What do I have to do just to get to 5k?

[Fedya]

Speaking of that, a few months back I bought a couple of Go books via Amazon. To get to the size of the order where shipping is free, I added a ~$6 copy of the Nihon Ki-in Tesujis Encyclopedia. Except that it's the Chinese translation, and I don't speak Chinese (or Japanese). I figured it was simply going to be a problem book, and at the bargain price, why worry about a problem book being in a language I don't speak?

Except that it doesn't appear to be a problem book. Or at least, quite a few sections don't appear to be problems. I guess I'm just supposed to figure out why the sequences given are good?

[Bill Spight]

Speaking of that, a few months back I bought a couple of Go books via Amazon. To get to the size of the order where shipping is free, I added a ~$6 copy of the Nihon Ki-in Tesujis Encyclopedia. Except that it's the Chinese translation, and I don't speak Chinese (or Japanese). I figured it was simply going to be a problem book, and at the bargain price, why worry about a problem book being in a language I don't speak?

Except that it doesn't appear to be a problem book. Or at least, quite a few sections don't appear to be problems. I guess I'm just supposed to figure out why the sequences given are good?

If the sequence is one showing basic material, you should be able to figure out which sequences are good or bad. But I would think that, while it would contain some basic material, a lot of material in a tesuji encyclopedia would be advanced. Even so, trying to figure out which sequences are good or bad is not a bad exercise.

A few years ago I happened to be looking through a book I had read (sic) as a 4 kyu, and noticed some margin notes that indicated that I had completely misjudged one of the diagrams.

[daal]

One reason that things go wrong is that you lack the foundation to carry out your plans. Learn the basics.

I'm sure Fedya would love to, and so would many of us but nobody is willing to say what we should know inside and out in order for us to take your advice. In contrast to playing piano, there are no scales to play. In contrast to learning a language, there is no vocabulary to memorize. Instead, there are 70 books on my bookshelf all competing for attention. You have often spoken in the past of overlearning, which does bear some similarity to the above-mentioned disciplines, but what is the content?

For me personally, one of the big difficulties I have with "the basics" is that since I don't know how to prioritize the material, and don't have a clear idea of what I should drill, I inevitably forget a huge amount of what I've studied because it just doesn't get repeated often enough. In a recent discussion, the under-the-stones tesuji was discussed as an example of something that practically never occurs in games - so is this not a basic? My tsumego program (tsumego pro) seems to disagree, as it includes many under-the-stones problems in its set of basic problems.

You mentioned that there are some skills that Fedya has not mastered that others of his level do with ease. Isn't it obvious that the same goes for his opponent? Telling someone to learn the basics is not very specific, but I'm also not sure how much being specific helps either. At kyu level everyone has knowledge gaps and it often seems that time spent filling one is time spent forgetting another. There is simply an enormous amount of unsifted material, and no one knows how to sift it.

[Uberdude]

L and J groups.

[John Fairbairn]

I'm sure Fedya would love to [learn the basics], and so would many of us but nobody is willing to say what we should know inside and out in order for us to take your advice.

I think it's been said many times. Assuming we are talking about players who are well beyond the pure beginners' stage, it's making a big niche in whatever time you do use for practise for playing over pro games.

However, I do get the impression that many people seem to think this means serenely sitting before a kaya board methodically placing clamshells and slate according to a butterfly-bound edition of Go Seigen's collected games, all in the hope that by some magical osmosis the fragrance of great go will seep into the brain.

It's actually meant to be hard work with lots of reference to other books or other people. In some eays it's like writing an essay at college. You can crib whole paragraphs from the internet and might even absorb a titbit or two, or you can go the library, consult books, think about them, consult some more, write the essay, leave it then rewrite it. I need hardly say which method is more likely to help you learn the subject.

But in other ways, learning go is like learning a language. You can learn whole lists of vocabulary, much of which you may never use, or you can go to the country concerned, speak the language every day, and learn only the words you actually use and need. By definition you are learning what is basic for you.

