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How Do You Learn Joseki
    Keywords: Question, Joseki

I've avoided really learning any josekis up to this point in my Go playing because I wanted to avoid the ameteur mistake of playing a joseki because it is a joseki without regard to the whole board situation. Now I'm getting to the point where I feel like I could really profit from a study of joseki, but I'm not sure how to go about tackling them. Does anyone have any pointers on how to learn joseki? --BlueWyvern



It depends on how serious you are about it. What I often do - and what has proven useful to me - is studying joseki I encounter in my own games. Especially those where I had the feeling that I played bad. I look up these josekis in a dictionary (or here at SL :o) and try to understand why my move was bad. I also try to apply my new knowledge in following games and see how it turns out. Usually, this means that I play an even bigger blunder and I'm back at the dictionary again :o) But overall, it is a very helpful process. --ArnoHollosi (1d)

DaveSigaty: I think that I am much like Arno. I mainly study ("check" is more accurate :-) in reaction to something that happens over the board either to me or in a game that I watch. It is very seldom that I study something in a forward-looking way where I look at a new joseki with the intention to try it out in my own games.

I don't find that attempts at intensive individual study help me that much. I quickly become bored and start to play around with the variations. This is wasted time in terms of advancing my skills regardless of how enjoyable it is at the time. Instead I find that presenting issues to an audience (both by contributing to SL and by writing reviews for the Go Teaching Ladder) adds some additional discipline that lets me dig more deeply.

However, regarding Joseki in particular, there is one thing that I did that I think helped a lot to get a sense of Joseki as a whole. I was just getting started in Go (mid-kyu player in the U. S.) when Ishida's Joseki Dictionary was published in 1977. I remember waiting impatiently for volumes 2 and 3 to be published. I read each one like a book - without trying to analyze each line. I would recommend this to anyone.

Most of all you should play what makes sense to you as situations arise in your games. Then, as often as possible, think about the results. After that check a dictionary if you have one available (and since there are some on-line now everyone has something available :-).



I believe that it is helpful to look in the joseki dictionary to know what is considered a good sequence of moves. But the true understanding comes when you play this particular joseki and play it a lot. A pattern by itself is not that good as the understanding of what kind of possibilities it carries, how big are continuations, what changes in the surrounding situation would require a reinforcement of the position, and so on.

Thus a study of a joseki, even the simplest one, is a long process. The book gives you a simple idea only.

I would solicit a lot of experimenting with moves to learn good and bad sides of them. Very often that makes you to understand the value of the move from a book. It is understandable the weaker players see the local situation only partly, only territory and influence, for example, but stability in the fight, eye forming potential and other sublte things have to be taken into account too. For example,


[Diagram]
Diag.: White 1 is joseki rather than 'a'

To weaker players such moves do not come to mind at a glance. But we can appreciate the idea when looking through the joseki dictionary.

 HolIgor


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