I always think adults play too many games.

Adults need to learn basics.

I know there is a myth that “you have to play lots of games if you want to be strong”.
But that’s wrong. That’s for pros and children at 5dan, 6dan, or 7dan level.

They learned basics when they were 8, 10, or 12 years old. They already knew all the basics.

Not adults. Adults lack a lot of basics.

In my 15-year teaching experience tells me that adults play too many games
and learn too little basics.

Without having basics, adults play too many games. Then they keep acquiring their
own styles, which is far from basics.

I have taught many adults for many years in Japan. Many of them are full of common amateur mistakes and of very little basics. They had played 10 or 20 years with their own stysles. Then I started teaching basics. Even if I taught them for 5 years, it was still very hard to acquire basics for them because their own styles were completely ingrained in their mind.

I once learned karate as an adult and repeated practices 6 hours or 8 hours a week
and did a fighting only once in a while. Fighting doesn’t last long. It’s usually a minute for 5 or 10 bouts.

Yet, I have improved quickly and got the black belt in 5 years.

When I studied English, I practiced speaking by myself for many
hours everyday without speaking with native speakers. Yet, I learned
basics and learned English well.

If you ask someone who knows me, I speak much better English than
many Japanese people who speak English fluently in terms of intonation and
pronunciation because I learned basics for many hours.

Please read my blog to see how important and how difficult it is to acquire basics:
http://ift.tt/1pFGsvd
http://ift.tt/1pFGuDo

In my experience, playing one game a week is good enough for adults.

If they have time to play games, they should learn basics.

If adults have 10-hour free time, I believe that adutls should study 9 hours and play 1 hour a game.
That’s my suggestion. If you want to improve fast, if you want to win, that’s what I suggest.

Of course, adults don’t have time to study Go for a long time.
Then studying an hour a day is still very good. One of my students, George, is making a big progress by studying an hour or an hour and a half every day.

He started playing Go in his 30s. Now he is in the 60s. He started taking my offline lessons in July, 2014. At that time his KGS rating was bouncing around between 4-6 kyu. In November he is currently a 2 or 3 kyu player.

http://ift.tt/14IiHPB

I hope this advice helps.

via Go, Igo, Weiqi, Baduk. Kaz’s original Igo-advice & fundamentals of Igo http://ift.tt/1xNKxmZ

November 19, 2014 at 09:39AM

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