Wishful Thinking
A while ago, S, an American Go player wrote me;
When I’m facing lower kyus I tend to kill their groups “a lot” but sometimes their groups are dying and I think they’re dead, then the lower kyu that I’m facing finds a way to live that I didn’t see. >< I’m starting to lose confidence in my ability to do life and death in my games =(. (Naturally I picked up a life and death book and started solving some problems. lol) Is this another part of getting better? I thought I would at least be able to do life and death better than a kyu =/
Does it sound familiar? Yes. It does to me. I experienced this myself when I was much weaker (I wouldn’t say I still have this issue since I am supposed to say I play the same no matter how strong the opponent is). Luckily I found the question when I was looking for a good topic to write, and thought it would be interesting to talk about it. The question was quite precise though, so let me generalize it a little bit for this essay’s topic.
