Go is about more than winning

I used to think too much about winning in tournaments and online games. I’ve even resigned games in tournaments because I made one blunder, only to find out later that the AI said the game was still good for me, or it was close. After a long time of trying to fix this, these are the things I came up with that have worked for me and many of my students. It takes some time to practice and get used to, and at first it might not always work because emotions are complicated. But over time, you will be playing better and at a higher level.

Ask yourself why

Go is often a reflection of yourself, and the problems you have with Go are things that affect the rest of your life. I had one student who hated losing much more than normal. He would avoid games and reviewing and would mostly study. When we finally got down to the main reason, it was because he felt like his opponents would make fun of him if he lost and laugh at all the bad moves he played. This affected him in many areas of his life, not just Go. After over a year of working on this to think more positively about Go and his opponents, he started to have fun and improve. He told me he had similar results in the rest of his life.

For me, my pressure to win came from wanting to teach Go for a living. So I felt every loss or bad game would affect how many students I could get, make students leave, or even lead them to ask for a refund because they thought I was a fraud, because I lost one game to someone I shouldn’t have. When I showed up to tournaments, I was already stressed before the games even started. I had zero fun playing games, even online, or studying.

Once I realized this, I asked myself, do I want to make Go a job just to be miserable and not enjoy it? And my answer was no. So I switched my mindset to: I will have fun with Go, and if I cannot make a living with it, then that would be okay. After that, I improved while having fun; I got more students and was finally able to do Go full time. So just finding the right questions to ask and think about can change everything.

How to stop thinking about winning

Before the game even starts, ask yourself what you want to focus on. Let’s say you have been working on counting and keeping track of the score throughout the game. So you pick a goal of trying to count at least six times and getting to the end of the game, so you have more opportunities to count. By doing this, you will stop thinking about the result because that is not the goal you set before the game started.

At first, you might find yourself getting distracted and thinking about winning or losing. If you let this distraction continue, then you might still lose. But the worst part of this is that you did not practice what you wanted to, essentially wasting your time. To prevent this, start recognizing when your focus shifts toward worrying about winning or losing. Once you can recognize it, you can then tell yourself to stop. Remind yourself of your original goal and refocus on it. The more you practice this, the faster you can recognize it and switch. Over time, the distraction will happen less and less until it no longer happens.

Even when playing important games, like tournament or league games. You should not go into those games without a goal, or even worse, go in with your only goal being to win. This type of goal does nothing to help you. It will just make you play worse when you put too much pressure on yourself. Think about your style and skills. If you like to play solid and get to the end of the game, your goal is to build strong groups and reach the endgame. Keep the goal simple. If you like fighting and want to get an early lead, make your goal to keep your groups strong and your opponents’ groups weak. You have to be careful with some goals. If you fail to achieve that goal, you might spiral out of control and try to over complicate the game, leading to a quick loss.

In this case, you should add a second part to your goal. If I fail to achieve my goal or mess up, I should stay calm. If you have time, get up and walk for a bit to calm down. If you don’t have time, don’t allow yourself to go crazy and play random moves to get back into the game. This rarely works when playing someone of equal rank. One of my favorite quotes I’ve heard is “The first mistake does not cost you the game; the second one does.”

Instead of going crazy, try to find out how bad the situation really is. A lot of the time, it’s not as bad as you think. You can do this by counting the board and seeing if you are really behind. If you don’t have time for that, then play calm moves until you have figured out the situation. You will be surprised how often this lets you stay in the game, giving you a much better chance of winning.

What Go should be

Go should be about endless self improvement. Winning is something to be enjoyed, but losing should not be hated. In fact, losing shows you exactly what you need to do to improve. But people hide from it; they don’t want to review their games because it means looking at all the mistakes they made and facing them.

I know that not everyone is super into Go like I am, and they want to play it casually, and that is perfectly okay. But even then, it can still be used to improve yourself, even if your improvement on the board is slow.

What will be the first goal you set?