Hey everyone,

So, while I'm not a total newbie, I am VERY bad at Go However I really love the game and want to improve. I bought quite a few supplies to get me started.

I have a real go board and stones, An application called "smart go" and some books.

The issue is, I have no idea where to start.

I used to be good at chess. When studying it, you could study openings, tactics (where you solve a problem by looking for the best move), theory, endgame etc.

Is there any way to study these areas and if so, where should I start?

Lastly, for chess, there are many sites such as this one http://www.chess.com/ Are there any Go sites with learning material?

Thanks in advance for your time and consideration!

http://www.go4go.net/go/ is nice!

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https://gogameguru.com/ is a good site for learning information.

Focus on tsumego. At 20k, there's not much point in trying anything else. The returns for time spent are going to be much lower for anything else.

Knowing how to kill something, or how to survive, is going to give you more wins than anything else.

There's tasuki's go problem sets (probably a little much unless you want a real challenge) and goproblems.com as well as gochild.

This is a pretty nice set of problems online for beginners: https://online-go.com/puzzle/5

I find tsumego quite boring, and not at all useful for learning the game.

While, as an intermediate level kyu player, I do indeed realize their importance in becoming a stronger player, they are still boring and I believe still not helpful to actually learn the game.

The really elementary dead shape ones are useful when starting out though, as your opponents will present many opportunities to apply that training.

You can see immediate benefits very early on from tsumego, later on it's not as obvious that it's helping a lot of the time.

Sensei's Library is a wiki devoted to go with a lot of good information (and some bad, as you might expect from a wiki)

I play go online at DGS for correspondence games and KGS for real-time.

The Go Teaching ladder lets you get your games reviewed, which you can also do on this forum if you like. The GTL is a bit more thorough, but also slower.

In my opinion the best way to get better at go in the double digit rankings is to play as many games as possible. The more mistakes you make the more you learn. If you dont play much you wont learn. Its like a process of elimination in which you are eliminating bad moves and finding good ones. Typicallu if you look at what seperates kyus from dans you'll see that many of the dan players have played thousands of games. They might even play as many as three hundred games in a month or ten games a day. It takes dedication:)

I disagree. Playing games is necessary, but not sufficient. Looking back, the times where I played more and studied less were always the times I had the slowest progress. From the advice I got, many stronger players agree with that.

You can play plenty and still miss entirely your most important mistakes if you don't get reviews from stronger people. I still miss my most critical errors on a regular basis when I review my own games.

And even at 20k, basic tsumego and tesuji problems are very useful to progress. Other DDKs *will* use 3-3 invasions, monkey jumps, snapbacks and nakade shapes on you. Figuring that stuff out just from your own play without reviews or problems can be quite hard and slow.

Of course you need to play too, to apply that knowledge and build practical experience. But I'd never advise anyone beyond absolute novice to do nothing else.

I decided to read the serie "Graded Go Problems For Beginners" GradedGoProblemsForBeginners and I really like the way the book is structured.
There are all sort of problems in that book, life and death, opening, connect/separate stones and so on

I started from the book one, which is a bit too easy for me, but I don't care, I really wanted to start from the begining.

I was pretty sure I can make an easy 100% of correct reply on the first book, but I was wrong, I still missed a few one... all having to do with false eye.
Only that information is woth the price of the book for me (gobook are not that expensive IMO).

I'm now with the second one, which is still quite easy but I enjoy the lecture very much. it's quite an addictive serie of books.

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Converting the book Shape UP! by Charles Matthews/Seong-June Kim
to the gobook format. last updated april 2015 - Index of shapes, p.211 / 216

I would vote for Senseis Library as well. Pick your way through some of the basic theory, just to know what it is. Play a few games. Try to review your games (go teaching ladder is nice) and watch other players playing on the internet. For instance - 10kyu games will probably be understandable for you, and give you some ideas.

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North Lecale

Great advices!

Also don't forget to regularly practice by playing.

