I just got to a flaky 3k on kgs, and now I want to keep my progress going. I've been improving about a stone a month, and I'd really like to keep this trend going. My final goal is 1d this year (after that, I guess I'll need to set a higher target).

As a go player, I feel like my biggest strengths are more strategic than tactical. My games are rarely violent. I think I need to acquire a skill at violence to become a better go player. Because of this, I'm going to try a reading focused study plan.

The plan

• At least 20 minutes of life and death from the Lee Chang-ho life and death set.
• Spend at least 20 minutes trying a page (6 problems) from 501 Tesuji problems.
• At least 20 minutes doing problems from Vital Points and Skillful Finesse for Sabaki.
• Play at least one game a week on a korean server on wbaduk.

Other than that, I'll keep up with playing kgs/dgs/ogs games, and post any games I lose in this thread for review, even (especially) if they're due to embarrassing mistakes.

Play me and you'll see enough violence for a lifetime (on the other hand a lifetime is not very long in my games, one of us will die big)

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Sanity is for the weak.

Perhaps, then, you should learn to play solid and non-violent. You'll learn a lot, and you may eventually learn how to balance the two.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

I'll definitely take you up on this.

I've been trying this "trick" joseki that shaddy taught me. It seems to start giant fights. Here's an example from a game today. This game was a giant fight.

A game of beauty

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Sanity is for the weak.

Today I got in some tsumego from the blue book of the lee chang-ho series. I did respectably well.

I also did some problems from VPaSFfS. Most of these I ended up just checking the answer to learn the technique. I will do the problems again once I've forgotten most of the details to see how much of it stuck.

if you ever forget, the difficulty is, easiest to hardest, green-blue-purple-brown-red-yellow. yellow caps out at around gengen gokyo difficulty = 1-2d or so.

So the Yi Chang'ho-Series is useful for 5 Kyu KGS, at least counting the first books? I always wondered if I should buy these, but you'll find nowhere on which rank books aim.
How much of a problem is it to not understand korean? =D Are there are a lot of instructed problems?

To the game:
I don't understand Black B15. Why not give Atari from C14? A lot less problems, I think. Black C11 is family feud, giving White a strong outer wall, which threatens the three lonesome stones. Furthermore C11 remains weak at the same time.
Really good game for White, you surely took your profit all over the board =)

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

Yes, the series goes from 6k to 2d. They are in chinese, I don't think you lose much as long as you can read "W to play" and "B to play", but I may be wrong as I can't read chinese. I found them extremely good study tools, but I had no other source of tsumego when I got them.

Hm, my local Go-store lists the Yi Chang'ho series in Korean. You have a link to the Chinese translation?

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

Thank you!

But someone already explained me that I mixed up the Yi Chang'ho series. He has a complete problem set covering Joseki, Life-and-Death, Tesuji, Hamate, Haengma etc., too, and I thought you meant this.
His raw Life-and-Death- and Tesuji-sets seem to be great. I think, I have to register on eBay in the next month =D

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

The first two books (the green and the blue one) of the Yi Ch'ang-ho Life and Death series are very accessible. I took about a week to do both books, and this was when I checked the answers afterwards, so I know I got around 90-95% of them correct as a KGS 7k. I haven't gotten round to volumes 3-6 but the first two aren't very hard at all.
I have them in Chinese, and you really only need three characters ("black", "white", and "first") to solve them. I haven't got a clue about Korean though. But I always find the English hints in the Graded Go Problems for Beginners series very annoying, because it forces me to keep the book upside down as to not read the text.

I've realized that an hour a day is a bit more than my attention span can take, so I think I'll pare down my plans do doing one of the items in my plan. Yesterday I finished the blue book, although I'll definitely have to give this one a reread as I got too many wrong. Tonight I started the purple book, and this one is noticeably harder, although I am still doing respectably well at getting the answers.

A lost game. I neglected to defend some big groups, and that cost me dearly.

T2 is interesting, is that the best local move?

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长考出臭棋.

R4 should be better first - then black defends (R5) and white plays S1. Later white may find a time to push up at Q4 and cut.

If 67 is S1, I can't see a way for white to live at a glance, at least.