There are currently a few threads here about learning josekis. That is nothing new. It is a topic of abiding fascination for a large segment of the amateur world, and continues to be so despite the equally constant warning mantras such as "learn joseki, become two stones weaker." There was recent incident in the North of England where a family drove past an enormous sign warning them not to enter the causeway to Holy Island when the tide was coming in. Not only are there tide tables posted, but in this case the tide had already covered the causeway. The upshot, when the stranded and terrified family was duly rescued, was that they thought the sign didn't apply to them.

This is such a common occurrence in life that there is probably a scientific name for it, and maybe even a university chair. It certainly applies to joseki study.

The subject has been taken up in Japan. I have a small 1981 book ostensibly by Go Seigen, though the real author is Mihori Sho. It is called "How to think about joseki". It couldn't be more different from what we see here. No checklists. No memorisation. Almost, in fact, no josekis.

The essence of the book can perhaps be summed up by Go's advice in the first part. Rather than looking at a corner and deciding which joseki to play, you are urged to look to left and right and decide which MOVE to play. If this process is continued, what may result is a shape that has occurred before and may occur again, but that's just an incidental by-product of the move-by-move process. With every single move you have to be prepared to adapt to circumstances, and if the best move means deviating from a known pattern, you deviate.

Mihori says the top pros know no josekis, not because they haven't memorised anything but because the concept is irrelevant to them. They are judging each move, move by move, and - as already said - whether or not that process leads to a known joseki is immaterial. Except, of course, in that it is precisely through playing joseki moves that amateurs give away many points in handicap games with pros.

Mihori says he often got involved in conversations with top pros simply because he was an amateur and so knew the josekis. The likes of the Kisei Fujisawa Hideyuki or Kajiwara Takeo 9-dan would collar him and ask, "Mihori-san, how does the joseki go from here?" It's going off at a tangent, but if you want to know how the conversation might go after that, Mihori gives an example: "Hane no hiki no kaketsugi no tobi desu ga..." That's real pro talk (and between two pros the hane mentioned might even be about ten moves down the line).

The reaction to Mihori's exposition of a line from a joseki dictionary might then elicit a snort from the pro: "Eh - that's awful!"

In fact, it appears that ultimately pros don't accept the concept of josekis because there is, in practice, no such thing as an even split. Every so-called joseki, to a pro's eye, actually favours one side or the other, and since the pro is always manoeuvering so that he ends up on the right side he will never accept a move just because it has been played before. Doing that leads to what some pros apparently call "bad josekis", and Cho Chikun once said to Mihori, "Whenever I see amateurs play a bad joseki because they regard it as a golden rule, I feel sorry for them."

Now, obviously, pros play go non-stop and see certain patterns over and over again. They might even know that amateurs call some of them josekis, and some may pander to amateurs by actually calling them josekis, or even by writing books and articles about them. But in their own games they regard and treat them differently.

One marked difference (according to the book) is that amateurs feel the job is done once they've achieved the joseki pattern. For a pro, the pattern is never complete. The purpose of playing the joseki moves is not to follow the joseki books but to achieve something specific, and even when a pause is reached in local play that purpose never goes away. If it does, you've played the wrong moves. If you choose to forget (or fall into the trap of fogetting) the purpose, why play those moves in the first place?

Some readers will perhaps be convinced they've got the right handle on this: "I got thickness and I'm using that thickness to attack his group over there"; or, "I've chosen to take territory and I've left myself a nice little endgame move here." Actually, nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes. It just doesn't go very far. It's not much different from saying, "I've got an easel, a canvas, a pot of brushes and a stack of paints. Now I'm going to paint the Mona Lisa." The pro artist takes all that for granted and is more absorbed by things like studying the light, or his sitter's history or emotions.

This "studying the light" element in go is called "joseki after-care" in the book. It is the whole process of guiding the joseki successfully towards the endgame. The early-middle game portion may be encapsulated as making sure the purpose of the joseki is being maintained (or frustrating the opponent's plans in that regard, of course).

One of the most startling parts of the book, however, is the last section which shows how rich even the most mundane josekis that every amateur seems to have memorised can be. Four common josekis are given (one of them is given in another recent thread here), but whereas in a typical book or dictionary this is the end pattern (with occasionally a remark that e.g. "Black can look foward to A later)", in Go's hands it is merely the starting point for a kaleidoscope of follow-up moves. Some made me goggle in astonishment. I'd never see them or even got near to thinking about them. The feeling in fact is not that the joseki is being finished off with a few boundary plays but that, even in the endgame, the joseki is still alive. It is easy at least to understand that there are many "nerai" - points to aim at, to a pro's eyes, in a fuseki or middle-game position, but to see the same process late in the game for a joseki position that has, in essence, already developed a thick, bony skeleton, is mesmerising. You may get a sense of this from the mere fact that Go devotes ten to a dozen full pages to each of these late-game nerais in one joseki, none of which you'll ever see in a standard joseki book.

Does all this mean abandoning joseki dictionaries and the like? No. It just means using them properly. The most obvious use is to get a sense of how to evaluate a position. That is a truly vital skill, and it is far, far more important to be able to look at a small handful of positions and to know how to evaluate them than to memorise lots of long lines. Note the distinction: how to evaluate them, not what the evaluation is.

If another player tells you "I know XXX joseki", look askance. If he says you must learn XXX joseki, look askance and run a mile. There is another more subtly erroneous piece of advice to avoid. Those people who tell you that you must understand the meaning of each move before you can claim to know a joseki are actually doing what bulls do after a good meal. If you think about it, the implication of what they say is still that the joseki is the right target, the holy grail, the place you have to reach. But if you follow Go's advice and look left and right and play the move appropriate to the circumstances, it is irrelevant whether you end up with a joseki or not. Mihori adds that it's not good, in go, to be the sort of Mr Joe Seki person who takes the same obvious route to work every day. It's good to explore the back alleys, too. Being Joe Seki is okay sometimes, but you can be Fred Seki sometimes, too - and, if it's the right thing at the right time, be happy to be Jane Seki, too. Watch Reginald Perrin to see what fun is to be had.

This whole idea of pros not following joseki is inherent in the very concept of joseki. After all, joseki really means "What the pros play in the corner". Or a longer meaning might be "What the pros play in the corner because they understand it, and what I imitate because I don't".

We would like to play like pros, but we don't because we don't have their understanding. So we would like to at least be able to imitate pros, but the odd are a gazillion to one that we will ever have the same board position. So the best we can do is imitate the pros in one section of the board.

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I'd say it's closer to mockery than imitation.

Why did I (or Mihori or Go) bother, I ask myself? No - we do imitate the pros and that may be because we want to, as you say. But it is not the best we can do. The best we can do is try to play each move for a purpose and a reason we understand. If that understanding is imperfect we can hope to get feedback as to why. Just imitating contributes as much to a game as picking your nose.

I'm not buying this. It seems to me that it's easy to find examples where a particular pattern becomes fashionable and is played quite often, and then it disappears again from pro play. So even if they don't think in terms of "this move is joseki", they are at least aware of what is being played by others at the moment. I think what Mihori says is how things should be, rather than the whole truth.

I also remember an example from "Invincible" where the text said something like "This move was played by rote during this period" (with the implication that in this context it was better omitted).

Thank you, John. This is actually one thing I liked about the "Whole-board thinking in joseki" books. They take the format of a whole-board problem (obviously, given the name), with a 'We've been playing in this corner. Black to play." sort of prompt. This turns it into a one-move-at-a-time approach similar to what you describe. So it felt a bit more like a 'Because the board looks like this, I want to play a stone over here. How can I best get this?'. It didn't hurt that I hadn't seen most of the joseki involved before, so it got down to a 'a or b here' purely, disconnected from any memorized sequences.

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Interesting idea, but I know some professionals who never studied life and death, they just studied joseki in order to become strong. By studying joseki they came to learn exactly the same fundamentals. Obviously, blind joseki play, just like blind shape play, can't always be good.

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North Lecale

What pros would that be? Someone may have said something like that, but I can't think what it would really mean. It would seem impossible to study joseki without studying life and death to at least an equal degree. I know a fair number of pros in Japan. None would deny studying life & death and tsume go as fundamental parts of becoming a professional.

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

They key point that I gathered from John's explanation was that, rather than thinking of which joseki sequence to play, we should think of which move to play. I agree with this idea very much, and in fact, try to play this way myself.

It's not so much that I try to play that way because I am consciously thinking that I want to get better at go by doing it (though, I do want to get better at go), but it's simply more fun to play that way. Also, when you play your own move, you can feel more like the go is "your go", which is kind of neat. I can't say that I play this way all of the time. It's not uncommon that I'll whip out a 3-3 sequence, thinking of other future plays to make. But I think it's fun to play moves at face value.

