I bought
the PDF a couple of weeks ago. As a borderline dan player (*) it comes across to me as the first half of a very good book. I enjoyed it but wanted more! I suspect it would be very useful to people around 5 kyu, or even for stronger players who haven't previously studied endgame theory. Actually most of it would make sense to a 10k, but at that level there are more urgent things to study! For me there were no substantially new ideas, but it added some clarity to things that I've only partially understood in the past.
(*) I'm around 2 dan over the board in Australia, but 2 kyu on KGS.
Things I most liked:
- The elegant and clear prose style. Törmänen deals with some fairly technical concepts but manages to explain them in a way that's simple and straightforward without obviously dumbing it down. This is a big challenge for any technical writer! Overall the book was much easier to read than I expected for this subject matter.
- The pragmatic attitude. As well as explaining how to do exact calculations, it acknowledges that you won't always have the time (or energy or motivation?) to do the calculations in detail, and gives some advice for practical play.
- The layout. It's well spaced out and more attractive to look at than most English language go books. The wide margins allow for "footnotes" that are right next to the relevant text (no need to go to the bottom of the page, definitely none of the dreaded end-of-chapter notes), as well as mini-diagrams. The diagrams in the margin are really useful prompts, often reminding you of what you were reading a couple of minutes ago. (Unfortunately they weren't used in chapter 9, which is where they would have come in most useful!)
Things that weren't so great:
- In part it reads like a "sampler pack" of topics, with some subjects touched upon but not quite explained in enough detail to be useful.
- It doesn't even hint at the existence of "traditional" endgame theory. If this is your only introduction to the endgame, then you'll struggle to follow older books or game commentaries that use deiri counting.
- It's possibly not the best value for money, being short (126 pages including front and back cover) and slightly on the expensive side for an ebook. Personally I don't mind spending the money, because I know that go book authors tend to be horribly underpaid.
Chapter 1 introduces the basic ideas of how to count territory in the endgame and how to calculate the value of a move. The examples are very basic and crystal clear, including how to make sense of "half a point" if you've never seen it before, and accounting for simple follow-up moves.
Chapter 2 takes a close look at the meaning of "sente" in the endgame. It does something that's missing from a lot of endgame introductions: it makes it clear that sente is relative to the whole board position, and right from the start addresses the timing of sente moves. (My first introduction to endgame theory was
the Ogawa/Davies book which, if I recall correctly, left me guessing on these points.)
Chapter 3 more or less reviews the ideas of the first two chapters with some slightly more complicated positions.
Chapter 4 gets into ko positions, so here you learn about "a third of a point". This was my favourite chapter, as it gets into two-step kos and approach-move kos, topics that can sound very confusing if not explained well, and gives clear examples of how to count them.
Chapter 5 consists of six problems to practice counting. I found that problem 2 was harder than problem 1. But overall the explanations are very clear. I would have liked to see a few extra pages here, perhaps 10 or 15 problems overall including some easier ones to warm up on, and maybe one or two more intricate ones at the end.
Chapter 6 was a bit puzzling. Törmänen describes a method for quick and approximate counting, based on the idea of "visible territory", something I haven't heard of before. I don't mind that there isn't a clear definition of the concept: after all it's just for rough estimates, and if two people interpret it differently and get slightly different counts, it's still delivering what's promised, as long as you can do the calculations quickly. But there are only two examples, one of them very simple, which isn't enough for me to feel confident using the method in my own games. Another couple of worked examples and some more problems to practice on would have helped a lot here.
Chapter 7 is about
Tedomari. The examples are very clear in that you can see what tedomari is, and why it matters, as well as how to get the last point in the special case where all but one endgame move can be sorted into matched pairs. Unfortunately it doesn't give much hint as to how to handle other types of positions. It does teach you that playing the biggest move isn't always a winning strategy. But then you're left wondering what to do other than read to the very end of the game. Isn't the point of endgame theory that you can use your local evaluations to figure out the sequence of plays, so that you don't need to do deep global reading? This chapter seems to undermine those foundations without giving an alternative -- I'm sure that's not the real message, but this is another place where the book opens the lid on a new topic without giving much detail.
Chapter 8 is on endgame tesuji. There's an introduction walking you through how to think about a tesuji problem, and how endgame tesuji differ in character from other tsumego, then eight problems to practice on. The solutions are clear and detailed. But again I felt that it wasn't substantial enough to really be useful. Törmänen does suggest that if you want more, you might read the
Guanzi Pu. Not bad advice, but perhaps a bit over the top? Maybe try
200 Endgame Problems first.
Chapter 9 is a "final exam" consisting of five 13x13 full-board exercises. Törmänen describes them as "extremely challenging" and seems to imply that you shouldn't expect to get the right answers, but you can still benefit from analysing them and then comparing your thoughts with the solution. On a first run through, I spent about 15 minutes trying to solve each problem, and probably achieved "partial credit" on each one. I did find this chapter interesting and rewarding. However, it felt more or less independent of the rest of the book. It doesn't really build on the theory of chapters 1-5; rather, each problem introduces a new idea or a new way of thinking. The explanations are clear and detailed.
There are two appendices which I wasn't sure what to make of. Appendix A has 74 positions ordered by move values from 1/3-point moves up to 7-point moves. It's not clear whether this is meant as a reference list, or whether you're intended to try and reproduce the calculations (or even memorise some or all of the values?) Appendix B is an essay on the history of go and the differences between Chinese and Japanese rules. It does include one example of how you should play an endgame position differently depending on the ruleset, but otherwise doesn't seem to relate to the rest of the book.
(Erratum: as mentioned earlier in this thread, one of the three-point moves in appendix A actually has a value of 2 15/16 points. This hasn't yet been fixed in the PDF. I didn't notice any other mistakes in this book.)
Overall I'd say this is very good on how to count reasonably simple positions but could use a bit more on how to choose the order of moves once you've done the counting, and it gives you a lot of tantalising hints on how much more there is to learn about endgame theory. All done in a very enjoyable and readable style, if a little shorter than I would have liked.
Up next: Robert Jasiek's endgame books. I've just bought the PDF of
Endgame 2 -- Values, but I think it's going to take more than a couple of weeks to work through that one. I'll get back to you next year :-)
I did not know this "like" button had been invented by Facebook.