am I the only one who hates solving tsumego problems?
I love tesuji, they are funny I think, and I love opening problems and making good shape.

but tsumego ..... nooooooo, come on, who invented this?

I am KGS 11k after re-started my go-career (formerly 18k KGS) but I think I`ll never get beyond KGS 4k+ when I won`t study tsumegos?

therefore the question rises: is it useless to continue playing go when i know i`ll never like a major part of it, namely tsumego? I mean, it ain`t any fun at all playing around 10k for ever ...

Maybe you're focusing on ones that are too hard for you. You should try a mix of easy, medium, and difficult problems. If you're serious about improving, you've got to struggle a little; no pain no gain.

hmmm .... i also failed at a lot of tsumego probs, but i still like them.

but even if i CAN solve tsumego ... it`s still boring for me. "so what?" is what i ask myself after solving one.

greetings to china, btw

I've never been much of a fan of tsumego, and never systematically studied them at any point in my go career, yet I still reached 4 dan.

A few ideas to ponder:
- Some young people and young children can memorize tens of thousands of L&D problems, much like young children who can learn languages with thousands of characters. This can be more difficult for adults.
- Define "useless".
- What Araban said.
- What HermanHiddema said; in particular, there is at least one pro (Chinese 7p) who also never systematically studied L&D. So, good luck.- Yes, Go is too hard; consider to quit now.

WOW!

There is this Go-player in my Club, who read - MAYBE - half the Go-books I read, who solved NOT EVEN CLOSE half the amount of Tsumegos or Tesujis I solved, who started to play Go like one year before I started and yet he is solidly four ranks stronger than I am and steadily improving (but yeah, I am, too ; )).

Tsumego is just practicing patterns and visualizing stones. If you are good in visualizing, if you have a good memory and if you have a good structure when searching for the right move (like not forgetting about certain counter-moves) you will need considerable less Tsumego-practice to sharpen your reading.
But yeah, less does not mean no Tsumegos at all.

Still, if you solve Tesuji and shape-problems I think you will make it through the SDK-ranks. The hardest part in Go anyway is strategy.

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

I whish I was on that level already ... but I know I have 2 go through some tsumegos first ...

Enjoy tesuji problems. Nothing wrong with that (I prefer them to L&D as well. I only started to do L&D after I kind of ran out of tesuji problem resources) and they serve the purpose of helping your reading skill. It is very probable that you will start to appreciate tsumego problems when you're a couple of stones stronger than now. And if not, don't worry and enjoy the game.

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If something sank it might be a treasure. And 2kyu advice is not necessarily Dan repertoire..

I didn't do any tsumego until I was 8k, and at the beginning I really hated it. I didn't start to enjoy it until I was ~1d. So maybe you'll learn to enjoy it later in your go career . I can say with certainty that tsumego really helped me improve. If you struggle with enjoying tsumego, I recommend listening to music at the same time - it really helps me stay interested in the activity for longer.

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

Read what Cho Chikun has to say.
http://tchan001.wordpress.com/2011/06/0 ... lculation/

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

What is there to hate about tsumego? It's all about reading and if you hate reading, how on earth can you enjoy playing Go?

You may find them a bit boring because they lack the competitive aspect of Go but that's not a reason to hate them.

Maybe you should choose easier problems involving shapes which are likely to occur in actual play (e.g. derived from joseki).
If you see a shape you know from tsumego in a game and kill a group with that knowledge, you may start enjoying tsumego

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If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

I did not enjoy, nor did I see the point of Tsumego when I was double digit kyu.
Little by little, I started to realize that the most important step to improving was improving my tactical thinking. Opportunities to capture key stones and cut in mischievous ways are often difficult to see, especially when a position hasn't even been played out yet.

To sharpen this part of your mind, you need to either play against stronger players and have them constantly introduce you to these tactics on the board, or you need to play against yourself (tsumego) and encounter these tactics in this way.