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I'm a Chess intermediate and Go beginner player

@ ManofKaya: Best thing to do at your level - in addition to playing games regularly - is to do lots of easy tsumego to reinforce the ability to analyze positions on a Go board. For now concentrate on capturing, tesuji, and life & death tsumego, since these three categories form the basis for everything else in Go. Also, replay pro games from start to finish to begin developing whole-board thinking and absorb good playing habits that can be applied in your games. Do not expect to be able to analyze pro games in any depth until you have spent at least a year playing Go. As for choice of pro player when replaying pro game records, Chen Yaoye (a 9th degree professional player from China) and Hon'inbo Shusaku (a famous Japanese player from the 19th century), are good choices, although in practice the choice is yours. It's just that for a beginner playing styles that emphasize the development of "thick" positions - positions both large-scale and small-scale that have very few vulnerabilities that can be exploited by the opponent - are easier to learn and apply. Both of the aforementioned players' games exhibit a preference for this kind of playing style.

Some beginners may have difficulty replaying games from a diagram, which is how most game records are formatted. Click on the following link for a few games in coordinate list format, which may be easier to use.
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=11764

play a lot

once you get to a certain level (lets say 9k) ask yourself what you would like to achieve.

if you want to be a high dan, look into lessons (but know that it will take a long time).

if you want to become a dan, ask your self in what time frame you want to see it. anything less than 3 years i would suggest a teacher. anything more you might be able to do without a teacher.

if you want to get just a middle level kyu, you can do that just by playing more and self study. time frame matters, but not as much.

"looking to improve" is a vague question to be honest. you need to have at least some sort of goal.

If you have a smartphone or tablet, the Wbaduk app has thousands of free problems, many of them at your level and probably quite a few that are easy for you. The user interface can be annoying, since there is no way to give up and see the answer. You just have to keep guessing until you find the right sequence or skip the problem.



I don't think is true. I myself made it from total beginner to 9k without hardly ever have solved tsumego, and definitely not in an attempt at serious study. I am sure there are may of us who did our initial growing in other ways. I have a kind of obsessive personality, so when I find something to be excited about I do little else until my enthusiasm wavers. By playing many games a day, and browsing the Beginners Pages at Sensei's Library I made it to 9k in a matter of 4 or 5 months.



I disagree with this quite soundly (or else misunderstand what you are saying). I have found that tsumego are great for improving your real game, especially of you have hit your natural "wall" (the level that you can reach without any special effort or study). My natural wall was about 5k. About a year and a half after starting go, and being at 5k for nearly a year without any improvement, I decided to buckle down and study to try and force my way to shodan. I did this mostly by playing regular serious games and reviewing them, doing lots of tsumego (especially tesuji), and reading more theory books. I only kept up a the regimen for two months, but I gained a stone of strength each month, bringing me to my current rank of 3k. I stayed at 3k again for over a year, and eventually stopped playing for 6 months. Then I watched Hikaru no Go again, and it fired me up. I jumped back in, and I am studying regularly with tsumego and lots of games and reviews. I recently regained the rank of 3k (I had dropped to 4k after my break) and I feel ready to shoot up to 2k, but we will see.

I hope that you find some benefit to the story of my progress this far. Certainly everyone will progress differently. Everyone will have different things that excites them, or bores them. Some things simply may not work for you. There are no wrong ways of getting stronger. Try out all of the suggestions we have given you and find out what works for you. One more suggestion that I don't think I have seen on this thread yet - Have you tried the Advanced Study League? It is a KGS league where you can get in many serious games, and pretty much everyone should be willing to give you a review afterwards. Good luck!

yes, they help you "improve" -- but they don't help first-time beginners learn the basic rules of the game.

perhaps my original comment was misplaced.

There may indeed have been a misunderstanding. For a novice, playing lots of games is essential to begin internalizing basic skills learned through solving exercises and, in the case where the beginner anticipates games on 19x19 grid board, replaying of pro games. This reminds me of the beauty of capture Go for beginners; a beginner can play lots of games without having to know more than the rule of liberties and capture. If something else is preferred, one can play plenty of games on 5x5 and 7x7 boards. Just play regular game, with no passing. Simply play on until one side runs out of liberties and loses the game. This is a good way to internalize the importance of accumulating liberties, whether through the surrounding of empty points or of stones, and the instinct for when to stop playing.