Four Questions Before Placing Your Stone
(according to Gerald Westhoff 6d)

Gerald once visited me on his way from one place to another, and we became friends … this is what he taught me in the short time we had, hope you find it useful. Spread far and wide if you like.



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BTW Gerald says you can see him in in the Gent (Belgium) Go club where he is teaching these principles and also the exceptions.

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Greetings, Tom

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Ahh, the golden rules!

I heard you get few stones just by remembering to apply the rules every time.

I find it odd that I have never heard a player who learned the game in Asia quote these. It would be interesting to know the origin.

Well, I know that Gerald lived in Japan for some time and studied Go there (with Fujisawa Shuko, IIRC), I will ask him about this.

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Asked him, and as I understand, these questions grew out of his experience with teaching Go to kids, based on many years of playing and learning Go.

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Hi Calvin,

It's because such checklist methods have pros and cons (as I pm'd Tom ).
My feeling is adults, especially adult beginners in the West,
would be likely to come up with these lists.
I didn't know of Gerald until this post,
but I had encountered similar lists over a decade ago.

Thanks for inquiring. The formulation appears in similar wording from other Western amateurs with the same story. While it is possible that they independently came to the same conclusions and developed similar ways of expressing it, it is tempting to speculate that there ought to be earlier precedents. I just want to make sure the progenitor isn't some drunken 1 kyu in a pub in 1860.

You mean … from other Westerners who also lived in Japan for years and studied with a strong local teacher like Gerald did? (with Fujisawa Hideyuki aka “Shuko”, IIRC in the 1980s)

Gerald is (or was) 6 Dan (EGF), see here.

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

One of the strongest in the lot is Troy Anderson, who was an insei in Japan, so I was wondering if this is a variation of something that was commonly taught in Japan around that time frame or earlier. If someone said, "oh, yeah, Shuko used to say that, but he left out this step and said this one differently" then that's interesting.

One of the issues with heuristics for go, which are not so hard to generate, is sorting out those that don't require later unlearning.

Here defending before attacking sounds fine; but in fact you should not always defend your weakest group just because often you should sacrifice it instead. Deciding when to sacrifice a group illustrates another problem with heuristics: it is more difficult to understand sacrifices than strength or weakness of groups, at least in the broad-brush way. Explanations of how to play can hide deeper concepts behind shallower ones.

This is a key point, but in the case of western go I think the problems are often of our own making.

I see two very common sources of the problem. One is an obsession with lists/flow charts/precision/comprehensiveness. The other is mistranslation.

To take the first first: lists or flow charts can be useful on paper; they are useless in the brain. In the present case the Japanese advice for the whole of the same topic would be boiled down to something like 弱い石から　- (start) with weak group(s). This very, very common elliptical style might be called newspaper-headline style, their equivalent of our "Man bites dog." Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this style in Japanese, where articles and plurals are absent to start with, is omission of the verb. The reader is meant to supply it and he can (and will) supply a different verb according to circumstances, or even a range of verbs. This is so ingrained in Japanese that advertisers use the same style to trigger multile subconscious responses.

So, in the present case, the Japanese go player can start off thinking of 'defend' weak groups first, 'attack' them, 'think about' them, 'use' them, 'sacrifice' them. He is actively using his other go knowledge, for example that it is usually best to consider your own groups first. We might say that he is using a mindmap rather than a list, a neural network rather than a flow chart.

If a piece of advice can be encapsulated in this mindmap-friendly way, it doesn't really need to be unlearned. The brain will apply the necessary weightings as experience grows. The important point is that connections are made and then optimised.

It is not a case of the Japanese being cleverer than us at this. It is simply that in go they have been at it longer - heuristic pebbles have been polished smooth. The nuggets of wisdom have also become standardised, so that connections can be shared more easily. There is a wider range of associated material available, so that more connections can be generated. In contrast, in the west we tend to have several different versions of the same proverb, which tends to make the concept unravel. Some people try to put the threads back together by making lists, which actually makes the problem worse. And of course we lack much of the supporting bedrock.

