Monday, April 02, 2007

Atari Blindness

A few days ago, I played a game where I suffered from total atari blindness in the first 50 moves. I managed to not have ONE case where I missed an atari, totally missed it, but TWO of them! Badly missed as in being very surprised when those stones were taken off the board...

Very weird, both of those were not very complicated reading situations either. I saw the glaring mistakes, and the atari without any trouble in review.

Makes me wonder how this could have happened. Was I trying to read too deep and too fancy and not looking at the basics? Was I not in the right go playing mindset yet (this was a daytime game, with kids interruptions) Do I just need to do 10,000 more simple problems and this issue will be solved?

It's interesting. This doesn't happen very often to me anymore, so I was uber annoyed to have it happen two times during one game.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe you were thinking too much about the rest of the board or what was going to happen next? That's usually when I make the worst mistakes. I plan a wonderful strategy that's sure to win me the game (at least in my head) except I don't look at the reality of the board and don't see the obvious immediate threat.

Anonymous said...

Not sure of what caused it in your case (either too relaxed or too concentrated on the game?), but I think it's just one of those things that can happen eveny now and then to anybody: I've seen professionals missing atari, and top insei missing atari in the final qualification tournament, so I don't think there is any cure to it.

Unknown said...

Hmmm, ok, so I guess I'll just accept it as something that occasionally happens and not beat myself up over it if it's a rare occurrence.

At least I am in good company, with the 30k's and the professionals ^^

Nanny

Anonymous said...

I've been reading your wonderful blog for more than a year it's always a great source of inspiration/motivation for me.

As for missing ataris - it could be because of some health problem, for example with your spine.

Jay said...

That's exactly what happened to me in my last rated game. Two captures that just stunned me when they occurred. And in my case I was extremely relaxed and confident about my position and focused completely on the sente moves I had coming up. Then SMACK back to reality.

Anonymous said...

+) is this a tesuji?
-) to me, it looks like a 'self-atari' ^^