Just play your game.

Played a really great "lesson game" with He Who Gives Nothing Away yesterday, which is to say, he got to talk through copious alternative moves, branching possibilities, and high level strategy, while I was somewhat more transparent about my thought process, both voluntarily and prompted.

13x13, 7 stone handicap. He won.

I'm chewing on an interesting phenomenon, which is that I adjust my style of play depending on the perceived skill of my opponent. You know that tendency to give up too fast? That, amplified. Which also explains why I was utterly helpless against Nick Sibicky in the ad-hoc simul he staged while waiting for his real class to begin. Mentally, I'd given up before we'd even started.

It wasn't nearly that bad with He Who Gives Nothing Away, but I did hurt myself with the extremely passive opening moves I made before I gained that awareness. Things got better when I started asking "what would I do against He Who Tells Stories?" Not sure yet how much of it is the perceived skill difference or how much of it is simply the degree to which my opponent is an intimidating motherfucker. The former, ergo the latter? I need more data.

I was also thrown off by the enormous handicap, which initially made me think more in terms of how I'd play on a 9x9 with a large handicap than what I really ought to be doing on a 13x13. I'm still frustrated by 9x9 AI games, so choosing to play in the style of the board size I'm frustrated by and stuck on rather than the board size I'm rather enjoying and making swift progress on was simply a terrible idea.

It occurred to me several hours later that I also don't have a mental warm-up. It usually takes a bit to settle in, which does me no favors if my weak opening moves put me at a disadvantage for the rest of the game. In an even match, neither of us is likely to start shit right away. Claim your corners, sip some tea, we'll get to the fighting when we get there. In a large handicap game, white needs to come in teeth and claws, and I need to be ready for that.

One of the things I adore about Go is the philosophical implications of the abstract principles, as applied to other walks of life.

One such example, which I'm debating the merits of offline, is the idea that you shouldn't assume you are weak, otherwise you will never learn to be strong. I think that idea is flawed, if not outright false, but interesting, none the less. Perhaps more on that later.

Another is Go as a meditation on jealousy and privilege. This came up in a discussion about how one must continuously fight back the frustrating truth that one can never hold the entire board. My answer to that, which maybe comes more easily for me that for him, is to let go of the desire to control the whole board. If jealousy is defined as a fear of having what you consider yours taken away, the game becomes really interesting really fast (not that it wasn't already), especially in the context of a base assumption that the whole board ought to be yours in the first place. That's just not going to go well, in life or in game.

One of my moves was a small instance of that. I wanted to defend two different areas. Instead of picking one and making a strong move, I made a weaker move in the middle, which only sort-of defended both. I didn't want to let him have either, and in so doing, left weaknesses in both.

Unreasonable late game invasions also came up in the discussion about whether or not to alter one's playing style based on the perceived skill of one's opponent. On the one hand, yeah, the stronger player might be able to get away with it. On the other hand, if the stronger player is losing by enough that an otherwise unreasonable invasion is what they need to win, then they actually fucked up a long time ago, either when the weaker player got the edge or because they waited too long to invade.

We concluded that it's better to just play your game as well as you can at all times; avoid altering it based on the perceived skill of your opponent. For the weaker player, getting intimidated will surely only weaken your game. They might well be able to pull off some ballsy shit, but they will definitely get away with it if you don't even try to stop them. For the stronger player, the move you're contemplating when you start with "I wonder if I can get away with this?" is almost certainly weaker than "what's the best move?" Taking advantage of a less skilled player's incompetence simply doesn't up your game as fast.

New terms:
Yose - a move that approaches fairly stable territory, enlarging my territory while reducing my opponent's

Oyose - a large yose. Also refers to the early endgame, when those moves are the most common. The board is fairly well settled, but plays are still worth a decent amount of points.