The Completely Free Path
Download KaTrain to Analyze your games
KaTrain is a free and powerful cross-platform application to analyze your games. Here is the main screen:
After downloading your games from where you play Go, you can load it into KaTrain. Then to find your biggest mistakes, just press the right red arrow (circled). KaTrain will move to the next serious mistake by black or white. At this point you can press “e” or select “Top Moves” in the menu to see the best move compared with the game move.
This alone has showed me time and time again where I made mistakes.
Download ShareX to easily take screenshots of your game positions
ShareX is my favorite tool to make screenshots with. Download it and get familiar with its functions for making screenshots.
Download Anki to make flashcards of your mistakes
Anki is a program that allows you to make flashcards and then review them so you dont make the same mistakes. Download it and each time you make a serious mistake make a screenshot of the position one move before your mistake, and then put the correct move in the answer part of the flashcard.
New Useful Deck Just Discovered
In browsing a thread at Life in 19×19, I found this Ankiweb deck and the first problem alone was something I simply did not know the answer to.
Use quality web resources
So far in my current attempts to improve the following web resources were useful:
Shygost’s list keeps me disciplined in how I choose a move.
Over time, the way I use his algorithm for move selection has changed but the basic instructions are valuable. They keep you from making emotional/irrational moves. Here is An example of me working through a position using his list. A brief version of his list is:
- Am I OK? If not defend, perhaps with a contact move
- Is opponent OK? If not attack, understanding that attack can often come from afar
- Otherwise, play a big move
Josekipedia helps me with certain corner positions
In this thread I received a link to Josekipedia which was useful.
Paid Resources
Just Go
I’m very pleased with the purchase of the Just Go software. Because you are buying it on Steam, there is a return policy. Tt is a very unified approach to improving your game in one place – analysis, problems, online play all in one very completely beautiful interface.
And it has the explicit intent of taking you from where you are to dan-level.
I dont have money for any sort of recurrent billing. So one-time purchases like this that last for months or years are my best option.
Other Approaches
Quite often a beginner will be seeking help at reddit baduk. A good number of strong players will weigh in with different advice.
- “So … that’s the first 100 ranked games done. I’m sitting at 19k. is Go Magic a good next step to study Go?”