I think that's theoretically possible, but also enormously pointless. Why skip the fun part until you are "ready" when there's no clear evidence of harm from indulging? Unless you're in an emergency where time efficiency is vital, this sort of practice seems silly.

You'd certainly need at least a hundred hours of study before you'd get to play.

Maybe if study is more fun to someone than actually playing? Given the diversity of the human condition, such people might exist.

Some people just really hate feeling like a beginner in front of other people. If they can bypass that without anyone seeing them do it then they might try. Personally, yeah I'd agree with you but I can imagine someone short on suitable time for go play but suitable time for study (say a long commute each workday) trying something like this. If you allow playing an AI then I think a fair few people do this evidenced by people asking on here if they really need to play humans.

After I returned to the USA from Japan I improved mostly by reading books and playing through pro games. This was before there was any way to play online and, near where I lived, there were not many people who could play go. I improved several ranks this way.

Re: Boidhre

That makes some sense.

Especially the bit below 20k isn't particularly glorious, and nobody seriously suffers from taking on the free version of igowin or gnugo or whatever during that stage. Especially if interruptions are often, playing a timed game is not an option at all.

I've had a lot of fun playing while from 19k to 10k though. I was much worse than I am now, and used to look upon sdk players with great envy and awe, but I really enjoyed myself. There were the occasional trolls, but it really wasn't so bad. I would never advise anyone to remain a recluse at that stage.

Come to think of it, I've heard before that many Japanese retired gentlemen will first spend some time to learn up to at least 1d before daring to show their faces at a go parlour. I imagine they play online for a while first, though. It's about as anonymous as playing an AI if you don't give out any personal details.

Wonder what that's like in Korea or China.

Re: gowan

That's quite a high level of dedication. I don't know if I could do that, without some very certain knowledge that I would be playing again within the foreseeable future. I might not even bother to keep a set to play with under those circumstances.

For me the entire game is completely meaningless without human opponents.

Internet really is such a good thing. I might go months without a game without it.

No, because they could not get a KGS rank without playing.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

I agree, books are important.
I myself have had a 2-year period in which I have not played a single game but have read a lot, and made a jump from 5k to 2k. So books by themselves can definitely help you get stronger. At the very least, they can help preventing you from getting (much) weaker during the period of inactivity.

Two things I am curious about in what you say, though:

1. About good vs not-so-good books:
Do you think your evaluation of good books vs. not-so-good books might be personal? In other words, the few books you found helpful, the 10% which conveyed 90% of the knowledge to you, might not be the same 10% which will speak to somebody else? I ask this because I made this observation with teachers in general - some of the teachers I have had in the past and who taught me the least, I was told they taught others the most. And vice versa. Same can be said about textbooks in general, although I have not really heard it about Go books in particular. Which might be because the selection was very limited until quite recently.

If the above is true, then it is not sufficient to just read 10% of the books because of somebody's recommendation. You need to read a big chunk of what is available, and then decide for yourself which 10% are the most useful to you personally.

2. About getting to be strong without reading books:
Do you have any data about all the strong asian amateurs/pros and how many books have they read? It almost feels like a lot of players in the world (not necessarily in Europe, though) get very strong by not reading very much, or even not reading at all. For example, all I know about insei training is that there is no reading at all, other than maybe solving tsume-go or replaying pro games. I have been told the same by some of the very strong Asian players I have run into, mostly Japanese and Koreans - they say they had little use for books, never read them much, only for tsume-go and replaying pro games. It further seems to me that most of the strong players I know of, at least afaik, got strong without putting very much emphasis on what you call "Go theory". So while I am not sure that this is the best way to get strong, it is certainly a viable way.

In any case, since neither of us here is really strong, its more like a blind leading a blind.
Still, interesting.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

yes, I have been doing a lot of that too.

Before the internet, even though I was an active club player, i was doing it actually much more often than play real games.
I guess as an opponent I was more often available to myself that most of my friends were... and I also was approximately the same level as myself, so them were pretty good games!

But joking aside, I think this is actually a very good exercise.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Almost none besides some tsumego books. However, they do have professional teachers letting them know certain ideas that amateurs are going to get from books.

I do remember one author basically saying it would be bad for sales, but he would have never looked at the type of book he just wrote as he was learning Go. It was a funny comment.

I don't think it's a funny comment really, he was aiming to become a pro, his audience just wants to gain a stone or two. Different goals have different methods.

Most go books I read were Asian books with very little text. I do not read Asian languages, but the texts mostly were extended captions and contained short diagram number, move number or short variation sequence hints. (It is very easy to perceive such if only one can identify arabic / Asian numbers, latin / Asian letters denoting intersections and kanji saying "diagram" or "variation".) When I read books, I try to get as much from their contents as possible. So regardless of what the authors try to teach, I also parse, in each diagram, each move, each strategic line, each sequence, each group, each strategic choice, each positional judgement, each global relation, each strategic concept and each strategy I can perceive or verify by my own tactical reading.

There are limits to my perception because it is very hard to perceive new concepts that the book author does not teach explicitly, that no personal or public teacher (of those teachers I have seen or whose books I have read) anywhere has ever mentioned and that I missed completely thus far.

So although it is possible that a few readers might perceive a particularly well hidden concept faster than me, this is unlikely for most readers because otherwise I would have seen some of them mentioning those concepts some time. What every reader can get out of books must be similar to or less than what I can get out of books because, see above, I really try to be exhaustive. (There is, OC, the difference that Asian books teaching significant context in non-trivial text offer those readers significantly more than me that can understand the Asian text.)

So what I see in by far the most books is the same boring contents I see in most other books. I already felt lucky on discovering just one move in a book teaching me a new detail, a move that the author did not emphasise but that was merely part of a sequence meant to teach something else.

