Life In 19x19

Hello! I had a question about studying Go problem sets of any kind (life and death, opneing, etc). Right now I'm looking at getting the Graded Go Problems for Beginners books eventually. However, I was wondering about how to go about studying. So far I've been told its fine to look at the answer and I had some others say try not to look at the answers at all. I have done some problems and I use the answers to see a) if I got the problem right and b) if I had the right reason behind the answer (if there is an explanation). What would be the reason to not see the answers? And also when you study life and death problems, someone mentioned placing them on the board to study them. Should I place them on a board for study instead of just looking at diagrams? Thanks!

Boyce

I'm just going to say right off the bat that you shouldn't expect consistent replies; people will suggest the method that worked for them and these will vary from person to person.

That said, I think this page will be useful to you: http://senseis.xmp.net/?BeginnersGuideToTsumego

As for my own personal way of studying tsumego, try to solve the problem in under 10 minutes. If it takes you longer than 10 minutes, skip it and move on. After you've solved it, feel free to look at the solution to verify your reading. If you have a board and stones in front of you, try putting the tsumego on the board but I would suggest not playing out variations with the stones. Just leave the initial position as is and try to solve it in your head. Reading on paper is also fine, and great for when you're in a bus (or if you're like me, to do in-between school studies).

There are two schools of thoughts on doing tsumego:
1) Do it only in your head
2) You can and should look at the answers

If you read the my blog article on Cho Chikun's thoughts on doing life and death problems, you'll notice that he urges people to read books where they can figure out 80% of the problems. So what I take this to mean is that you need to find books where you can accurately solve 80% of the problems without looking at the answers. And you should be able to do so in a short period of time. Remembe Cho Chikun says he prefers people to do 60 problems in a hour instead of 1 problem in an hour.

Now the idea about where and when you should look at the answers. I would suggest that you do look at the answers of books you find too difficult to solve. The reason you want to do so is to expose yourself to higher level thinking and concepts. Once you are exposed to such thinking and concepts, you can try to experiment with them in your own games and learn even faster. The point is that this allows you to build up your own personal arsenal of interesting moves which you can select from in many situations you are likely to face in your games. The bigger the personal arsenal is, the more flexible you are in finding the right options when facing difficult situations.

You should therefore probably spend about 80% of your time drilling yourself with easy to understand books and 20% looking at harder books. Once your ability to solve the easy problems improve to perhaps higher than 95%, you should move on to books at the next level of problem difficulty for your daily drills.

One more idea is to look at difficult problems as a group. From time to time on KGS in the L19 room, we have informal study sessions where we look at interesting problems that are usually much harder than the average attendee would be able to solve in their head. So we let the lower level people have a first crack at it, and then move up the ladder until it gets close to being solved. Sometimes, it requires a high level dan to crack the problems. The idea of this group study is so we can look at the thinking process of different ranks and try to incorporate the good habits we see of people who are higher ranked. Whereas the higher ranks have a chance to try out interesting problems from Asian books which they might not have the chance to acquire. It has worked well in the past and we have had some very interesting session. Of course it is expected that the person who brings up the problems has access to a model answer from the books. And from time to time, we do find that the model answer is wrong or can be refined.

Everybody encounters tsumego in their path towards being a stronger player. (If they didn't I'd say they were pretty lost). Don't be confused by the differing opinions on how to work with tsumego. Figuring out how you, personally, would like to work with them, is very important. Be aware of the different options you have, which have been summarized by tchan as follows:

tchan001 wrote:There are two schools of thoughts on doing tsumego:
1) Do it only in your head
2) You can and should look at the answers

You can pick either one, or even create your own synthesis of the two ways of solving tsumego. No two people are alike, therefore what works for one person might not work as well for you. There are benefits and drawbacks to each way of working with tsumego. Personally, I emphasize doing lots of tsumego without ever looking at the answers, just read, read, read through a position until you know you have the right answer, and can refute every move your opponent could make in the position (should you be interested, you can read more about that here: viewtopic.php?f=48&t=994) This works for me, but more importantly: that's how I enjoy my tsumego the most. If you're going to be doing them a lot to improve, you might as well do it the way you like best. And when you've tried a certain method, you might at some point encounter its drawbacks, and decide you need to alter it a little. For me, never looking at the answers means I'm not exposed to higher level ideas. I'm only exposed to moves I can come up with, and this approach is much slower. I might have to rethink my approach in the near future.

Anyway, read up on the different ways of solving tsumego, and make a conscious choice of how you want to work with problems. And don't let anyone tell you your choice is wrong. After a while you'll know if your approach needs some adjustment. Above all, have fun. Solving tsumego is one of the great joys of being a go player.

tchan, thank you very much for translating that part of Cho Chikun's book. It was quite infospiring.

Boyce wrote: What would be the reason to not see the answers?

Usually the reason is that when you are playing a game, you can't look ahead to see the answers. Nor can you play it out on the board. You have to read it out in your head and go with your best decision.

But studying is not the same as playing.

When you are studying, do what works best for you for learning and improvement.

But take the "what works best for you" advice with a grain of salt, because coaches/advice givers often know how to push us beyond what we think we can handle -- because if we really only did what we think best, we might never improve.