That said, sometimes what constitutes "joseki" can depend on perspective, I think. I attended a workshop by Kim Myungwan awhile back, and one thing that still strikes me as interesting was his use of the term, "joseki" at the time.

We were looking over a sequence in one of the corners, which I thought to be "joseki". It was a common variation, which I had played before. But he told us that, "with this stone here" (while pointing to a stone all the way on the other side of the board), "this is not joseki".

I found this kind of interesting, because when I thought of this sequence - this "joseki", I thought of it only as the corner sequence in its own isolation. But from his wording, it appeared that Kim Myungwan considered this sequence as "joseki" when it worked in coordination with the rest of the board.

Thinking in this manner, "joseki" is not an isolated sequence, and should not be thought of as such. Rather, "joseki", to me at this time in my life, is a dynamic idea of balance across the entire board.

Maybe I misinterpreted Kim Myungwan, but it was still interesting for me to think about.

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be immersed

There are a few aspects of whole-board context. One is making use of the existing stones on the board (e.g., if I make thickness here, will it be worth enough?). Another is making use of stones not yet on the board (e.g., possible endgame follow-ups.) (From this point of view, aji-keshi is really like hurting your poor unborn groups: OMG, I'm hurting my group that is so weak it is not even there yet ) Yet another regards temperature (in the CGT sense), and I think this gets neglected a lot. When you think about it, when you look at a joseki in a book, it must be making assumptions about the what else is big on the board. If something else is bigger, you would not continue the joseki. If everything else is small, you might continue beyond the local sequence beyond what is in the book.

Consider mirror-go. Mirror-go games have this interesting effect that they naturally create equal (or nearly equal)tensions in two areas of the board. In a normal joseki, you might rarely see tenuki at certain points because the likelihood that there is something elsewhere is bigger is not very high in most games. But in mirror-go, because the position is duplicated, this assumption is not true, so bizarre-looking tenukis are possible.

Then again, I am posting this after having a full liter of beer---which is more than my usual---so I may think this make no sense tomorrow...

I guess the book is only available in japanese?

Anyways thanks for sharing!

It's always dispiriting when people don't bother to read what is written. Mihori specifically referred to "top pros". But, as regards the claim about fashionable joseki, I also think you are really looking at the wrong thing. The bit that is fashionable for pros is fuseki theory. It used to be the norm for the Kido Yearbook to summarise new trends in fuseki over the previous year, and more's the pity they don't do that now. But still we can say that pros follow fashion for fuseki; amateurs follow fashion for joseki. Once new ideas for fusekis take hold, standard corner patterns tend to follow even in the pro world, of course. But even then, there are constant new creations - and if you look at who invents new lines that become popular, it is rarely some low dan but a top pro like Go Seigen.

Going off an another tack with this theme, current fuseki theory among pros is so different that josekis are almost disappearing. Many amateurs seem to believe that what the Ishida dictionary lacked was the new 4-4 josekis, and they are desperate to get their hands on them, hence the bleating about the wait for Takao Vol. 2. I have always been puzzled by this as I (putting new games in the GoGoD database daily) see little evidence for it. As a double check, I just ran quickly through the first 20 games of 2011 in the database. That's a total of 80 corners, but there were only 7 josekis in all (2 in 1 game), and of those only 1 was a 4-4 joseki, and that was a very old one that even I knew. But in fuseki terms, every single game felt very different, not just from the past but from each other. I'm sure there are themes running through them, but I have little idea of what they are. Still, it's obvious that joseki is not a major part of the mix nowadays. (As a matter of fact, I don't think josekis were anything like as common in older games as most people seem to believe, though I do think they were a bit more common than today.)

Yes, except that ASIN B000J7K8EM is meaningless to me.



Such a startling claim really does call for an essay!

I teeter on the edge of rejecting it outright, but I'm still preparing the Colman's to go with the pork pie. I've never even come across a pro who admits to having read a joseki book. The whole business of joseki books is mainly a late 20th century phenomenon tied in with the popularisation of go among the amateur world. Writing in the 1960s, Hayashi Yutaka said that joseki was not really a technical word in go at all, but a word that had recently become popular (this was when go books had just become common). The term used in olden days was kata, and there was no concept of "fixed" or "even" attached to it. They were just "patterns".

