Beginner Go Series E2: Staying Connected/How to Practice

what is up go players young and old new and old is insensate here and I'm bringing to you the next episode of the beginner series I'm trying to start basically trying to take somebody from knowing zero things about the game to know him some things about the game enough so that they can have fun they can get better on their own and they can really appreciate this game without trying to climb the learning curve falling off and never getting back on again because that's really easy to do um with me I have Kyle Lum one of my good friends and somebody I just taught the game to um I would say love what two and a half weeks ago yeah the last time came too busy Asia yeah so he's pretty new at it um he saw me doing it like last year a few times but most of what I was trying to talk to about the game like went right over his head and so this year was a few weeks ago were like alright let's like actually try to like teach you 9x9 right now and how would you say it's been so far it's been a lot of fun I think one of the things with being around Mike is that when he explains things and gets really excited about it it's really easy to get excited about it too so Mike came up for his birthday and showed my front other other mutual friend Jake and I how to play and actually him and I have been playing and then I've been pointing online in following Mike's footsteps kind of and starting to get into it a lot more so than a lot of fun awesomely cool concepts you learned through go that apply to life too which are things I think Mike and I both are interested in oh yeah metaphors are life metaphors are everything and go has a ton of them um so definitely is something that can be really fun um when you're first starting out but I remember when I first started out it was extremely extremely daunting and extremely scary it's really easy to get caught up and I don't know what to do sort of feeling did you feel that way when you first started I still feel that way haha yeah there's a lot of times too or I know that there's probably a better move like I'm in for a given situation and I'm just like don't know what it is so I kind of guess and how design works out of time it definitely doesn't yeah and like that's part of it though too and so I think a lot of beginners when you try to start the game um is they want to be able they want to feel like they know what to do right away but this isn't the kind of game where that's going to happen this is the game where you're gonna be not understanding really what the best move is and you very and it's very clear how little you know when you play this game but the more experience you get and the more it starts clicking um the more rewarding it is honestly it's really easy to forget once you've been playing go along time like what beginners struggle with and that's sort of why I wanted to bring you on because um it'll give a really great perspective and sort of keep me reined in when I'm trying to explain stuff because if you if you can understand it that means another player that's been playing for a few weeks will understand it yeah I made sense so enough about the philosophy let's started you try to get into some you know actual planning and some actual moves here so if you're watching this and you've seen my other video I'll put it in the description below it's just a recap on the rules and the nuances of capturing really everything you need to know to go from zero to I sort of know how to play I sort of know the rules in 20 minutes I told you at the end of that video I gave you some sites to play and it gave you some resources and I said the best thing to do for that week is to just play around be like a kid swimming for the first time try new things figure out what works figure out what doesn't just like play don't try to win just like get experience with it so you should have have a few games under your belt right now um what I want to do now for this video is sort of talk with Kyle about what he's done um to sort of actually delve down and be like okay like let's actually try to start understanding this game I'm going to ticket and get into it a little more seriously um it's going to be frustrating but extremely worthwhile though Kyle what would you say that in terms of um actually in terms of the game what concepts of the game did you find most helpful to you and trying to piece together like what the next move is so I think when I went the first weekend when you show Jake and I how to play something that Jake did very well and that I didn't which caused me to lose every game I think I was overly aggressive and trying to say oh I want the full board worth of territory and I would space my pieces up which is one of the things you were talking to me about earlier just staying connected is super important in what I would do for the first and I was doing it online when I started a lot too I would leave too many openings that I did not have enough time to cover so now I can take this position that's a great that's a good point if you have places right a or B um how do you know which one to pick so let's say black wanted to try to surround white this is the surrounding game after all and black has the choice of A or B we can see that a is a little bit more severe were definitely hampering white and we're stopping white from extending to the edge of the board however and you don't need to worry about why anybody watching but just notice that I'm going to show this in future videos um this shape right here is disconnectable in terms of white can play this diagonal and no matter what black does his stones are going to get disconnected and so Kyle that was a great point about what you said if you're trying to pick between two moves that accomplishes some goal if you want to try to surround territory but you're not sure which move to pick try to pick the one that will keep you connected most easily you can see B it's in a really it's one space away from his friends if white tries to come in um in the most passive way black and give Atari White has to come out and black and connect one of the stones if white tries to come in then we see black and just Atari again go down and black and follow and from there these white stones are not looking very comfortable so these one spaces are much stronger and as you play go you'll see oh like what about this move maybe neither of those maybe this one's a good medium between the two but definitely trying to accomplish your goal in a way that keeps you connected is a great thing to try to keep in the back of your mind when you're starting to try to figure out a method to this madness in