The fastest way to plateau at five-in-a-row is to never review your own play. Casual sessions drift; you make moves, lose track of which sequences you actually tried, and repeat the same mistakes next session. The fix is simple in principle — record each round, study the losing moves afterward — but the medium you choose has real consequences for how consistent that review actually is.
This piece compares three ways to keep a practice log and analyze your games: pen and paper, a generic spreadsheet, and a browser-based interactive board. Each has honest trade-offs, and the right choice depends on whether your bottleneck is discipline, depth of analysis, or speed of feedback.
Why a Practice Medium Matters More Than It Looks
Most beginners treat five-in-a-row as a single sitting: place stones until someone wins, reset, go again. There is no memory between games, no review of the move that actually lost, and no way to recognize a pattern like "I keep losing after move 18 on the upper-left." After fifty such games, you have played a lot and learned little.
Record-keeping changes that. Once every position is preserved, you can revisit the exact moment a loss occurred, mark branches you did not try, and see whether your instincts in similar setups have improved. The medium you pick changes how often you actually do this work.
The constraint, for working engineers specifically, is time. We are used to tooling that lets us script repetitive checks, diff two states, and get feedback in seconds. A game session should not feel like a chore that competes with everything else. Choosing the lightest setup that still gives you durable review artifacts is the real engineering decision here.
Option 1: Pen and Paper
Paper is the most portable option and the easiest to start. One sheet per game, a small grid drawn by hand, dots for black and circles for white. No setup cost, no screen, no accounts.
The trade-offs show up quickly. Photocopying a clean grid is tedious, and once you want to mark candidate lines, arrows, and priority points, the page becomes cluttered. Searching across games is impossible — flipping through notebooks is slow, and there is no easy way to filter "every game where I lost playing black." Storage degrades too: a coffee spill on the wrong page, and a whole session of analysis is gone.
For someone who plays once a week at a café, paper is fine. For anyone trying to spot patterns across dozens of games, it stops scaling. Use it as a default for the first ten sessions, then reassess.
Option 2: A Spreadsheet of Coordinates
The spreadsheet is the natural step up. One row per move, with columns for turn number, color, x, y, and a notes field. Anyone comfortable with cell formulas can compute quick statistics: average game length, win rate by color, most-played opening coordinates.
This gives you durability, search, and the ability to chart. It also asks more of you on the input side. You have to translate every visual position into numbers, which introduces two failure modes. First, transcription errors — a mistyped coordinate that you only notice weeks later when the analysis breaks. Second, slow entry — pausing after each move to fill a cell drags the rhythm of the game.
Spreadsheets shine when the board itself is not the artifact you care about, only the move history. If your goal is to answer questions like "what is my win rate when I open at the center versus the corner," coordinate data is enough.
If your goal is to walk through a tricky position visually, mark threats, undo a move and try an alternate branch, you have outgrown what a sheet can do cleanly. At that point, the sheet becomes a record of moves you have already analyzed somewhere else.
Option 3: A Browser-Based Interactive Board
This is where a tool fits naturally. Instead of entering coordinates manually, you place pieces on a visual grid with a click, and the board itself becomes the stored artifact. Undo, redo, branch exploration, and move-numbering come built in, so the friction shifts from transcription to actual study.
The trade-off is that you are committing to a specific tool's data format and feature set. If you switch later, you may need to export and re-import. That said, for solo practice the lock-in is mild, and the time you save on entry and review outweighs the portability concern.
A practical workflow looks like this:
- Pick a tool that lets you save games as you play them, step backward without losing state, and leave small text notes beside each move.
- Play a focused session of three to five games with a single opening in mind — say, the parallel three or the diagonal two-plus-two.
- After each game, immediately mark the move where you felt the game turn.
- End of session: open each saved position, try one alternative branch per loss, and note the result.
If you are evaluating tools, the online five-in-a-row practice guide at Lizely walks through which features actually matter when you are reviewing alone versus when you are studying with a partner, and which browser boards support undo history well enough to be worth your time.
A useful sanity check on any board tool: try its undo function. If it rewinds to a clean position with correct turn color restored, you can trust it for branch analysis. If it leaves artifacts (wrong color on a stone, stale markings), treat the review output with suspicion. The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines discuss why visible state indicators matter for any interactive surface in their perceivable principles section, which is also a good lens for "is this board showing me what it claims to be showing me."
Which Medium for Which Situation
Here is a quick rule of thumb drawn from the trade-offs above.
If you play fewer than five games a week and never expect to revisit them, paper is fine. The friction is low and the artifact cost is zero. Skip the spreadsheet entirely.
If you play five or more games a week and want to answer questions about your own patterns — opening tendency, late-game collapse points, color bias — a spreadsheet is the lightest durable option. Pair it with a simple board-rendering SVG or canvas in your notes so you can glance at the shape of a position when needed.
If you are actively trying to fix specific weaknesses (you keep missing the four-four split, you always let a straight four through), the bottleneck is visual analysis, not statistics. Use a browser board with undo and per-move notes. The spreadsheet still has a role as a session log, but the board carries the analysis load.
Two more judgment calls worth naming. The first is the partner dynamic. With another person, a shared board that lets you both click stones in real time, or at least export a portable record, is worth the setup cost. Paper is fine for in-person play but bad for asynchronous review. The second is the device you practice on. A laptop on a real desk encourages the kind of slow, careful review five-in-a-row rewards. A phone on the train is fine for live games but brutal for position study, because you cannot see threats well at thumbnail scale.
A Lightweight Review Routine That Works on Any Medium
Whatever you record with, the same review discipline applies. Without it, even a perfect transcript is wasted.
The routine below is order-sensitive; do the steps in this sequence or the time cost roughly doubles.
- Within five minutes of finishing a game, write one sentence about why you lost — or, if you won, the move that seemed to decide it. This is faster than full analysis and forces a hypothesis.
- Once a week, scan your week of sentences. Group them by recurring words: "missed a four," "let a fork through," "drifted after move 20." Those groups are the next things to study.
- Pick one group per week and drill it. Either replay five positions where that pattern showed up, or set up an isolated exercise: board, your stones only, find every straight three your opponent has.
- Replay one full game from last week at quarter-speed, marking every move you would change. Keep the original record untouched; make a new layer of analysis beside it.
That last step is the one most people skip, and it is the one that compounds fastest. You are not changing history; you are building a comparison between what you did and what you now think you should have done. Six months of that, and the difference is visible. The Wikipedia entry on five-in-a-row is a useful reference for the canonical opening patterns worth drilling against.
Frequently asked questions
How many games should I record before reviewing them?
Single-game review is the highest-leverage habit, but it is also the easiest to skip when tired. If you cannot face the replay immediately, batch three to five games and spend twenty minutes on the set once a week. The compound effect of one weekly batch is close to per-game review, with much better adherence.
Is there a downside to using a browser tool for everything?
Yes: you begin to lose fluency in reading a printed board, which still matters in club or tournament play. At least once a month, print a finished position from your tool and read it cold, the way you would an unfamiliar setup. The skill transfers; the dependency does not.
Can I combine a spreadsheet and a board?
That combination is often the strongest setup. Spreadsheet carries the metadata you want to query — win rate, opening frequency, color bias — and the board carries the visual review. The cost is double entry, but if you load games from the board into the sheet through a simple copy of coordinates, the overhead is small.
What is the single biggest mistake to avoid?
Treating any of the three media as a substitute for actually replaying your losses. No tool, no log, no chart improves your play until you sit with the position that beat you and try one different move than the one you played. That is the entire job.
This article was drafted with AI assistance and reviewed for technical accuracy before publishing.
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