The last part of the sentence I doubt. When I once played Go regularly, I plateaued at 15k (KGS, years ago), simply because I was too lazy to read. Beyond simple improved experience in opening and life-and-death, reading situations out is one of the most important skills to improve. In Korea schools usually heavily concentrate on reading (in the sense that compared to typical Japanese and Chinese schools they do not force “good shape” that much on pupils, but reading out the situation). This has lead to a quite aggressive style of Korean play, even at amateur level—they play out of “shape” and “intuition”, and than beat you with comparatively enormous self-discipline and speed in reading.
Which may point to another lesson. More than once, after making a move, I have had my opponent say with a frown, “I was afraid you would play there. Now I have to read[1]. This may take a while. Why don’t you take a smoke break, or buy coffee, or something.” An important skill in Go is to recognize when intuition becomes insufficient, and careful analysis essential.
[1] “Read” is Go jargon for careful analysis—what the computer geeks might call exhaustive tree search.
The last part of the sentence I doubt. When I once played Go regularly, I plateaued at 15k (KGS, years ago), simply because I was too lazy to read. Beyond simple improved experience in opening and life-and-death, reading situations out is one of the most important skills to improve. In Korea schools usually heavily concentrate on reading (in the sense that compared to typical Japanese and Chinese schools they do not force “good shape” that much on pupils, but reading out the situation). This has lead to a quite aggressive style of Korean play, even at amateur level—they play out of “shape” and “intuition”, and than beat you with comparatively enormous self-discipline and speed in reading.
Which may point to another lesson. More than once, after making a move, I have had my opponent say with a frown, “I was afraid you would play there. Now I have to read[1]. This may take a while. Why don’t you take a smoke break, or buy coffee, or something.” An important skill in Go is to recognize when intuition becomes insufficient, and careful analysis essential.
[1] “Read” is Go jargon for careful analysis—what the computer geeks might call exhaustive tree search.