Developing intuition
A couple of days ago, I found myself encouraging another player to play a few games everyday and review them, in order to develop "intuition". Intuition, believe it or not, is a very important tool in the Go world. At the lower levels, training intuition raises your level at an incredible rate; while playing by intuition some easy moves, players can avoid reading every move and save time for the important or complicated ones.
How to train intuition?
It's important that you keep on playing a regular amount of games each day... not too much, people usually recommend playing around 4-5 games and review them afterwards. In fact, the most important thing about playing is reviewing the games calmly on your own, to realise by yourself where did you do the mistakes. So, my opinion is: play as many games as you can review. If you have little time, play one game and review it, if you have the entire day, you can play 5 of them.
Though it is true that reaching 5k level without reading at all is not very common, there is no doubt that training intuition is very important at the beginning; personally, I think that I reached about 12k level just by intuition, and then stopped playing regularly. I guess I could have gone a little bit farther with it, but the lack of play led me to this 9k "platform" where I have been for the last months.
At the beginning it shows you good and bad shape as well as the direction of the game. As you keep growing, intuition marks you the correct time to attack and to defend, where to invade and where is your key point. Yes, you can do all these by reading, but you might want to save that minute for the next move.
Don't stop training intuition, you'll always learn something new from it.
