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Joseki Discussion
Keywords: Joseki
newbie question: What is the advantage of knowing a joseki? is it so that you can try to force the stones into a settled position while retaining sente? or is there another advantage? Illume (25kyu): I suppose the major advantage is to recognize common continuations as early as possible. For example you might be in a position where you'd like to make life in the corner and connect two groups of stones. If you study similar positions you will know how easy or difficult it is to achieve both goals. Scartol: Go is all about patterns. Recognizing life patters, death patterns, fuseki patterns, yose patterns. Once you are able to recognize patterns, you can consider their context in your games and adapt your play appropriately. Knowing how to use joseki is useful to me because it allows me to approach difficult situations (like the sansan invasion) without fear. I know there is a mutually beneficial way to resolve the situation, and we can proceed along the path until there's a chance to alter the pattern. Andre Engels: Basically, learning joseki is a short-cut to playing the best moves. If you know the joseki, you can then see the outcome immediately, and then quickly go through the moves until a place where either the opponent plays something different, or you prefer to do something different. Joseki contain a lot of knowledge from many players, which certainly beats having to think things out every time by oneself - some joseki sequences contain tesuji that even a top player would have a hard time thinking out behind the board. Also, when you know how the joseki goes on, you know whether it will be good to play it in a certain situation. Velobici: Joseki are based upon the best play for both players viewing the corner in isolation from the rest of the board. Therein lie two dangers for folks studying joseki. The first danger is that the joseki is the best play....meaning that both players are pushing their moves to the limit. This leaves no room for error. If the other person deviates from the joseki and you dont know why their move is wrong so that you can choose the appropriate response, they may be able to convert your previous maximum effort moves into mistakes (because you failed to support the earlier moves correctly). The second danger is that the joseki ignores the rest of the board. You can play the joseki perfectly and still get a bad result because the joseki does not support your stones on the rest of the board. A simple example is chosing the wrong 3-4 point block when another invades at the 3-3 point below your 4-4 point. Many hamete are based upon deviating from the joseki and punishing the other players failure to push you for deviating. Dieter: I agree with the second but strongly disagree with the first. Whether or not you are consciously playing joseki, a Go player should always go for the best move he can think of. If he gets punished for it, too bad. This is not something typical of joseki. Secondly, sometimes mistakes in joseki lead to disaster, sometimes they incur a 2 point loss. The fact that people are not aware of these differences is a real danger of learning joseki. "Aha! This is not joseki ! Now I will win the game." There is also another danger of learning joseki: Joseki as a source of bad habits. Bob McGuigan: Joseki are sequences of the locally best moves but often different moves are required because of circumstances in neighboring corners or elsewhere on the board. It has often been said that joseki should not be memorized but understood move by move. Many sequences in Ishida's dictionary are no longer considered correct as a result of research and experience in pro games. If you really understand why each move is made you will be able to take advantage of mistakes and make up your own "joseki" if you don't like the standard moves. It's also worth noting that joseki "mistakes" that are considered fatal by pros might only result in a loss of one or two points, hardly likely to be fatal for most of us.
Charles Indeed, giving away too many pints komi is a traditional mistake. This is a copy of the living page "Joseki Discussion" at Sensei's Library. ![]() |