Life In 19x19

dfan wrote:I've said this in other threads, but at 10k Life and Death (the Davies book) was over my head and turned me off of life and death entirely for a while.

I struggled through Davies' L&D book twice a few years ago, but have had no desire to return to it. Somehow, the book just seems dry (more than other tsumego books) and I've heard a lot of people say they didn't like it. In fact, I once read a comment from a 5d player who'd owned the book since it was first published in the 1970s, and claimed he was never able to make it all the way through the book!

To the OP, like some of the other posters, I'd recommend 1001 Life and Death Problems. The Korean Problem Academy on Gobase is nice too, provided you have an account. Once you've mastered 1001 L&D, think about one of the tesuji dictionaries.

Cho Chikun's 'all about life and death' is a lot nicer to read than the Elementary Go series L&D. Of course being OOP it's hard to get and expensive.

You may also try http://senseis.xmp.net/?BeginnerExercises

However, the key thing is to recognize life and death situations when they arise in your games. Therefore, doing problems should go in conjunction with playing games.

I like davies L&D a lot. It is systematical, you learn step by step.
Last week, in the Amsterdam tournament, I had the L&D problem shown in the picture ( bottom left corner ).
As black ( 7 k ) I was happy to know that I could live with Bb3. Thx to Davies. Stupidly I replied Bb1 against We2 next, but he did not see the killing continuation at Wa2.

Araban wrote:You need to play many games and go over them thoroughly!

Didn't work for me. When I still played a lot, I lost because of stupid DDK blunders in the very most cases. Somehow the mistakes didn't want to enter my long-term memory. It seems these situations didn't occur frequently enough to get hardwired. Probably I am already too old.

I think that it is worthwhile to concentrate on the seemingly easy things, where you still occasionally blunder, most. "Yeah, I know that, I just did not read" is no excuse---you need to train it until it sticks.