The second issue I mentioned - poor translations - is really just a sub-set of the first. To take another example involving what may be the most important trigger word, から (kara), we have the Japanese proverb　ｻﾊﾞｷはﾂｹから. I have seen various renderings of this in English. A typical one would be: "To make sabaki, attach!" In other words, play an attachment first. This is not exactly wrong, perhaps, but it is certainly inadequate. It leads western players robotically to play an attachment whenever they see the need to settle a weak group (and that tendency is exacerbated by a constant diet of blitz games where knee-jerk moves are prized). The Japanese player would instead be 'thinking about' an attachment first, 'probing' first, or a host of other things based on his experience. The end result on the board may often be the same, but the extra dimensions given by the mindmapping approach seem likley to result in a few stones extra strength over time.

Another aspect of translation is one I alluded to in another thread recently. 'Position' in 'positional judgement' doesn't really tell us much. The Japanese equivalent 形勢 comes pre-loaded with a host of useful connections going back even as the Art of War.

What we do to remedy our situation I'm not sure, since time is a big part of the answer. But I do think an early part of the answer is to stop making lists, and to stop pointing out that proverbs are contradictory and instead embrace their contrariness by setting up associations. Go is a game of co-existence in more than one sense.

I suppose this is similar to Macfadyen's "weak group theory" and the Shyghost(YilunYang?) formulation.
Useful enough to start out with, but as Charles says, you have to understand the limitations of the approach.

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North Lecale

Thanks for all your valuable comments!

Charles, I indend to build upon this chart when I find time, and I’d love to improve it, using your input and that of others … perhaps beginning with putting the italics on the right bottom into a preamble (sort of), together with a warning that our assessment of the board situation changes as we grow stronger (FWIW, I’m just a measly DDK), and as our focus changes from single stones to groups … then to areas … then to the whole board.

Could telling this a reader before they read the chart help creating a better (i.e. aware/critical/self-critical) mindset?


Yes, the terribly anal-ytic Western mind …

This is extremely helpful, thank you (and this goes not only for the quoted text but also for what I snipped!).

I’d really love to morph this into a mindmap. If I ever get to it, I’d want to submit it here.

Since you already mentioned the obsession … I personally probably cannot just jump out of my Western hide and stop obsessing … but hopefully (and perhaps with support of the South Asian imprinting I enjoyed when I lived in Kerala, India, as a child), I can … improvise … and build up on the list, making the flowchart evolve towards a — somewhat fuzzy — mindmap … ? I think I’ll try at least.

If it could help beginners in their progress (if even only to my current level) without burdening them with too much stuff to unlearn later on, respectively with injecting a “flexible” and/or “critical” element into their mind, so as to always be aware that everything can be different if one changes focus … I think it would be totally worth it.


Thanks again for all your input, John, Charles, everybody!

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Sorry to be late.
About the before-moving priority flow chart, I have been given the following advice:
Kyuba - Sente - Oba
that's both easier and less clear than the first one of the tread. Anyone knows where is this from? The words are japanese, but that are also some quite common Go terms, so I suspect that any western Go player could have easily found and put at use.

The word by word translation, according Sensei library is : Urgent - Initiative - Big
In rules: play first the Urgent moves, if there are no more, the Sente moves and finally the Big ones.

The point is that it is quite difficoult to put it correctly into action.
Starting from the middle: what is really sente?
Is it always good to play a move just because it's sente - maybe loosing future ko treats?
And on and on...

IMH-DDK-O (In My Humble - Double Digit Kyu - Opinion ) the point is that all these rules are to help/try adding some extra "full board thinking" before moving.
This is also the general advice of many good books for beginners (e.g. Yuan Zhou‘s "How Not to Play Go": keep looking at the full board, stop blindly following/answering to your opponent moves and the like...).

Anyway: what a nice tread: lot of deep insightful points. I need to sit down and read again ...slowly
Thanks!
Galation

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When you play Weiqi you are joining millions of people across four thousand years of time.
Jonathan Hop - So You Want to Play Go?

What about replacing point 3 with positional jugement ?

3 Are you leading ?
Yes -> Defend your weaknesses
No ->

4 Is an invasion possible ?
Yes -> Invade
No ->

5 Is reduction possible ?
Yes -> Reduce
No -> Resign

Thanks, Galation and Pio2001 (and everybody else who replied),

I will certainly consider all your valuable suggestions when (if!) I get to work on this again.

Greetings, Tom

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?