jlt
Yes, my view is rather different from that of knotwilg, but not the opposite.
All other things being equal, the player who can read more deeply should always win, in my estimation. So, reading must be valued.
Where I differ (insofar as I correctly interpret knotwilg's view) is that I reject the hair-shirt approach that there is value in reading everything out move by move.
If I want to go and see my friend whole lives in a mountain hut, I can don my cilice and spiked garter and walk all the way there, chat for a few minutes, and then hobble all the back.
Or I can drive my car (i.e. use tesuji) and drive to the bottom of the brae and then walk the last few hundred yards. That way I can spend more time with my friend, or go to visit another friend as well.
The hair-shirters may say, "But look at my bulging calf muscles and see how fit I am." I could retort, "But I can walk up the brae without difficulty, and look at my bulging social life."
In real life, it's a personal choice, of course, and I would hesitate to say which choice is better. But in go I think it is possible to make a very strong case for avoiding the hair-shirt approach. This is especially so for amateurs, who have little time and tend to need to play fast. Because of the relative weakness, I think amateurs would in any case benefit more from the baby-steps approach of learning each tesuji as an amuse-gueule rather than as a four-course meal.
But even for pros there are drawbacks to the far-end-of-a-fart approach. The more time you spend going down the branches of a move tree the less time you can spend on a totally different move. You are likely to end up with blind spots and the nerd view as well as nervous exhaustion. This is a form of déformation professionelle even for "un professionel." A version of this defect is particularly applicable to amateurs. How often do we work through a problem, feel the glow of getting it right and then turn the page to get, for good measure, the author's pat on our backs. "Yes," he says though not in so many words, of course, "Your line was correct, but what would you have done if White had played A?" Prick of balloon - we never even considered that move. This is such a major problem in amateur go, I believe, that hair-shirts could usefully be banned.
Quote:
On the other hand, most moves in contact fighting don't seem to be in the catalogue of tesuji techniques
I'd need to think hard before accepting that. But in any case, if it's true it gives you a lot of information. It tells you to expect to play ordinary moves most of the time and not try to be too fancy. That alone can limit your reading load. There are also heuristics and other "tricks" to ease the burden, e.g. "five alive", miai, precious liberties.
I also differ (I think) in that I don't believe the way to learn tesujis is to get a problem book and hair-shirt your way through that. I prefer analysing the tesujis in terms of first, and most important, what they are meant to do, and then in tracing the various lines that lead to said end. Only then do you do problems to reinforce what you learned. You don't normally learn things by just doing problems in other disciplines, surely? You don't learn Latin by practising the conjugation - what conjugation? - of amare and then reading Cicero. First you learn amo, amas, amat etc and you analyse what the endings -o, -as, at do, and why, and so on. Go's only different, as I said earlier, because we start actually playing a full game too soon.
I feel confident in my assertions because of personal experience. When I was translating Gateway To All Marvels (i.e. Xuanxuan Qijing) I had to analyse each problem intensively. First I had set myself the task of cataloguing the various types of techniques (I'm too lazy to look it up but I think it may have been about 30-40 at a minimum). That required great focus. I had to prepare many variation diagrams. That required huge focus and also guaranteed that I looked at every variation - no blind spots. I had to compare many different professional opinions as to the solutions. In many cases the pros differed from each other, some were plain wrong and some didn't solve the problem presented - they chose to add an extra stone so they could show off their own line. Imagine the concentration that required of me, tip-toeing round the feet of the gods, scrabbling for crumbs of spilt ambrosia. Then I had to sort out the relevance of the title of each problem to its solution. That bit at least was fun. I had to do that for about 400 problems.
Note that in all that work I never tried to solve any problem in the traditional way. At the end, however, I was able to look at not just these problems and just "know" the solution, but I could turn to other similar Chinese problem classics and say almost instantly, "Oh, that's a double snapback, just like XYZ in GTAM, and you've got to watch out for so-and-so." Interestingly, though, if I turned to a largely dissimilar book such as the Guanzi Pu which deals to a large extent in boundary-play problems, I was lost - because I had never analysed this type of problem. In other words, my move-by-move reading ability had not improved at all. I had just acquired a lot of useful chunks, or tools for my tool chest. I knew that if I had the urge I could - as could everyone else - acquire the necessary chunks for GZP and other books.
This method of analysing and making associations is, for me at least, much more fun, probably sticks in the brain longer, provides a gorgeously fertile mulch in which to plant new chunks, and doesn't preclude at all any extra move-by-move reading that you may want to do.
PS The Fujisawa tesuji book is the one to use if you want to start on tesuji analysis.