T
here's a little piece of wisdom when playing Go: "Only make moves that you understand." This can sound almost axiomatic (why would you make a move that you don't understand?), but in reality, amateur Go players are bluffing all the time. It's a terrible habit to make an asinine play, thinking "This will really rile him up! Surely he'll back down!", but it's one I fall into over and over again. Instead, the masters tell us, just play the moves whose purpose you fully comprehend, even if they don't seem like they're going to be "enough" -- in Go, as in so many games, the goal is just to make the fewest mistakes, not the greatest number of brilliancies.
I wrote several posts ago about losing streaks. It turned out, I had not even begun to lose when I wrote that post. In the days following, I went through one of the most sustained periods of losses I've ever gone through in the game, dropping more than 100 points in my rank over the course of perhaps 48 hours. The games I play most these days are 9x9 games, with a brutal 3-minutes-per-player clock ticking down; so you can cram a lot of games into a day if you're tilting.
But now the dust is finally clearing, and I'm winning again. Last time, I mentioned the mystery of losing streaks versus winning streaks, and they are quite mysterious. I don't feel so different from when I was losing more than 2/3 of my games, many of them to players rated much worse than I am. I'm consciously trying to take the advice of the first paragraph, and it seems to be paying dividends (over the last 15 games, I've won 11, tied 1, and lost 3). But if you'd asked me during my losing streak whether I was thinking about playing comprehensible moves, I probably would have said I was. Would I have been lying? I don't know. Being tilted is a crazy drug; it badly distorts our perception. Unfortunately, the server I'm playing on only saves the last 30 games, so the records of my losing streak are lost to time. Good riddance, I suppose.