Takemiya, Kobayashi, Go
I’m considering taking a look at the games of other pros, Kobayashi or even Cho Chikun. I’ve noticed something lately. If a game goes according to my “style” (omoyo), I play very well - perhaps at the 2-5 kyu level (a lot in rank depends on the server lately). However, when I am forced to play outside of my style, I really miss what’s happening and my direction of play is shot to hell.
In my opinion, this means that my intuition in fuseki is off when I’m thrown from my common openings. I believe that this means I need to start studying some pro games that are not omoyo based, but are instead territory or fighting based. Kobayashi Koichi, Cho Chikun, Hane Naoki, these are all good non-omoyo players!
My other problem is fighting… My reading is definitely getting better, but I have a tendancy to try too hard when fighting. This eventually leads to a fatal overplay that disrupts the game completely. I either need to learn fight avoidance (which is not a part of my fighting spirit) or learn to read even better! I’m studying “1,2,3 everybody come solve Tsumego 1000 problems” Tsumego book (Literally, １２３大家來解詰棋1000題) for my “easy” and “medium” level problems (yet hard for beginners up to 10k). For the hard problems, I’m looking at Segoe’s tesuji dictionary. These are MUCH harder, though I can solve many of the “C” level problems (and even a few “A” problems that I think are mislabeled ;)).
All the tsumego does have the effect where I try my hardest to capture stones that cannot be killed. This is another problem with fighting spirit - I need to find the border between “Fighting Spirit” and the suicide brought on by going berzerk.
After all, Go is about Balance. Perhaps the “perfect game,” if there is such a thing, is a jigo (though that last half point of komi must be hard to overcome ;)).