How to Improve Your Rank — What to Practice and How Much

Playing Go for a long time doesn't make you stronger on its own. Plenty of people stay at the same rank for years. It isn't a question of time but of what you do.

Beginner to intermediate Go · about 8 minutes to read

Why playing games alone doesn't make you stronger

It seems as if just playing game after game should make you better, but in reality it rarely does. The reason is that you keep repeating the same mistakes.

During a game it's hard to tell where you went wrong. All that's left is the result — a loss — and you play the next game without knowing why you lost. Play like that 100 times and you'll keep going wrong in the same spot.

For games to mean something, they need to come with a process for finding where you went wrong. That is reviewing.

How to balance the three

Practice falls into three broad parts: life and death, real games and reviewing. For beginner and intermediate players, roughly this balance works well.

• Life and death 50% — the surest way to improve, and you can do it even in short bursts
• Real games 30% — check what you've learned on the board
• Reviewing 20% — find where you went wrong in your games

It varies from person to person, but most people play far too many games. Playing two games and solving twenty life-and-death problems a day will make you stronger much faster than playing five games.

Life and death — the most honest part of Go

The reason we recommend life and death is that each problem has one right answer. Opening styles are a matter of taste and joseki depend on the situation, but in life and death you are either right or wrong. So you improve exactly as much as you solve.

Life-and-death skill is ultimately reading, and reading is used in every phase of the game: when capturing stones, when judging whether you can cut, when counting endgame values. Solving life-and-death problems is really reading training.

How to solve them properly

1. Read in your head instead of placing stones. Solving by actually putting stones on the board isn't training.
2. Check the whole correct sequence. Getting only the first move right and moving on means you've learned only half. Look at how the opponent resists and how you answer.
3. Mark the problems you miss and solve them again. If you miss one again a few days later, that type of problem is a weak spot.
4. Don't hang on to problems that are too hard. If you can't solve one in five minutes, it's better to look at the answer and understand it.

Reviewing — the step most people skip

Going back over a lost game isn't fun, so most people skip it. Yet this is where you improve fastest.

What to look for when reviewing

You don't need to go through the whole game. It's enough to find the one point where the game tilted.

• Games where a large group died — where those stones first got into danger. The cause is usually long before the capture.
• Games lost on territory — in which stage the gap opened up: the opening, a middle-game fight or the endgame.
• Games lost by half a point or a few points — somewhere in the endgame you played in the wrong order.

On this site, games you play while logged in are saved automatically, so you can review them move by move in your game records. You can revisit them on the game records page, so we recommend making a habit of looking through your losses the same day.

Using the AI for review

Reviewing on your own, you may get as far as "this looks like the problem" but not be sure. One way to settle it is to play the same position again against the AI. Restart from the position where things went wrong and try a different move, and you can see whether it really was better.

What to work on at each level

Beginners to the 20s kyu

This is the stage for learning the rules and getting a feel for the game. We recommend handicap games with plenty of stones. Playing even from the start, it's easy to be wiped out before you can do anything; with a few stones down first, the game holds together long enough for you to see what's going on.

At this stage, the experience of capturing and being captured is itself the lesson. Getting used to liberties and atari comes before counting territory.

15 kyu to 10 kyu

This is when you start reducing your handicap. The goal at this level is not letting your large groups die. It's also the point at which to start studying life and death seriously.

Fix the habits described in 8 Common Beginner Mistakes one at a time — playing in contact, chasing with atari, adding moves to living groups — and you'll climb through this range fairly quickly.

10 kyu to 5 kyu

Once your large groups stop dying so often, the next bottleneck is seeing the whole board. Telling big points from urgent ones and the width of extensions, covered in Opening Basics, are the goals for this range.

It's also time to start learning the endgame, because from this range on you'll lose more games by just a few points.

5 kyu to 1 kyu

Your fundamentals are in place. What separates players here is judgment: the ability to count whether you're winning or losing right now and decide accordingly whether to play safe or take a risk.

Handicap games against stronger opponents are especially helpful in this range.

Habits that lead to a plateau

Only playing opponents you can beat

Winning feels good, but you learn nothing. You improve best at around a 50% win rate. Losing about half your games is normal.

Playing too fast

If you play without thinking, no amount of games will make you stronger. You need the habit of stopping to read, even for 30 seconds, at important moments.

Never looking at your losses

The one mentioned above. It's the most regrettable waste of all.

Only memorizing joseki

However many joseki sequences you memorize, you can't adapt them if you don't know the reasons. As Introduction to Joseki says, two or three joseki are plenty for beginner and intermediate players; that time is better spent on life and death.

How long does it take?

It varies, but here's a rough idea. Starting from knowing just the rules, with proper practice you can reach around 10 kyu within a few months. Getting from there to 1 kyu takes longer, and reaching dan level is another matter again.

The important thing is that plateaus will definitely come. Progress tends to stall for weeks and then jump up a level all at once. Just don't quit during the times when you feel you're not improving.

Summary

1. Do more life and death than games. Two games plus life-and-death problems beats five games.
2. Look at each loss once the same day. You only need to find the one point where the game tilted.
3. Play opponents you beat about 50% of the time. If you only win, you won't improve.
4. Stop and read at important moments.
5. Don't quit during a plateau. Improvement comes in steps.