If you study go, you can go to a classic tsumego collection and work hard at it. Not a total waste of time, but not very efficient. You'll learn under-the-stones patterns that you may never see in real life. The carpenter's square or a variation of it comes up very often (I did count once and I seem to recall it was about 4% of the time). Under-the-stones comes up close to zero times. In my experience most dan players can solve under-the-stones problems but almost none know the ins-and-outs of the carpenter's square (my self included )

But if you play over games and come to, say, a carpenter's square, and you are not sure about it, you look it up in your library, you maybe examine the variations on another board. You are still studying tsumego but, best of all, you see the position in the context of a real game and so don't learn just techniques but e.g. timing of life & death manoeuvres, their relation to other parts of the board (e.g. the different ways to connect the bigger L groups), comparative sizes, best plays to leave aji and ko threats. These are all basics because these are the things that come up most often, and you are seeing them in the precise frequency that they occur in real games, so your learning is as efficient as can be.

You can apply the same thinking to tesujis, fuseki, the endgame and everything else.

I'd suggest that the best question to put to other forums is what they recommend as reference works. Not books to read (although they have their place) but books that are well structured and well indexed, books that are comprehensive. I'm not entirely au fait with those in English but I think you need a joseki dictionary, a fuseki dictionary and Fujisawa's tesuji books to start with, and many other items you can find easily on Sensei's Library (e.g. you see a life & death position with a notch in a game - turn to notchers on SL and look it up - then go back to hard study of the game where you can reflect on how this position arose (from a systemic weakness?) and what effect it will have on the rest of the game. You can even look up things like players' styles on SL.

In short, I'm saying that it is useful to regard whatever comes up most often as the most basic.

[dfan]

The best books I've encountered on the basics (disregarding life and death, which of course is arguably the most important topic) are:

• Opening Theory Made Easy: general fuseki principles. I haven't looked at it in a while, but I bet it is at least approachable at 20k and I wouldn't be surprised to see 5ks violating its principles regularly. (Maybe I should take another look!)
• Lectures on Go Techniques: general principles for good shape and contact fights. My guesses for the levels of the three volumes are 10k, 5k, and 1d: the material in the first volume is pretty much instinctive to me by now, I have to remind myself about the things in the second volume, and the third volume has plenty that is unfamiliar to me yet. Lots and lots of examples of why bad moves are bad, which more books should emulate.
• Cho Hun-hyun's Lectures on the Opening: Like LoGT, but for fuseki principles. Unfortunately only one volume has been translated. If my recollection is correct I'd put it around 10k.
• Tesuji and Anti-Suji of Go: similar to LoGT. I'd put it somewhere between its 2nd and 3rd volumes in difficulty.
• Get Strong at Tesuji: hundreds of problems, many of which are shape-based. Worth taking your first stab at it at 10k. One shortcoming is that the explanations can be very terse.

I would particularly recommend going through Get Strong at Tesuji and the first couple of volumes of Lectures on Go Techniques every couple of months for a while. Note the problems you get wrong; those are the patterns you haven't internalized yet.

[Bill Spight]

You mentioned that there are some skills that Fedya has not mastered that others of his level do with ease. Isn't it obvious that the same goes for his opponent?

Fedya has a recurrent complaint that his opponents (presumably around the same level as he) can do things well that he can't, such as invade a framework. OC, since they are about the same level, there must be things that he is better at than they are. So for a long time I thought that he was having trouble with negativity and lack of confidence. But now I have come around to taking him at his word, that his opponents are better able to carry out their plans than he is. And, looking at his games, it seems clear that it is his lack of basic know-how that explains why that is. They know their basics better than he does.

That is actually good news for him. If his problems were mainly psychological, who knows what would be necessary for him to improve. But he can learn the basics of go. It may take him a year or two to learn enough to get to 5 kyu, but he can do it.

[RobertJasiek]

Fedya, to improve from KGS 6k/7k to (on average weak) KGS 5k, you must

1) learn from your own mistakes,
2) avoid the beginners' mistakes in fundamentals,
3) acquire a reasonable reading,
4) learn the basics of life and death.

