My pace of improvement at Go has clearly slowed. There's fewer easy fixes to my game. My losses are coming less and less from close-fighting blunders or forgetting to connect some group and more from strategic lapses so it's harder to make improvement form just playing. I bought Kageyama's Fundamentals of Go and I'll be trying to work through that book. I am also still periodically working on Go Dojo. I went through Contact fights and now I'm working on Sector fights, although on this first pass, I'm really just browsing the material, rather than studying it. It's sort of the way I used to study math. I'm more curious what there is to learn than actually interested in learning it. It seems in Go, though, that progress without sweat is an impossibility so I'm going to have to buckle down if I really want to improve. I am now around 14k on KGS. I think my experience is not too dissimilar from some others that started around the same time as I did. It will be interesting to see where we hit our walls.
An area that I could definitely improve on is the opening. I'm not exactly sure how Go compares to chess in terms of the number of 'rote' openings one needs to know. I think it's a much wider game tree, but there are 'building blocks' of opening joseki or standard sequences that you sort of fit together to form opening plans, it seems. Of course, I'm just sort of winging it right now but when I play GnuGo I routinely get trashed in the first 15 moves so there's probably some work to be done there.
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