It's been a long time since I've posted here, but I've since started playing Go some more online (under two different accounts), as well as in real life (go clubs plus the 2008 Rocky Mountain Winter Go Tournament). I started playing again in December '07, and have had my 9k AGA rank reinsured through the recent tournament.
When coming back to playing Go, it's hard to realize where one stands with strategy and tactics, and where one needs the most work to realize their true rank once again. There's many topics that can be rust-covered and creaky, including but not limited to life and death, fuseki, joseki, tesuji, middle game tactics, end game efficiency, shape, sacrifice, snapbacks, capture races.... I could list any and all of the different topcs here.
It can be quite a task to determine which one can be doing the most harm to your game, since one topic may very well bleed into another. Poor understanding of fuseki can compromise your starting board position even if you know how to respond correctly to joseki, and bad choices in joseki can bleed over into bad shape or horrible middle game situations. With all of these topics stringing into one another, it can be difficult to choose a handful of things, or even just one, to focus and study on. However, here are some tips that can help if you feel yourself stagnating.
1) When in doubt, study Life and Death. We've all heard it as a 30k, and we'll still hear it as a 9d. A good knowledge of L&D incorporates many topics, such as reading out the board, determining living vs. dead shapes, and some beginning tesuki. Plus, if your groups don't live, it doesn't matter how strong you are in other tactics.
2) Review a couple of your recent games, and determine where massive point swings occurred. First, check your fuseki and joseki: if you're behind by a massive amount of points in the first 10-20 moves, then this is a serious problem and you need to focus here first. Second, check to see if you maintain your point value into the middle game: if this isn't the case, learn more about attack and defense. If the breakdown of your game happens in the transition between middle and end game, then tesuji, life and death, and endgame might need to be your focus.
3) Practice the art of tenuki, and determining big points vs. urgent moves. Go is a big game of chicken, and if you can take the big parts of the board and intimidate your opponent on the board, then it's more likely that you'll be able to take enough points for the lead.
4) Play some games with good friends, and review the resulting game with them. This is much easier to do in an online setting such as KGS, but it's also easy to do (at least for fuseki and joseki study) in real life. Real life review can also be good for your game as well, since you're forced to remember the moves that you've made, and in replaying those moves, you can more easily remember the major mistakes or awesome moves that you made. Plus, it's always good to have an objective voice that can help you identify weak points in your game.
5) If all else fails, study what you enjoy until your game stagnates, and then study that which you hate. For example, I love studying fuseki, and it just so happens that right now, I believe that's one of the weakest parts of my game according to my last couple of games (whether this is from distraction, lack of concentration, lack of confidence, or imbalance of my studying, I'm not certain). However, once I'm strong again in fuseki and re-evaluate my play, it may end up that I need to study more about tesuji, which is my least favorite thing to study, right next to life and death. However, if that's what I need to study to get past a stumbling point, then that's what I need to study.
6) Always remember that we all play go to have fun. If studying is getting you down or getting too serious that it's no longer entertaining, then take a break. Play some games for fun and don't care about the results. Grab some friends and play an exciting game of rengo. Challenge your memory skills by playing one-color go with a friend until everyone forgets the colors of the stones. There's lots of ways to have fun in this game, and it's not all about studying. :)