However, 10% (probably less) of the books are different: they teach important, essential concepts explicitly, concepts entirely neglected in the other 90% of the books.

So, no, I do not think that my assessment is too subjective.

(Instead, IMO, my description is an understatement. Go to Asian book shelves and notice the very many beginner / school books with even much less contents. I never read such; it would be a complete waste of time. Sort of books for the 40 kyu.)



No.



Of course. This is so because there are almost no theory books for very strong players. I have been stuck at my current playing level also because I have reached the end of "easy" learning by just reading suitable theory books. (Tsumego and pro games offer something for also the strongest players. So these I study and learn from because there is not the much more efficient study source books. However, discovering further hidden concepts equals doing research and so is very slow.)

I've always wondered at the wealth of "introduction to go" titles.

I imagine a grandfather gives such a book to a grandchild, who sets it on a shelf, never to be touched for any other purpose than dusting off the shelf. Are there grandchildren who have several of this kind of book?

Or perhaps it's like the people who buy a "teach yourself ukulele" video with matching instrument, which then both gradually migrate into the attic. Good for sales, but the next Shimabukuro is not thus created.

Isn't it the same for everything?

Well, wouldn't you assume that after the first three or four or so, you could accept that maybe that base has been covered?

It's probably not that awful in English, but in Japanese there's an enormous amount of them. It's really quite astonishing how much introducing is deemed necessary. Literally dozens of books published in the past ten years alone.

I'm fairly sure it's still the same game it was in 2005, which hasn't seen any major changes which would render prior introductory material obsolete. I don't really see any major didactic breakthrough in that time, either. I'm even more certain that humans are still the same species, too.

They must sell, though. Why else would so many books get funding?

It's the same with language learning. The introductory books are the ones that make real money.

The general rule is: beginner books and other materials can be cheaper/faster to put together than material for more advanced learners and/or they can have a much larger market to tap into because the number of people who decide to learn guitar will always be much, much larger than the number who get to an advanced level. So you tend to see more beginner books/cheap guitars made/introduction to yoga videos than are strictly necessary as a lot of publishers/makers chase this market.

Ah, so I should then rejoice at this clear indication of enduring interest.

A non-zero percentage of the people who buy or are gifted these books will go on to become lifelong players, after all.

Absolutely. I like to think of it as a pyramid. At the top you have the pro players, and then as you go down the pyramid it gets more and more casual.

At the very bottom, you have people who just know that the game exists but don't know the rules and just above people who have barely learned them and played once or twice. One might think they don't really matter but if that base isn't large enough, it's really hard to build a tall pyramid...

That's an interesting thing you mention, there.

If the people who are made merely aware of the existence of go also count as part of the pyramid, I've widened the base a lot more than I thought.

Hmm...
My point is that most (it not all) of the strong asian players got to your level without any books, and went far above your level also without any books. So while books (and by extension - theories) are certainly useful (or are they?), they are by no means necessary - maybe not even optimal as a learning method.

I understand what you say about "easy learning". In one way or another, most of us are slaves to the "easy" way. You say you are "stuck" - but many are not. So maybe this is something peculiar to you, rather than generall applicable truth?

Still, I wonder... is the mere fact that it is made so "easy" hampering us in the long run?
Like the athletes, then don't get to be really good by only doing exercises the "easy" way...
Is categorizing and quantifying really the best way to do it, even if it might be the easiest?

It brings me back to the question: what is the basis of true strength? Is it conscious understanding, like lerning math? Is it subconscious resources, like speaking a language or riding a bike? Or is it a combination of both? And if so, which side is the prevalent one?

Questions, questions...
I wish there were some strong players in here to comment on that.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

This has to be taken with a very large pinch of salt. After all, Go Seigen got two bent index fingers from reading books so much. And all pros can quote the proverbs at you - they got most of them from books. We also know this from autobiographies.

You need to visualise the oriental go scene. Leaving aside the pro teacher-pupil system, which is a special hot-house atmosphere, strong oriental amateurs differ in a few ways from the western variety. One is that they read the magazines (and the best books tend to be distillations or reprints of magazine series). The other - no doubt reflecting numbers of people available - is that they tend to talk about the game with each other a lot. This is a form of reading - getting knowledge from other people's words.

In my experience this rarely happens among western players. I imagine that a good part of the reason is there are so few strong players that most of the time they are the big fish in little ponds, and they only get together at tournaments. There they do talk amongst each other, but from what I have observed they are (a) very cagey with each other (who's the biggest fish?) and (b) they concentrate on tactics.

In the CJK scene as I have observed it, strong players roam in what we might call mini-gangs and the gang has an acknowledged leader or two - which helps a lot, I find. Furthermore, they very often talk about strategy (or theory, as RJ would have it) and are very free with dispensing advice to each other and to weaker players. It seems to be regarded as a social obligation. They also often talk about what's in the latest mags. Often a club is affiliated to a particular Ki-in and gets that organisations magazines free, and these are always in use - but no-one has actually bought them. Almost all clubs I have seen also have a large supply of books for loan, so again a strong player may claim he hasn't bought a book but he has probably read it.

Of course CJK clubs also often enjoy visits from pros, semi-pros and local pros, so again there is talk, which again amounts to reading.

Obviously, it's not always quite that clear cut. For example some players will belong to more than one "gang", or they may be well off enough to pay for pro lessons (or, more commonly, have a job/patron what will pay). But I think the above accurately conveys how the balance is tilted the opposite way to us.

Naturally, really strong players concentrate on tsumego and game collections, along with study groups - that's just because they are strong enough to dispense with the fundamentals.

For everyone else in CJK, ordinary book knowledge is important, however it is acquired - from books or people.