hl782 wrote:i play about 2 12-stone handicap games with him on a weekly basis. He's not much of a teacher/reviewer though - just expects me to progress as i continue to play. he did get me some cool korean books though!
Getting to 10k a month after playing is good progress. Getting to 9D is going to take a good while! Perfectly doable, of course, but there's a long road ahead and commitment is required to get to your destination.
If you want to force your dad to take handicap in the end, do the following. In addition to playing games on a regular basis, you should replay pro games and do exercises in life & death, tesuji, joseki, endgame, middle game, and fuseki. Life & death and tesuji are the bread & butter of many a baduk player, so beef up on these! Of course the other categories are important, but in a game of baduk between strong players fights are frequent and sharpening your L&D and tesuji skills will help you to cut through even the most difficult-to-read positions. Of course, the more of these that you do, the better, but as little as 10-15 minutes a day of doing exercises can go a long way to make you a stronger baduk player. As well - and this is VERY important in my experience - replay pro games, move by move, with board + stones, from start to finish. It can be a classical era baduk master such as Hon'inbo Shusaku, Hon'inbo Shuei, or Huang Longshi - a Chinese master from the 17th century - or it can be a modern master such as Lee Chang-ho, Park Jeong-hwan, Naoki Hane, Gu Li, or Kim Ji-seok. The importance of replaying pro games is that you pick up good habits and ideas that you can apply in your own games. In addition, whenever you get the itch to do whole-board exercises, replaying pro games gives you the background info needed to make educated guesses. The more of these that you replay, the better, but 1 or 2 games a day for starters is more than enough. As well, it is best to replay a game record from start to finish, but you can get a lot just from memorizing the first 100 moves out of 100 games. Logan Dixon has posted his pro game collections, in diagram format.
http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewto ... 17&t=10643
You appear to have been playing baduk for some time, so replaying games from a diagram should not be too difficult. If diagrams are a bit hard for you at the moment, you can go here for some games in the form of move lists, given as grid coordinates.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/123975471017841/
And do not forget good theory books. The concepts presented therein can help you organize all that information picked up through study and practice. Some of the stuff written by Yang Yi-lun 7p is highly recommended.
The Fundamental Principles of Go and the
Workshop Lectures series are worth reading. These can be purchased at
http://www.slateandshell.com .
Well, I hope the above study program proves useful in your case
Of course you'll be losing a nice number of games against your dad, but with each won and lost game your skill at baduk will grow and so will your relationship with your dad. Constant practice & refinement is the way to success!
Hope to improve alot here!