The Joseki Project

Here is a random thought maybe people might want to try.

It just occurred to me that most top kyu/dan level players have one particular joseki that they like. I'm talking about one joseki that they know inside and out, and if you play it against them, you better have a really good idea what you are doing or you are going to end up totally reamed in that corner and possibly the whole board. It also seemed to me that picking up a random joseki book and studying it is often kind of difficult because of all the content, and not knowing where you really want to begin, etc. So I came up with this idea. Perhaps individual people could write about their favorite joseki in extreme detail for others to download and study. I know there is already some of that on SL, but I am talking very thoroughly. Like someone picks out "Star point knight's move approach, two space high pincer, knight's move counterpincer" and writes 10-20 pages on it complete with game examples, pro and amateur, mistakes, trick plays, etc. Assuming people pick joseki's they actually like and know a lot about already, I think this could provide valuable tools for learning. If you ran into a joseki that puzzled you, you could e-mail an author and ask for their pamphlet on the joseki and get a complete treatment, instead of having to go rummage through a joseki book, SL, kogo's, or whatever, and get a few pages, possibly not even on the moves that confused you.

In terms of how much to make each description, I was thinking perhaps the first three moves of a joseki in the case of something simple, like Kitani's Thrust, or the first four moves of something complicated, like 3-4 point low approach one-space low pincer one-point jump. I was thinking perhaps try to get the document in PDF or something psot people can read. As far as diagrams GoFigs seems to work pretty well. In the spirit of getting things going, I'll leave one to start.

Availiable Joseki Pamphlets

Takemiya's Kosumi - (in progress) BlueWyvern

The high pincer - Rather out of curiosity than mastery, I do play this one very often and have been working on the SL pages describing the variations of this pincer. You could say it is my favourite move. --Dieter