite awhile and recently discovered a go community around my area that I plan to be apart of someday. Thanks for all what you do and making learning the fun game of Go very easy and simplistic to grasp without any fluff or confusing to learn. Huge thanks. i'v even created a playlist I go back to quite a lot to refresh my learning ability with from time to time.
Haha good to hear someone is mixing a playlist of Go videos! =)
Easily the best Go tutorial channel out there! Where can I play Go with a computer?
Thank you!
You can play with Katrain for example.
For English speakers, OGS is also a great place with a variety of bots (and humans!)
@@Kaiasky For some reason I'm not able to play with bots on OGS. An error popup comes up every time.
@@neerkolihey, If you still have problems with bots in ogs , I came with the same situation a while ago and solved. Just try to change configurations a little, some bots have restrictions like not playing private games, or certain boards or non ranked. cheers
@@zeldyyy Thanks, I'll check it again!
I love the way you put the stones
Hm, you mean by holding them between the fingers? =)
@@GoMagic how you hold them, but also how snappy you move your hand and the sound it makes when it touches the wood.
Ahhh fellow aesthetics enthusiast!
Seriously - you’re a charismatic person
Thank you 🥰
i think i may have aphantasia which makes it very difficult for me to visualize things in my head like this, even while looking at a problem or the current state of the board. i can maybe visualize one stone placed at a time, but struggle with holding multiple stones across multiple variations in my head at once. will practice really help visualize these things better, or will i just get better at pattern recognition to find the right move given the shape of the stones on the board?
I've see someone say that they are a 8 dan player on Fox and have aphantasia. They solve go problems this way just fine
@@ShredST that's a relief to know, thanks!
Finding it difficult to visualize even 1-2 moves ahead is normal. Yes, you get better at pattern recognition which will simplify the process.
For the last problem:
- Push method: 18k +
- Wedge method: 10-18k
- You found the solution:
=D
@@GoMagic Also, yes, I took the wedge method, I’m still pretty bad. However your channel helped me a lot!
We’re always here to help 😊
You are essentially saying that we should read the problem completely instead of just playing and trying moves (without reading them).
Yes, that's the gist of it
Question: which stones do you have and where can I get them?
Hey, just some basic Korean stones.
Visualization is by far my biggest shortcoming as I've slowly learned this game, or rather my complete inability to visualize sequences and variations. I have kind of developed an instinct for how things might go through trial and error and got fairly decent at solving easier go problems. Visualizing though, its like my mental go board is so blurry and the lines wobble, bend and loop all over the place, lol nevermind trying to imagine the stones. over 1 year later and it still hasn't changed. Somebody told me that if I haven't caught onto visualization by now, I'm better off focusing on honing my intuitive instinct instead. Is the inability to visualize common among players? (I think my brain might be broken XD) That said, this vid is still quite helpful.
You're not alone! Visualization is one of the hardest skills in Go, and it takes time-lots of time-for most players to develop it. Many people rely on instinct and pattern recognition rather than visualizing every move, so don’t worry about being “broken”!
@@GoMagic Thank you for this reply. Its been bugging me for quite a while. Good to know I'm not alone with this problem. Much appreciated.
May I ask what type of board and stones are you using for your videos?
Where did you buy it? If you could send a link of the same board and stones it would be great 😊
Impossible, sorry. They all come from different places. Vadim bought the board in a store somewhere in China.
something wrong with ur first example, u miss a white stone at the bottom line.
🤔
great video
Difficult thing to learn!
When I start the game what should be my approach, I win only 2 times against ai or computer
Then you don't need Go problems yet, just watch some beginner lessons and play more games =)
Gomagination
Exactly!
yay
Yay indeed!
🦑