terms of practice for people that are just starting to play um I think that there's a way to play that gets you really frustrated and then there's a way to play that actually gets you better um the way that to play that will get you really frustrated is to play games and not think about what happened during the game afterwards and keep playing and um with the intent of winning that's the way to get frustrated um so if you find yourself trying to you're just ripping through game after game as soon as that game is done you go on to the next one um you might find that especially if you lose a lot in a row you'll get frustrated did you ever feel that way yeah I texted you there's one day so I started Jake and I saw our friend Jake and I started playing the same day and we had the same amount of knowledge about the game and I lost every single game by a lot which was really annoying because I knew he knew just as much as I did well apparently not because he kept winning but that was frustrating and then I would what go on - I'm on a ogs and started playing 99 games against other people and I kept losing theirs - and then the first day I lost like six times in a row and it's just like I'm a pretty competitive person so losing doesn't sit very well what I did exactly what Mike was talking about and I was playing not really reviewing my games as Didem especially the ones in person with Jake because we would clear the board and I continue to lose and wasn't really learning why so I can definitely vouch for that is what happens if you play that way yes that's not to say to not play a lot there's a proverb and go that says if you want to get better if you want to learn go lose your first hundred games as fast as you can the reason being is that if you want to learn this game you're going to have to lose because the only way you can learn what to do that's better than what you're currently doing is by losing because that means someone is doing something better than you and that is a one of the most key things you need to play a lot but the other piece to this puzzle that keeps people to keep people from getting frustrated is you need to after each game take one thing just one that you feel like you messed up it doesn't matter what it is you could have missed an Atari you could have been playing the game and you could be playing black and you could just be just doing things and oh I let white capture this stone and as you're going through and you might have not realized that and realized how much that ruined your position until you go back review the game and be like well that was a problem I let my stone get captured and then so you cannot you can even write it down um like don't like watch out for your stones getting captured it sounds really stupid but it's something beginners mess up like if you're trying to learn and learn all the usuals at the same time you're gonna miss stupid things like my stone is going to get captured unless I save it so when you're playing always try to go back take one thing doesn't matter how small how insignificant just learn something from it then after you lose 50 games you will have 50 lessons in your logbook um and as long as you don't repeat those you're bound to improve and I think Kyle you can probably attest to that working out pretty well right absolutely yeah a lot of the times I think the one might just mentioned missing Ataris you can be like so and this doing about like what you're trying to do and you forget that if you don't go in one spot someone's going to kill you so but it definitely does help a lot and doing it right after you do play the game I think also while the game still fresh in your mind is a lot very helpful so virtus is doing a couple in a row and trying to go back and be like oh I don't you're not quite in the mindset of the game that you had just finished applying so I think doing it immediately is probably also the best time to do it right so play often lose often review often getting discouraged is the worst thing for your go game at this stage I completely agree with you Mike and I think the way you presented it and I told me to take things out of my games is at the beginning when I was getting really frustrated but like so say like a week later I would be thinking in the middle of this game and all of a sudden I lose a ton of pieces or something goes wrong and a section of my stuff gets captured and it almost kind of switches your mindset to be instead of being like really mad that I just lost it's kind of almost exciting to be like oh you know what I wonder where I messed up in that last sequence that I could if I could have saved those pieces or whatever scenario could have happened and it almost makes it more exciting and you get kind of excited to lose because you know that's an opportunity that you're going to learn something and be better the next time that comes up mmm not so now that we have sort of the practice regimen taken out I want to end this with a kind of going back to the full circle on the initial go lesson that we learned for today which was how important staying connected was um this was actually Kyle this is one of your games yep from yesterday so if you destroyed um it happened you destroyed this player in this game by staying connected and his down this other players downfall was that he led his groups get split and subsequently captured and I think going through this game beginner players watching get a very real sense of how much power you can get with a strong connected group especially after how you've captured something so we're going to just do a quick review and I'll probably stop that's sort of a few moves and sort of ask you what your thoughts were and why you did certain things okay um so this is interesting you start it on the side around the corner this time this wasn't me this was the other oh I'm sorry okay so actually yeah good to clarify because I don't actually have the players on here um yeah so you were playing white in this game and your opponent black I'm Sookie you started in the corner and that's an okay you know it's reasonable because the board is so small the most common move for black in the beginning is a centered move um puts pressure on wherever white decides to go right from the very beginning and makes it the game a little bit difficult for white because black has a lot of options playing in the center but you won the corner so that's fine um you decided to play in the middle and play close to the center and respect the fact that he had a stone there so you kept your distance so nothing really to comment on so far yeah and here he is playing a very large move away from his stone um to try