Have fun with the game, and eventually you may too start to realize just how important this type of thinking is.
There is a certain type of pleasure to spending a bunch of time practicing life and death, and then doing something completely beyond what you thought your level was on the board. It's something to look forward to.

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Ko is the best solution.
With Ko, I can keep eating and drinking until I am full.

Visit >>>Koosh's Study Journal<<<

I hated tsumego until I learned how to solve them -- before, I would always be frustrated with not knowing what the opponent might play in response to my attempts to solve it (thinking only one-sidedly about trying to solve, instead of trying to find the "best" move/response for both sides)

I learned this concept on how to solve tsumego from James Davies book Tesuji. Ironically, that chapter seemed to be missing from his book Life and Death (or I just overlooked it).

I was not a fan of tsumego at DDK. I tried (especially Davies' L&D, others) and the only ones I liked even remotely were the Korean Problem Academy's early sets (1-3 move solutions - you can find them on GoBase, but it requires a paid account).

This all changed around 5k. Suddenly I learned how to read through solutions. Now that I'm around 1k (or higher, lower?) easily half or more of my study is tsumego. They're enjoyable once you're able to get >50% correct (>30% even...) - I still find extremely difficult problems no-fun... practice in or just above your ability.

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What? What about this thread?

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=4448

I didn't say I was bad a them

I sometimes enjoy doing one or two, now and then, but I don't really have the patience to do lots of them or do them systematically.

So for me, my reading strength comes from playing games, and reviewing them, not from tsumego.

Broadly speaking I think you can divide tsumego books into two types. High level books are those such as the Xuanxuan Qijing (Gateway To All Marvels - literally) which can best be regarded as for entertainment. Low level books are the utilitarian kind, meant for drilling or seeing the most basic patterns. These range from classics such as Gokyo Shumyo to the ten-a-penny problem books and magazine inserts that flood the market.

But there is a great defect in the low-level, and I have never really understood why there is so little attempt to remedy it: there is too much variety.

Bear with me and accept the analogy (which I can defend) of doing tsumego as being rather like learning idioms in a language. I think you would find it odd if a book purporting to teach you idioms gave you a random list of a huge range of types of idiom: a proverb followed by a phrasal verb, a colloquialism followed by a quotation from the Bible, a Shakespearian novelty followed by a piece of internet slang. Yet, in essence, that randomness is what you get with almost every tsumego book.

For learning a language a separate book on Shakespeare's contributions, a separate book on "making out" in English, a separate book on phrasal verbs, etc is what you expect, and what you get. Why aren't tsumego books equally specific?

I would wager that if you were given a book of tsumego problems featuring only the tombstone tesuji, or only the golden stork standing on one leg tesuji, or only the elbow-lock tesuji, or only the cork-in-the bottle tesuji, or only L-groups, etc. etc, you would very soon not just learn but absorb that tesuji, and potential examples would magically leap out at you in your games, like heavy rain stotting off the ground. Not only that, I think you would enjoy the process, because even if the first couple of problems taxed you a lot, once you recognised what to look for you would rattle of the rest. Such postive feedback cannot fail to induce a warm glow.

So (with a very small number of exceptions) why don't we see such books?

There is a series of five books on Tsume-Go by Masaaki Fukui, which main theme seems to be "shortage of liberties" and "Oiotoshi".

詰碁
のんびり・じっくり
楽しみながら強くなる

I hope that a translation to English is something like

Tsume-Go
At leisure - without rushing
Enjoy getting stronger

The level given has a range from 2 kyu ... 1 dan to 3 dan ... 5 dan.

My experience with these book's problems is similar to what you have mentioned.

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The really most difficult Go problem ever: https://igohatsuyoron120.de/index.htm
Igo Hatsuyōron #120 (really solved by KataGo)

I agree.

This is what I like best about the GoChild site, is that it does a good job of grouping similar types of problems together (at least at its lower levels)