On Sat, 2007-01-20 at 21:55 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > In my opinion in Go a game leaves the "standard" opening book very > quickly, usually early in the opening. There are so many ways to play > in the opening. If you opponent is trying to manipulate you into his > favourite joseki(the taisha joseki for instance, with its proverbial > 1000 variations), you have so many options to avoid it. > But usually you just don't know what my opponent will play, so > preparing for a particulal opponent is usually a waste of time.
Yes, there are not volumes of exact memorized opening moves in Go and so you can't prepare against an opponent with specific memorized variations. Of course this has nothing to do with the point I was making about the relationship between thinking time and move quality. > In my > opinion, the difference is that in Go the possibity of variation is > so > great that a player is forced to rely on his own strength much > earlier > in the game than in Chess (in relation to the full length of a game). Yes, I would agree with this. Even Bobby Fischer noticed this and came up with a chess variant to render opening knowledge moot. > My level is 4d. For me the way to improve my results is studying > professional games and Go problems. The aim is to get a very wide and > general knowledge, more than a very deep knowledge of particular > situations, because the level of variation in Go is so great. By > improving you general knowledge of the game, you improve you ability > to handle all those unique situations for which you cannot prepare in > particular. All interesting games require this - Go is not unique in this regard. I did not intend for anyone to think I was making a statement about the importance of memorizing openings or preparing for specific opponents. I get the feeling that you believed I was talking about this. I was responding to Ray Tayek who believes that he cannot produce higher quality moves no matter how much time he is given. That's not how it works for me. - Don > Dave _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