to I guess make some territory on the right so what were you thinking when he played this and what are you trying to do so well I think goes back to what you meant he's down just so far apart and actually this is a unique game for me if someone plays black anywhere but the middle unless it's like one of the immediate vertices around it I'll usually play in the middle and because I like being able to have the control through the middle of the board and to stay connected now if that's something I figured out about style so when he played there and because I went I guess a spot down I was looking I think I don't know where I went but my yeah I was about to say my intuition tells me I would have played f6 because that's a way to split and if he tries to like go ahead I don't know arm e5 or f5 I could foreseeably get around that and still connect up to my knee for stuff right so you're trying to put pressure on this stone um that he played while keeping him disconnected from his other stone and that's that's a very reasonable thing to try to think about um we're not going to get into a crazy sort of variations like what would happen if black cut here um what white should do because that's not really the scope of the lesson um because keep in mind you learn things incrementally so even if you're making mistakes in your game right now you're playing against people at your same level once you master this concept better than them you'll move up and then you'll you'll learn the other parts of your game that you need to fix so right now we're going to sort of focus on getting connected so regardless of what black could have done black decided to attach onto your stone yeah um so black isn't thinking about connectedness keep in mind black is just thinking about making points we can see very clearly what black is doing and what he wants to do he just wants to make points on the side of the board he doesn't care that he can't link up to his black stone right we see you very aggressively um go for the honey around um if you wanted to keep him disconnected something as simple as this is it less complicated to keep in mind because they'll get those players where they'll crosscut you um and then that'll be a nightmare to try to read out yeah um but beyond this the idea of trying to keep it disconnected as good um and then you just have to sort of polish how exactly you do that would f5 be a viable spot to go on my next move or not really depends on what he does um because then that I've kind of just is like very passive it does sort of like play something like this you might want you to keep him from through you depending on how you see that happening um but it's kind of up in the air it depends on what black does this is certainly cuttable right now these white stones aren't connected we can see that white just to nuke you somewhere um black link here here and here yeah uh whites now disconnected and beginners I will be going through shape I'll get be giving you guys a shape video soon maybe next week to sort of break it down for you guys what it means to have stones that can be connected or disconnected but for now I just want to get the main concepts and we see what white and black are trying to do white is trying to keep black disconnected regardless of how successful or not it was the idea is white is trying to keep black disconnected black just once points so now we go on the game he honest black ooh black does go for this throw and smart so instead of doing what I did here and allowing an Atari right black pull or white sorry pulls back um keeping his stones more connected and a little more solid now we sort of see black trying to attack your stones um he's trying to I suppose disconnect uh uh you just calmly a calmly connect and I would think that even though you don't have territory right now there's definitely places for you to get some if white was good at attacking and really good at using this influence which I'm not as great at which is why I tend to not do that style um something like this is possible you don't know why yeah because a long story short that's an Atari black has to fill in and that's a ladder that goes straight down oh yeah if black decides to do this then white just calmly goes here black can't do this because that goes nowhere and even if black were to go somewhere else this Atari on those three stones captures so white has a lot of really strong ways to use this sort of center group against one of blacks to weak groups it really comes down to style I think personally yeah and who is better at what they are trying to do again with beginner games it's tough to really say oh like blacks ahead White's ahead because when you're a beginner you're not that's it's not a you don't have this skill set to have a game and be like Oh whites ahead blacks ahead you're trying to develop other things you're trying to develop connectivity you're trying to develop fighting strength and are trying to develop a simple tactics so usually the things that decide a game from between beginners isn't oh I don't have as much territory as I'm in the beginning but who leaves like that first weakness you know what I mean yeah okay so let's move on uh black tries to cut off this stone but because you've been doing your life and death and you've been doing your practice you know that that is impossible you correctly go up black tries to fight it and you calmly deny him that fight so this was a very dubious sort of move um this was the perfect sequence to play out because we can see and I think black will do this yep black tries to escape and you calmly ha a block tries the cut but those stones were in Atari yeah so that is what the experience and going through your games gets you I know for a fact that if this was a week ago or two weeks ago you would not have done that no you would not have done that I've been able to capture those stones um but you did recognize that pattern from a previous game right yeah that and then the also just recognizing uh I think you watched one of my games where you told me not to panic and I did and I ended up losing because of it but and if you go forward a couple moves when he cut me the second time or like tried to cut her right yeah mmm I think previously I would have panicked but because I knew it's gonna take him at least two moves to capture that stone that he put yeah and I knew I still had two moves to get his other so it really didn't matter enough that did that so that was something that definitely working through games I understood by now and that I didn't need to respond immediately or I did but like I was okay like I was safe and I was comfortable with it right and just