I had been wanting some more problem/tsumego books and recently picked up Get Strong at Tesuji and 1001 Life and Death problems at my local game shop. Although I had read many reviews of both books, I have to admit I was a bit surprised at some of the problems from the Get Strong at Tesuji book. Now, this is by no means a complaint, merely an observation. I guess I expected it to be more along the lines of the Tesuji book by Davies, but only filled with problems to solve.

From the chapters I’ve read from the Elementary Go Series Tesuji book, most of the problems have a fairly specific goal such as to connect, capture, or prevent opponent connections, etc. While these problems are usually fairly difficult, the goals seem to be pretty concrete and the solutions can often be derived by reading/calculation, even if they take a while for a 14-kyu player to figure out.

While skimming through Get Strong at Tesuji, there are certainly many problems similar to that throughout the book, but what surprised me were many of the problems on the first few pages. Rather than a concrete, calculable goal, there seem to be many problems asking for more “abstract” goals, such as achieving good shape, how to best defend the corner, etc. So, I was actually getting quite a few of the initial problems wrong, even some of the one-star problems. I am familiar with the basic concepts of what defines good shape or good defense, but the answers to these don’t always seem as obvious as “capture” problems.

Again, this is not a criticism of the book, I just wanted to hear opinions from others who have read this book. I’m trying to figure out how to best approach problems like these. Of course, I’ve been looking at the correct answers and trying to figure out the author’s justification of the solutions, but sometimes that’s hard to figure out. Should I just keep on doing that and try to learn by repetition and example, even if I am not quite able to understand why a given solution is the optimal one? Thanks!

You don't get strong concrete hints in games.

As far as I know, the idea of drilling these problems is to recognise shapes in certain local situations which you can turn to your advantage. The abstract hints in the book can serve as general questions you can ask yourself while playing: "Can I give White poor shape here", "Can I save those three stones" etc. But mostly it's about developing instinctual recognition of shape on the board so that you see the answer before you ask the question. It also has to do with giving you more ideas about candidate move selection, i.e. which moves to look at first when reading out a position in a game.

I imagine stronger players will do the book and not look at the hint and just the board to see what they instinctively recognise or not from shape.


I'd love to be corrected here, since I know I could be wrong and mostly write this post to see if I am wrong.

I felt the same way when I first did Get Strong at Tesuji... but in the process of trying to find examples to post here and explain why I thought some other outcome was equally good, I realized how silly I was being. It's probably worthwhile to work through the problems whose answers seem vague to you. Alternatively, you can come back to the problems after you've gained a few stones, at which point the final position (if not the tesuji that leads to it) will be obvious.

Some things to look for -- sente versus gote, the size of follow-up moves, follow-ups that are sente versus gote, whether stones are cut, whether stones can be cut, the value of stones. These were the things that I was missing, at least.