You have asked
- "What's the best way to improve knowledge of good/bad shape?": At your level, this is part (2).
- "How do I improve my positional evaluation?": At your level, it is almost sufficient to defend the connection, life and stability of your weak important stones, maintain your major territories and otherwise choose the larger regions and see (2).
- "what to do with thickness." At your level, this is part (2).
- "I've also been going through Attack and Defense, but that obviously isn't helping much." This book is above your current level. First achieve (1) to (4).

See also http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewto ... 27#p211727

[Gotraskhalana]

For basics, you don't need much in the way of language, looking at the diagrams is pretty much good enough.

Thanks for your response. I have read it all, of course, but let me comment on this sentence that seems to me a key issue. There are children who learn to read by looking at words on the street and asking their parents what they mean and then figure it out by themselves. Those children would tell other children that it is enough to look at words to learn to read (and indeed, someone mentioned someone like Terence Tao trying to teach a fellow two year-old to read).

I think that's just it that not everyone will figure things out by themselves from example diagrams without someone pointing them to the relevant key patterns.

[Fedya]

And, looking at his games, it seems clear that it is his lack of basic know-how that explains why that is. They know their basics better than he does.

Probably starting with joseki, at least understanding which is the right joseki to choose in a given situation and what to do if my opponent deviates from what I know. I'd been thinking of posting another game here, since I've got a couple of recent games that feature me falling behind because I get a lousy position out of the joseki, which I'm guessing implies that I'm picking the wrong joseki. I have to go over the games more carefully, however.

I've also started going through Davies' Tesuji again.

[Bill Spight]

For basics, you don't need much in the way of language, looking at the diagrams is pretty much good enough.

I think that's just it that not everyone will figure things out by themselves from example diagrams without someone pointing them to the relevant key patterns.

If we are talking about basics, the diagrams show the relevant key patterns.

[Gotraskhalana]

If we are talking about basics, the diagrams show the relevant key patterns.

Of course they do. The question is what different people see.

An example: A colleague told me about a property of certain quadrilaterals and I asked for an example. I looked at it for ten seconds or so and my colleague exasperatedly said "How can you search for the quadrilateral? There are only four lines in this picture!". But I needed to look at it for some time to view the quadrilateral as object. It is hard to explain, but there is a non-trivial step in pattern recognition.

A go example: During a review on a big upright go board in a go club, the reviewer said at a certain moment. "The biggest point is here *click* because it makes good shape. However, Black played here. Now, the biggest point is here *click* because it destroys Black's chance at good shape." After that the two players had played a two-digit number of moves before they came around to play this point, and after every move, the reviewer played this point saying that it was the biggest point on the board and retracted it again to proceed. Not only have I not forgotten this shape, I recognize it immediately on the board without thinking. I don't think that seeing it in a book would have come close to this effect.

[Fedya]

So I won enough games on KGS that I got promoted back to 6K. I put up a challenge, and for the first time in months, got challenged to an even game by a 5k. I thought hard and felt like I did well, playing a good wedge on the left, making a nice moyo on the bottom by attacking the group on the bottom right, and fighting in the top right to kill a bunch of my opponent's stones. But when things settled down a bit and I was finally able to count rather than just making certain everything was alive, I realized I was slightly behind, and no matter what I was trying, I wasn't catching up.

Over the years I've had several games when I've reached 6k and get challenged by a 5k who decides to play at the same slowish pace I do. They tend to be some of the more interesting and enjoyable games, but with my usually losing by a small margin, in the single digits or so. This game was going the same way... until my opponent spotted a weakness in my moyo that I didn't see, enabling him to kill a half dozen of my stones. The one bright spot is that even if I had fixed that weakness, I still would have lost. It's too bad to have a game end that abruptly, but at least I didn't blunder a won game as far as I can tell.

On the other hand, I just can't figure where I went wrong to wind up with my opponent having a small lead that just wouldn't go away.

[Shaddy]

Black's play in the opening is generally ok except for 27 (must hane) and 59 (White cannot actually hold Black in. tsumego - find the way to break out).

[Fedya]

I thought about the hane on but rejected it because I was worried about the cross-cut.

And on I was trying to find a way to break out and kill those white stones on the edge, but kept seeing a shortage of liberties on my side.