A Baduk Blog

(with a caveat at the end)

The secret is... deliberate practice (and lots of it).

As you can tell, I'm pretty bad at hiding secrets. Although, even if the answer is simple to state, much like weiqi itself, truly understanding it is more complex. So let's break it down.

Practice

You will never become a pro cyclist watching cyclists. It turns out, if you want to be good a cycling, you need to go out, get on you bicycle, and ride it. The same is true for Go.

But what constitutes practice in Baduk? Well, there are a lot of ways. Solving puzzles, memorizing openings, studying professional players are all things you can do. But the most important way is simply to play.

Thankfully, it is easier than ever to play Baduk these days. There are fantastic online servers such as OGS and maps were you can find an in-person meetups such as baduk.club.

Deliberate

Time spent merely doing something is not enough. Deliberate practice means practicing in a way that pushes your skill set as much as possible.

What constitutes deliberate? It means solving a Go problem without the aid of a computer. It means reviewing your games after you play them.

Another important concept here is one from educational theory called the “zone of proximal development.” The idea is that for progression to occur, you need to be pushing yourself the right amount. If you do things that are too easy or too difficult, then you won't get better.

And lots of it

“The greats weren't great because at birth they could paint, the greats were great because they paint a lot.” — Macklemore, from the rap song Ten Thousand Hours

Andy Lui, AGA 1 dan pro, can be seen playing 24 games of Go in 24 hours in the documentary The Surrounding Game. And it is well known that Korean and Chinese pros spent 10+ hours a day every day learning the game as a kid.

In my own experience, I went from 30 kyu to 3 kyu in 9 months because I was riding my bicycle across the United States. And so everyday I would exercise for many hours and then play Go in whatever town I was in or I would read Baduk book and do Weiqi puzzles. Rinse, wash, and repeat for months.

The caveat

I would be remiss if I did not mention the valid controversy around this bit of popular psychology. The 10,000 hour rule was popularized was Malcolm Gladwell and many people have come out against his work.

As it turns out, deliberate practice is very domain specific. Luckily for us, it just so happens that Baduk is probably the best domain for this type of thing.

“We found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions. We conclude that deliberate practice is important, but not as important as has been argued.” — A 2014 Princeton meta-analysis of 88 studies on deliberate practice

It is also a fact that natural talent actually does matter as well. And there are many other contributing factors which aren't actually fully understood.

But one thing is for sure, if you want to be good at Baduk, you need to play.

Find a club near you at wheretoplaygo.com