Life In 19x19

I am interested where people find the tsumego they solve, if they solve any.

I am not a very seasoned problem solver, but I am doing tsumego once in a time, but then I am not sure where to look for them. And they are so different in didactical value...

Edit: People I screwed up, it was my first poll and I followed the suggestion to add an option... Can anyone reset this?

You can try looking for me in the L19 room on KGS. I have study sessions from time to time with various problems selected from my Asian go books. I can probably safely say that I have one of the best collections of go problem books around I'm sure I must have some interesting problems around which will interest you no matter what your skill level is.

I mainly work through problem collections in books. The Graded Go Problems for Beginners series (4 volumes), Lee Chang-Ho's Life and Death set (6 volumes) and James Davies' 'Tesuji' and 'Life and Death'. Books are nice and transportable. Also, they are available in bed and other places where desktop pc's can't reach ^^

I've printed the Elementary and Intermediate problems of Cho Chikun’s Encyclopedia of life and death (from http://tsumego.tasuki.org/?page=tsumego)

tchan001 wrote:You can try looking for me in the L19 room on KGS. I have study sessions from time to time with various problems selected from my Asian go books. I can probably safely say that I have one of the best collections of go problem books around I'm sure I must have some interesting problems around which will interest you no matter what your skill level is.

Yes, by all means look for tchan001's problems. He posts some interesting ones. Often they're too hard for me, but that's cool. It's interesting to see them.

Started with Cho Chikun's Elementary Problems (they are legally for free, see Li Kao's link) but never went over ~400, then got the "Graded Go Problems For Beginners"-series and "Get Strong at Tesuji" (both main Tsumego source, worked through them like four times already), aside of that I worked through some hundred to one thousand problems on GoProblems.com and in the WBaduk-client, bought and worked through "1001 Life-and-Death Problems" and "Tesuji".
Started "Making Good Shape" (less Tsumego obviously) and "501 Tesuji Problems" but dropped both, because I was not able to solve them.
Then I have one of the classic japanese Tsumego-books with 160 problems inside (9-1k), which I never solved completely (at 3k it was too hard, but this was more than half a year ago) and "Intermediate Level Problems", which I did not start until now.

Yeah, what I really can recommend is the Graded Go Problems series, "Get Strong at Tesuji" and "Tesuji". You can read and solve them a douzen times, there is always something fun about them : )

Then I heard, Yi Chang'ho's Tesuji series is great, but I don't have them so I can't tell you more.

For on computer problems, I would check out wbaduk's problem sets. I think they're fairly good.

Offline, I just have a ton of Japanese books for problems.

I have a Nintendo DS with a good set of tsumego from for the bus. Android has one program with tsumego but it's loaded with problems from goproblems.com which can be hit or miss for quality.
The DS game is http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%82%A8%E3%83 ... y_vg_img_b

All the tsumego I do come from books. Right now the only books (with problems) I have are Lee Changho's life and death series and James Davies' Tesuji. I'd like to get Lee Changho's tesuji series and Graded Go Problems for Dan Players at some point as well.

I get a weekly assignment from my teacher and have trouble even with finishing those.

I am surprised that flashcards are not popular at all. (In Germany they sell Go problems on flashcards.)

I worked my way through Maeda's three volume tsumego set and did a number of problems from the classics (Gokyo Shumyo and Gengen Gokyo). I also have collections of problems composed by Go Seigen. Lately I've been working on a Korean life-and-death "dictionary" (really just a large collection or problems). I found it in a Korean book store in Queens in New York City. I don't know or read any Korean language so all the problems become "status" problems where I have to figure out what happens when either color plays first. Usually they are easy in one direction but some are really interesting in both directions. I like working this way because it's more like how I'd have to evaluate the position in an actual game.

Maeda's tsumego is another set I'd like to get. How difficult are the problems? And do you know of anywhere other than Amazon Japan that I could buy it?

Perception wrote:Maeda's tsumego is another set I'd like to get. How difficult are the problems? And do you know of anywhere other than Amazon Japan that I could buy it?

Slate and Shell has the middle volume for some reason. I'm curious why they didn't have the whole set.

book and other

other includes; people at the local club showing problems, situations from real games, Many Faces problem database, various (random) internet sources.

this sounds like a lot but I solve only a few problems every now and then.

oren wrote:

Perception wrote:Maeda's tsumego is another set I'd like to get. How difficult are the problems? And do you know of anywhere other than Amazon Japan that I could buy it?

Slate and Shell has the middle volume for some reason. I'm curious why they didn't have the whole set.

The problems range in difficulty from around 10k to 4k in the first volume, 5k to 1k in the second volume, and 3k up to dan level in the third volume. The three volume set is different from the book published by Slate and Shell which is a collection of problems published in the old Go Review magazine. The difficulty ratings have to be taken cautiously. They were assigned when the book was written, in 1965, before the rank inflation. US players at the stated ranks would probably find the problems fairly difficult.

AFAIK the three-volume set is only available in a single-volume edition in Japanese. I don't know whether a Chinese or Korean translation was published. If you have access to used book dealers in Japan, like Akashiya Shoten, you can probably find the old three-volume set.

gowan wrote:
AFAIK the three-volume set is only available in a single-volume edition in Japanese. I don't know whether a Chinese or Korean translation was published. If you have access to used book dealers in Japan, like Akashiya Shoten, you can probably find the old three-volume set.

It is sold as a single item, but I would not call it a single volume. It contains three separate books in a box that holds all the books together.