Sorin Gherman's (6d) advice on studying Go

Using grokker, I came across another interesting website from Sorin Gherman (6d, former insei). He had some good advice about how to learn Go and I've provided it at the bottom of this post for your convenience.

He had a link to a site called Kombilo. I haven't had a chance to examine this Go study tool yet.


Sorin Gherman's Advice on How To Learn Go

DO:

• ... play a lot
• ... play fast games
  • Isn't fast bad? (Doug Cable)
    • Why do I think fast is good. (Sorin Gherman)
• ... discuss your games with your opponent or somebody stronger than you: it always helps to see it through someone else's eyes
• ... learn several professional games by heart, and replay them regularly
• ... study professional games (don't focus on commentaries, but try to understand the moves: before looking where the next move was played, try to think for yourself as if you were playing that game)
• ... study lots of basic tsume-go (Cho Chikun said once: if you have 30 minutes to spend on studying tsume-go, better study 30 easy problems then one difficult problem)
• ... try new things regularly: be ready to lose while experimenting, but you'll sure make up by also learning something useful

DON'T:

• ... take the Go books (strategy, joseki, fuseki) literally: most times those books are meant to show just one, normal way of playing. If you misread them, you'll end up with many misconceptions.
• ... suffer about a lost game too much: think of it as a lesson you learn for your next games
• ... focus on winning the game as the only thing: try to focus instead on playing well, on playing moves you'll not regret at the post-mortem analysis, this way you'll learn and win naturally
• ... think for too long for any particular move: usually after a long thinking session one plays strange, unnatural moves, many times wrong ones. It happens to professional players too