How many years have you been online, John?



As a quick check on joseki in older games, I took a look at games in the GoGoD database from 1911 (all Japanese). I immediately ran into the question of what to call a joseki. It did not seem to me that initial play, approach, and pincer was enough. So I decided that four moves in a pattern, not necessarily consecutive in the game, was enough to call something joseki. (I also did not consider joseki elsewhere than the corner.) The mode seemed to be two, with the average between one and two. That's rather more than John found, but we may be using different criteria.

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— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

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ASINs are Amazon's ID numbers for books. ( Sorry to impose yet more American culture upon you )

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So, what is that? A 9d? A title holder? Only Go Seigen?


So, after Go discovers a move, do other top pros also start playing it? If so, how is this possible, if they have no joseki knowledge?

Taken to its logical conclusion, the statement also means that if top pros plays something like the large avalanche, they read it out from scratch every time. Somehow, in doing this, they manage to avoid "old" sequences such as the play at the 2-2 point, without knowing the joseki.

In "The 1971 Honinbo Tournament" there's an instance where it says Ishida had a joseki in mind, but accidentally deviated from the correct order.

Don't get me wrong: I accept Mihori's statement as good advice for us amateurs not to get too hung up on joseki patterns. But I think it's very much exaggerated for effect and rather absurd if interpreted as a literal claim.

From an ancient (19th century, I am pretty sure) joseki collection in four volumes. the first three diagrams.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 . 4 . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . 8 . . . 2 3 . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , 5 . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . 3 2 . . . 6 . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . 5 . 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 . 4 . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 . 2 3 . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . 7 . . , 5 . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 . 1 . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . 1 0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . 5 , 8 . 9 . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . 3 2 . 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . 4 . 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

In the bottom left corner I used and for and . Which plays they are should be obvious.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2 3 . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . 5 . 7 . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . 5 , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . 6 7 . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . 8 3 2 0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

This one I broke up into two diagrams.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bm11
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O O X . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . X . X . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . X , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . O 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . 5 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . 4 2 X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | 6 1 O X . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . O X O O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . X 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Not sure what you are implying, Bill - always best to spell it out for us bears of little brain - but if you are trying to adduce an early use of the term joseki, I'll trump that with the first go book printed in Japan, the 1607 Honinbo Joseki Tsukurimono by Sansa. The issue in this thread seems to me not to be about existence but usage, and the differences between (and for) pros and amateurs in their understanding of or their need for the term joseki. But then I think I already said that. Why do I have to repeat it? Is it really so unclear?

I don't think it's a matter of clarity; rather, some people don't fully agree with this perspective on joseki.

For instance, a few years ago when Cho Seokbin 7d came from Europe to the US to provide workshops and lessons near my area, one of the exercises he had everyone do was to learn a few joseki sequences he put up on the board and have us play that sequence 10 times, over and over again on our boards. He explained that through this methodology, he would remember joseki sequences he played since his pro training in Korea (which implies this is something that is or was once done in baduk academies in Korea for those training to be professionals). Such a teaching method would clearly be considered wrong based on what you wrote, so for someone like me it leaves me in a bit of a conflict on what to think.

The antiquity of the term, joseki, is a minor point.



On the surface, you do seem to be contradicting yourself. There are enough qualifications so you are not, but I do think that you are being unclear.

As for joseki books being aimed at amateurs, has it not always been so? (At least for published books. Surely there were books kept secret within the different houses.)

Before it gets lost, I think that your main point is what a pro told a class I went to in Kyoto: "If I play it, it's joseki." Amateurs, particularly in the West, perhaps because of the influence of chess, make too much of joseki.

I also expect that you are right about the relative importance of fuseki for pros.

But I do not think for a moment that pros do not go to the woodshed to work on joseki. Certainly Kajiwara, Kitani, and Go Seigen did. Go Seigen's influence on both fuseki and joseki has been enormous. Many of the ideas of modern pro play can be traced back to him.

The diagrams from the old book now seem decidedly strange. My own impression is that more progress has been made in the past couple of centuries in joseki than in fuseki. (Perhaps that is because joseki are more concrete.) For instance, sanrensei now seems to be inferior to nirensei, but I can easily imagine that it would make a comeback some day. OTOH, the extension, , in the first diagram from the old book is now considered to be too low, and I can only see it being played under special circumstances. It will not come back as joseki.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.