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BGonline.org Forums
help with training on snowie/gnu
Posted By: Daniel Murphy In Response To: help with training on snowie/gnu (Daniel Murphy)
Date: Thursday, 24 September 2009, at 11:59 p.m.
Couple or three more thoughts:
(1) Your bot gives you a good game but the same game every time. Opening 5-2: Gnubg 2-ply will bring two down every time (but 0-ply and 3-ply will split). Are you ready for 13/8 24/22 and 13/8 13/11? And perhaps there should be room in your training schedule for thinking about what to do in response to 13/8 6/4 (and not only because you might someday meet a confident player prepared to walk all over you with that move)?
(2) Some memorization of plays can't hurt, but one study goal should be to understand and internalize the reasons behind the plays and how they direct and channel your responses and strategies. You want to play confidently with understanding. As a simple example, everyone knows how to play opening 3-1. And it's fine to have memorized that in response you're going to split with nearly every nonpointmaking number. But it's even better to also see that 8/5 6/5 creates a semiweakness by temporarily stripping the eight point, which makes your split less dangerous now but probably more dangerous later. Awfully obvious, perhaps, but the little thought involved reveals a theme -- playing against stripped points -- which ought to be useful to your play deliberations in many more situations than just this simple opening sequence.
(3) Recently someone wrote that they like to play -- I think it was 4-3 or 3-2 down -- because that seemed to generate more errors in response than splitting. That'd be my studying cue to review my own responses to 4-3 down, to make sure I wasn't one of those obliging opponents!
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