The fundamental Principals of Go
Who are these people, and which schools do they run?
And talking of schools seems like a good excuse for mini-essay time.
It has long been my sense that it is possible in go to improve continuously in almost every aspect by continued study, except in the fuseki and in middle-game strategies. Study tesujis, life and death, endgame counting, joseki and you will progress and never go backwards, except for extraneous reasons such as tiredness or age.
On the face of it, this split between strategy and tactics seems natural. But what seems unnatural, at least initially, is that when you study strategy you often go backwards. For example, you read advice that it is good to make territory by attacking. You try attacking and, sure enough, you get a great thrill from chasing the opponent round the board, but he lives and you end up with
less territory than you used to get before. I'm guessing the flaw is in equating "study of strategy" with accepting "advice" or "fundamental principles" (or proverbs). Fuseki and middle-game strategies probably don't distill down to fundamental principles very well. Unless someone can do some sort of multiple regression analysis to isolate the dominant factors reliably, progress in these areas is probably best done in the school of hard knocks rather than in books.
Furthermore, it is my impression that if you do study strategy pragmatically, whilst you do improve, at the same time you come to realise there is more and more that you don't know. In other words, you see what a great game go is, I suppose.
I used to latch on to pithy sayings such as Go Seigen saying, "The corners are always biggest". My equivalent of the school of hard knocks, playing over his actual games, led to me retort, "Oh yeah, so why don't you follow your own advice?" I'm not sure that it would be an exaggeration to say that every piece of opening or middle-game strategy advice I've ever seen comes somewhere with either an exception or a caveat. So, now, pithy sayings just wash over me.
Still, there must be ways to become better at strategy, so what are they? My own impression is that attaention has to be diverted to two somewhat unintuitive approaches. One is to accept a much coarser grain of advice. The principle that is most "fundamental", if I dare use that word, may be simply to strive to make your stones work together. Looking instead for fine-grained advice - the ultimate folly of which is learning joseki by heart - means you end up playing just as a wide receiver or a tight end when you really want to be a quarterback.
The other approach is timing. This is rarely mentioned as a fundamental, except obliquely. I have seen, for example, recent go features that talk about TOP - time, opportunity, place. Apart from putting time first, however, time has not really been discussed there very well. I imagine this is more of a journalistic gimmick to borrow some new management-school jargon than a serious attempt to discuss the topic.
Yet there are at least three elements of strategy where timing is at the core. They are closely interrelated. One is sente/gote. Another is miai alternatives. A third is patience.
Patience is the least appreciated in the west, in my view. Possibly this is because so many Japanese take it as a given that they never bother to discuss it. Since most of our literature has been borrowed from the Japanese, that lacuna has carried over, to our detriment. Patience is especially valuable in the middle game. It distils down to concepts such as the honte, but also, to use the example I gave above, if you do follow the advice to gain points by attacking but bolster it with patience (e.g. quietly play a move elsewhere but in the eventual path of the flight of the stones), it gives a way to manage a complete game.
As to sente/gote, this is one of the most discussed topics in western go. We even get bogged down in arguments about whether there is a difference between a kikashi (forcing move) and a sente kikashi. You very rarely hear these discussions among oriental players. Instead, you hear talk about things like sente no gote and momentum (choshi). You can easily get a western player to understand these concepts, but (in my experience) the commonest reaction is simply, "Oh yeah, that" and then discussion of sente kikashi is resumed. These other concepts are, at best, tucked away into the recesses of the toolbox instead of being always on instant stand-by in the tray at the top.
Miai alternatives in strategy I have seen mentioned countless times, usually in the same breath as Honinbo Shuei. But I don't recall ever seeing them
discussed. Again, it is very easy to understand miai once you are shown them in a specific game. But it is a real devil to work out how to create them regularly in your games. Here, too, I believe that the key to unlocking understanding is a coarser-grained approach, but I have yet to find it.
In fact, in general, I believe that the most fruitful approach to fuseki and middle-game strategy is to make your "fundamental principles": (a) take a coarse-grained approach, and (b) justify every action you take in terms of time.
