Also, my copy of Chess for Zebras by Jonathan Rowson finally arrived yesterday morning. I have been devouring it apace, despite the great distraction of having had to volunteer at a long Halloween party immediately after it was delivered.
First, I have several books on joseki, including Takao`s big two-volume reference book. However, what I fancy about How to Use Basic Joseki (another MyCom book, btw) is that is combines solutions to several of my needs.
* It is selective - 35 featured joseki (with others en passant)
* It includes detailed discussion of follow-ups
* Each featured joseki is introduced through a set of three whole-board problems - is the joseki a good choice and why?
* Successes and failures are explained, with other ways of playing included
* Nice diagrammatic index at the beginning - useful for reference
* It's printed in a larger format than usual, with big diagrams and easily legible print (a welcome courtesy to a non-native reader and presumably to Japan`s greying target audience)
With this book I can fill up some spaces in my knowledge and train my skills.
The issue I have with Takao`s joseki dictionary, for instance, is that it tells you lots of ways to play, but it`s very difficult to make any kind of inroads on it as an object of study. It`s useful for post-game reference, and sometimes quite enjoyable to read in itself, but reading it feels somewhat like trying to learn French by memorising a dictionary.
Books like 38 Basic Joseki (out of date and I don't know if I still have a copy back in Albion) and Takemiya's 24 Basic Joseki are selective, which at least gives you a feeling of creating scaffolding for further learning, but still involve you only in a passive way - you read the book and try to remember, but you don`t do a lot of thinking.
Then there are many pocket books, which are basically cheap puzzle books asking you to find the correct continuation, but they are seldom useful to me because explanations, if any, are brief and bald (this flavour: "White plays here, Black answers and the result is equal"), and because they tend to be haphazard in their structure.
The problem with dense reference books is that it is difficult to read them in a structured way. The problem with selective instruction books is that you read them too passively. The problem with puzzle books is that although they make you think, they don`t provide enough frameworks or explanation to support your thinking.
This book, How to Use Basic Joseki, seems to solve all three problems. You get reference material (alternative joseki and follow-ups), you get instruction and structure so that you don`t feel lost, and you are actively engaged in the learning process. I believe the two points are crucial: to improve your skill, you must learn to think for yourself, but you need guidance from a higher place. Books that tell you only what to think will not benefit you nearly as much as books that train you to think well.
Further, it might well be worth investing $25 dollars on it even if you don`t read Japanese - with very minimal kanji recognition you can extract a lot from it.
Those are my first impressions, not a review.
As for Rowson. As John said, it`s a very good go book! I don`t play chess any more, but it`s plain to see that many of the issues that affect chessers affect us stoners. People memorise chess openings, but can`t play chess very well; people memorise joseki and fuseki, but cannot play go well.
Many of the things I have been talking about are addressed by Rowson - for instance, what I have referred to a relational memory is discussed.
He brings up the role of words in chess thinking. They start off by being helpful, but eventually they become hindrances by overloading the working memory. Grandmasters think in a much more abstract, streamlined way, with minimal use of words to describe the relationships that they process in their minds.
Apply this to go: go principles are of great help, but they can also be great obstacles. For a long while, I have noticed how very difficult it is to keep reminding myself of verbal principles while considering a move in a real game situation. It is as though they impede thinking rather than facilitate it. Analogy time: at some point you have to study grammar to progress at a second language, but you have to avoid consciously thinking about grammar in order to speak the language. It can be tedious talking to language-learners because you can see the cogs turning behind their eyes, when you already know what they are trying to say.
One exercise Rowson recommends is to take a position from a master game, give yourself about 20 minutes, and then try to work out what happened. Afterwards, compare your game with the real one. It can be instructive to see how your impressions of what was important turned out to be different from what the players thought.
I am certainly going to try this the next time I play through a professional go game - I will stop a several places, and try to play the game for myself, and then compare with the actual game. I have no doubt that it will greatly challenge my ideas about size, urgency, aji, shape and everything else!
The key here is developing thinking skills - it may be rather humbling to find that your thoughts about a position were completely out of tune, but discovering this for yourself and learning how to get back in key should be much more beneficial than merely being told what to think.
To summarise, verbal principles are something to be mastered and then transcended. The goal has to be to learn to see go relationships in an abstracted way, a wordless way that gets straight to the real relationships between stones. That, I believe, is skill.
And this brings me to the last point. I am certain I have now finally identified the most important skill of all, the skill that brings everything else into frame. But, I`m not going to tell you what it is
Napoleon Hill-style, I will give you a hint:And because I`m not a cruel teaser, he`s one more hint:
