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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 patterns, 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.

BobMcGuigan: 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.

DJ I totally agree with Bob. But I have noticed that Charles has corrected a hilarious typo due to which Bob's last phrase read like: "...might only result in a loss of one or two pints, hardly likely to be fatal for most of us.".
I would have left it as it was, because it is certainly true that losing pints (of real ale?) is not fatal. Sad, yes, but not fatal.
:-)))

Charles Indeed, giving away too many pints komi is a traditional mistake.


(Moved from kosumi tsuke joseki)

phenomene : Well, I think a sequence linked from the page Joseki without further explanation should refer to something locally leading to an even result. Of course there are special circumstances where this sequence is good (when one has strength on the side as in your examples), but it is usually bad to play Kosumi-Tsuke when the opponent has room to extend. It may be called Joseki because it matches the translation of the Japanese "settled stones", but in usual go language, one uses the word Joseki for equal results only, and it is common to say "this is not joseki" for sequences better for one player. In short, it is dangerous to suggest a sequence is a rule when it is an exception.

Bill: I think it is what joseki books call a play that depend on the circumstances Baai no Te.

[Diagram]
A simple joseki

Andre Engels: I don't agree with phenomene. There are joseki in the joseki books for which they say, "Locally this is good for Black/White, but it may be different regarding on the overall position." Ishida for example, regards the sequence to the left a 'basic joseki', but also notes that "just taking this area in account, the exchange [...] is clearly favourable for Black."

DaveSigaty: Yes, he did say that, so I updated 3-4 point distant low approach to warn readers against taking such out of date advice too seriously!
More seriously though, I agree with Andre. The joseki books would be both dull and a lot thinner if they only listed lines where there was a clear consensus that the result was completely even. More importantly, perhaps, they would be forced to exclude all the joseki that are currently being used = the ones where there is no consensus yet so one player or another thinks they will lead to an advantage.

BobMcGuigan: The famous statement that "for a meijin there are no joseki" suggests that very strong players make things up as they go along, or maybe that "joseki" are determined by social convention among go players. There are also various sequences that were given the "joseki" stamp of approval in, say, Ishida's dictionary and widely played in professional games but some years later are no longer considered "joseki". Maybe all joseki dictionaries should have a warning label that indicates that the moves in this book give results that are generally considered equal at the time of writing but are not guaranteed to be so in the future. Nakayama Noriyuki, writing on this topic, said that erroneous joseki sequences seem to persist in dictionaries for 30 to 50 years. In other words, it takes a long time for go writers (and even pros) to become aware of some of these changes of judgment.

Charles At least. If one works closely with them, one becomes aware of the uneven nature of their content. For example, repeating old analysis not based on high-level play has been common up until recent times (when, to be fair, there are many thousand more games played per year by pros). You can find minor mistakes in suji, too; which is probably a sign that an insei compiled a section, rather than a strong pro. The Igo Daijiten must quite largely consist of research rather than joseki from real games. One reason that Korean go has had such an impact is that a more sceptical attitude has been applied to 'things everyone knows'.



This is a copy of the living page "Joseki Discussion" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.