How to improve my go game?

Question

i play on kgs im 15-18k i was doin good all week 10 matches no loses then all of a sudden i just cant play good any more im makin stupid moves im playin like i did when im first started anyone got some tips to improve my game

Answer 1

Lose Your First 50 Games As Quickly As Possible

Think of Thomas Edison's famous quip: An assistant asked, "Why are you wasting your time and money? We have had failure after failure, almost a thousand of them. Why do you continue to pursue this impossible task?" Edison said, "We haven't had a thousand failures, we've just discovered a thousand ways to NOT invent the electric light."

Answer 2

Every player has off days and off weeks. Your game will pick up soon, don't worry. The big problem is that the losing streak is making you feel like a bad player, which is only making your game worse. Once you win a few games, you'll feel better.

If you want to get better, the most important thing is to practice every day. Play as many games as you can, it's the fastest way to learn. If you can, try to play some games with higher and lower ranked players (with large handicaps). Just make sure you play plenty of equal games as well. The rank difference brings new and different challenges to your regular game play, and will make you a more rounded player. Playing a game against an opponent who has a six-stone advantage from the start of the game, or playing against someone who pushes you mercilessly around the board is a very different experience than playing someone with the same skill level as you.

If you're serious about go, study joseki and fuseki to improve your opening game. If you learn how to build a solid starting position, it will improve the over-all quality of your games.

Also, you should study life and death problems. If you do them enough, making your groups live or killing your opponents groups will become easier.

When you get a bit stronger, you should go over as many professional games as you can. There's a lot you can learn from them. Since you're already on KGS, something you can start doing now is viewing games between people about 10 levels better than you. (So if you're at 15k now, you should watch games from 5ks and lower). But feel free to watch the dan games as well, you just might not get as much out of them as you would from games closer to your own rank.

A few websites that will help your game:

http://senseis.xmp.net/ (tons of articles on pretty much everything go-related)

http://gobase.org/ (some of the pages here require a subscription, but there's still some good free stuff)

http://playgo.to/index-e.html (not much here, but might be worth a look around)

http://www.361points.com/sgj/ (you can find lessons and commented games here, among other things)

http://eurogotv.com/index.php?menu=Home&... (has quite a few professional and amateur games played in Europe)

http://gtl.xmp.net/ (my favourite site for commented games. They're sorted by rank, so you can review games played between 15k's, commented on by players from much higher ranks (very useful).

Good luck!

Answer 3

im 1d now. i always practice go in the internet, that's how u improve. practice makes perfect!! Keep going!!