from a very basic sort of standpoint here we see yeah White has two liberties right now and it's White's move keep in mind and black has two liberties and so if it's White's move and you both are the same amount of liberties white just takes away one and black can't catch up so we see white do this and now capture now now white can now this group is looking weak and this group is open to White's stones that can just come in and ruin its day and you guys will see now black makes a slow move so it's white that's fine black is playing extremely aggressive and once again he's forgetting the rule of keeping his stones connected this thing this shape here especially with White's move is not connected right now which you demonstrate um you gave Atari and then Atari from this side now a little bit dangerous a little bit dangerous you left some cut points here Oh black could save himself this way so you had the right idea but a better thing to do may have been to simply descend that way if white does decide to cut you've got this ladder and if you don't know what a ladder is beginners I will give you that video too don't worry this is just a preview a sample of things to come um and if black decides to try to escape with this you can even give an Atari on this stone so just in a very basic way trying to keep him disconnected was a good move you could have even let it be like okay fine like I'll let you connect here but now I'm going to take this entire corner and all this is made possible because this central is so strong so as long you stay connected to this center group you could wreak havoc right so we definitely see some technical misplace from both sides but because they're both beginners it's okay it balances out you know you could say Oh black did this you know this was a bad move because black could have done this that's maybe true but that's not really what we're trying to focus on right now to try to help beginners out but the fighting skills will come the more you practice them this lesson is to show you that fighting is a lot easier if you're connected because you're leaving less weak groups and you can help each other out more easily we can see right now what happened was black tried to escape white followed once again black is playing a move that is not connected with his stones right if we see black simply do this come here that will be very strong taking advantage of fact that white isn't just white isn't connected but we see black makes a move that doesn't connect to stones you capitalize and you that is one move too short and now you can capture um so he tries to take and once again not respecting the fact that he needs to connect two stones always to do is play here and here and you can even capture those three if you wanted let's see what you did and that's what you did nice and these were sorts of things you learn from reviewing your game and just from playing games and that works too that's just as good and so you now you capture those four once again once again he's making this so if he went back and reviewed this game he would be ten times stronger because he's making the same mistake every time he's playing moves that get him disconnected from his other stones and letting them be captured oops is that what you played yes and I think from there black resigned because it would be very hard to keep both of these groups alive and white clearly has much more strength to do what he wants we even see that if we just fill down here the more black protects this group the more in danger this one is and even if we let black this isn't alive I mean this is definitely dead but let's say this wasn't um with Comey white still has more points so the game was over and by staying connected you managed to outplay your opponent and get a very solid victory um thanks yeah it was good and it's definitely a testament to reviewing your games thinking about why you lost and trying to not repeat those mistakes and I guarantee you like I said this your friend went back to this game saw that he's been making the same mistake playing these diagonal moves right here wait where is one here was one right here that'll let him be cut and then this one and not defending it right they'll let it be cut and then this one let him be cut we see that it's the same pattern right and people are going to make those mistakes but you won't understand that you made those mistakes unless you go back and look at your games with fresh eyes so that is all I really wanted to sort of impress upon you for this first lesson for this first these first steps that you're making um connectedness is one of the most important things to learn and go and there's a tons of other things to learn but those will come I think conducting this is a good first lesson and I also tell you how to practice how to review your games and how to keep from getting demotivated by really trying to learn from each opportunity um so Kyle what sorts of things so how do you feel about how far you've come and what are you looking at to try to improve on for the future uh I think I feel pretty good especially with how quickly losing a lot of games teaches you how to play better and I think it's definitely gone a lot quicker because of that recommendation you made so thank you Mike I realized though that I definitely still have a lot to learn because I anytime I'm so in this game I'm 22q against the 22q I'm still consistently losing 220 Q's and 21 q so I think I'm I still up up into the figure out before I start getting a lot better but I'm definitely on the way there great great that's good to hear and um keep playing it's going to come and it's going to be really exciting so with that I will leave you guys I hope you learned sort of some tips I hope you got some ideas on how to practice maybe you can sort of understand the basic concept of connectivity a little bit better if you weren't sure why I made the moves that I did if you didn't understand why some things were bad some were good that's okay this is meant to be sort of a initial taste I'm going to sort of I'm going to make technical videos I'm going to show you guys the basic moves that are good and why they're good in the future so this is more just to get your brain sort of thinking about what you need think about and to develop a good way to practice with that keep playing good luck and I will see you guys next week for a new lesson Kyle thanks so much for being here thank you

Channel: In Sente

Views: 126,569

Rating: 4.9048047 out of 5

Keywords: go, baduk, weiqi, beginner, learn, how, play, Practice

Id: Qst5MwJVwn0

Length: 30min 53sec (1853 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2016