A Nervous Wreck

My head has been all over the place lately, so I’ve been taking a step back from things and just trying to clear my head. So one of the things I did was remove myself from spending time watching amateur games and focus more on professional games. In the process of doing so, something became painstakingly clear to me: I’ve become a nervous wreck.

While I was going over the first game in Breakthrough Attacking Power: Yamashita Style, something interesting happened to me. I had just played out a sequence and noticed that the position felt disadvantageous*. Before I knew it, my brain starting firing panicking neurons and I was feeling like the game was lost. Now keep in mind that I’m reviewing a professional game, so it’s not like I’m even playing. Yet for some reason, I was still feeling this panicking feeling? And on top of it, I thought a disadvantageous position was equivalent of a loss game? Not good…

In case I really don’t know what the proper remedy is for this situation just yet. I’ll probably be upping my dosage of meditation and introspection, and I think I might continue reviewing professional games at the same time to give myself real examples of games that seem disadvantageous that are still perfectly playable. Either way, I definitely need to take a step back and really reassess things.

*To clarify, it’s not that it was actually disadvantageous, Black had just taken a lot of territory early on and White was primarily focused on a power game. Sigh. This just goes to show you how bad it’s gotten for me. My style of go is not even territorial! Haha. Oy vey how far I’ve fallen… xD