Pro players are amazing!

So I've recently taken a 2/3 month hiatus from the game and recently got pulled back into playing. I decided since I've been a slow learner at the same that I'd do something different from the usual studying (playing/review/lectures/books/tsumego, you name it, I've done it) and just review a couple of pro games by finding books, playing out the game from an uncommented record and then reading the comments afterward.

What I've noticed is how damn amazing pros are, it's not the reading deeply but choosing really interesting and directions of play, shape and tesuji, some of which don't require as much reading to understand as you might think based on what people say about pro games. I'm really impressed by their ability to see the bigger picture and always asking if a move is really the biggest or most urgent point on the board. Naturally, they're always double/triple checking their reading and counting but following along is not nearly as hard as people make it out to be. (Especially with commentary, I find that lots of my suspicons about the game being played is confimed via the text.)

It's really showing me how terrible my own play is. I'm always settling my groups too quickly, attacking when it's not necessary, responding too much to my opponents moves because they're "sente" and not waiting patiently enough for thickness to pay off. This is part of the anxeity that comes from playing online, I feel like an abused victim which is what causes my play to be so fearful at times and yet overcompensating to fight back. There is no balance in my games.

I'm going to keep my playing suspended for now until I work through a couple of books and reviewing pro games. I really wonder if it will help me to finally break into the dan ranks.

Every year I start anew saying "this year I'm going to make it", let's hope that this year I can finally make it happen.

I'm currently reading "The Way of Creating a Thick and Strong Game" by Hane Naoki and then I want to go through the whole Master Play series before I continue onto Invincible then maybe the modern games like Relentless, Invisible and the commented games of AG vs Ke Jie.

Even if I'm no dan player, pro games are not as difficult to understand as I thought. I think I almost enjoy reviewing pro games more than I like playing the actual game!

I really have to thank Guo Juan at the internet go school, the months I spent with the training system might not have payed off directly in rank but I really think that it's given me the basic concepts necessary to understand pro games.