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Memorizing first 50 moves
   

Someone told me, when I asked about how to improve my openings, that I should memorize the first fifty moves of one-hundred different pro games.

Is there anything legit about this idea? Would it help me, a hapless 10k or so? Or is this in the same idea that it's too soon to be memorizing pro games?

I just thought I'd ask some people with more go-savvy then myself.

Kendrah

Arno: I guess you will improve a lot if doing so. Although, the cause of your improvement may not be that you handle the opening better, but that in order to remember 50 moves of 100 games you have to study a lot and have to recognize shapes in josekis etc. The real question is: would you improve more if you did the same amount of studying of e.g. life&death and tesuji problems? I think so. Reading ability is the single most valuable asset a Go player has. If your reading is strong, the other points (strategy, evaluation of positions, ...) will follow too.

kokiri as an alternative, why don't you see how many moves of your own games you can remember - this is usually a good sign of how much you are concentrating on your moves. Usually I find that i can remember a game for about 100 moves, give or take, but that I forget just when things start to go wrong - i.e. when I stop concentrating properly on my moves.

Rakshasa: I think at 10k you will gain more by doing life & death and lots of relatively easy tesuji problems. Except for the fun of it, i don't think replaying pro games at that level is that helpfull compared to doing a large quantity of tsume go. The pro games will show you josekis, complex tesujis, balance and more but most of it will be lost on you if you don't have the basics.

Velobici: Further support for doing lots of life and death problems. The Korean Problem Academy is an easy resource. I have been studying life and death mainly for about six months now. The result is that I see sequences that cause my opponents grief and other sequences that relieve my concerns about my own stones. Life and Death is the basis of everything.

unkx80: Yes, I agree on picking up basic techniques. For a 10k, learning more on life and death and tesuji might be more worthwhile than learning things like joseki.

Bill: There is something to the idea. However, there is a better way to study the opening that is similar. Get a program that lets you replay games without seeing the next play, and play over the openings of several pro games, trying to guess the next play. Spend up to a minute or two on each play. If you guessed wrong, try to figure out why the pro played where he did. If you do that, you will not only improve, you will find that you have memorized nearly all of those openings in the process. ;-)

It wouldn't hurt to read a book, either.

Good luck!



This is a copy of the living page "Memorizing first 50 moves" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.