Learning pro games
A traditional method of teaching beginner players is to ask them to memorise one or more complete high-level games.
This suggestion is still made. One should probably see it as a way to try to put players directly in touch with fundamentals?, without verbose instruction.
It could also be a way to throw off time-wasting pupils, of course. A reasonably strong player can learn much of a game by playing it through a few times - taking an hour or so. It could easily take a beginner a week.
XCMeijin: is replaying a pro game as good as memorising one? I've recently started doing this and was just wondering... And should i replay the same game over and over again, or is variety better?
Truc: I've heard varied advice on this subject ranging from "Don't bother with pro games until you're a high dan" to "Replay games to get the feel for shapes" to "Replay a game over and over until you can remember it without looking at the kifu". Ultimately you should decide for yourself how you want to study pro games. Most pro games have middle game fighting that's way beyond my understanding, so I usually replay the first 40-50 moves of a game to get the feel for the fuseki and don't bother studying their middle game too much.
Tamsin: It's unlikely you'll get more than a slight boost to your intuitive feeling for the game simply by replaying pro games. But if you play through a game several times and try to memorise, say, 100 moves, trying to understand the meaning of the moves as much as you can, then you should expect several benefits: first, you'll learn a lot of joseki and the situations where they are appropriate; second, you'll notice what shapes are made in which situations; third, you'll pick up middle-game tesuji and joseki, and again you should begin to associate them at some level with the appropriate contexts.
I used to do this a lot in my first two years of playing, and improved rapidly; now, I realise, I find that almost all the joseki and standard techniques I know were first encountered in this way. Therefore, I'm trying it again; it should be more fun than force feeding and other things that I've done (force feeding works, by the way, but it really drains the enjoyment out of studying).
Malweth: Learning pro games was one of the things that has helped me the most getting from approx 15k to 3k AGA.
At first (15-12k) I just watched through the game once, and then replayed over the first 50 moves, not caring too much if I got the correct next move, though memorization of the first 50 moves is still ok and I did that a number of times too.
Around 8k I concentrated more on short-term memorization of the first 50-100 moves. I'm not aiming to keep any single game in long-term memory, but the shapes and josekis are learned easily this way.
Now, between 5-3k, I've been concentrating most on memorizing the game until just before small yose (150-200 moves) and attempting to reason out why each move was played. I believe that it's only important to start doing this when you're in the very low kyus or beginning dan levels. I'm concentrating on easy to understand pro players (Takemiya) for this aspect of learning pro games, and I continue with my 8k method with the harder to understand pros (Go Seigen).
Just a warning that: this does cause (relatively) rapid improvement, but Life and Death and Tesuji Tsumego are also very important. It's my opinion that Wu's games helped me crack 8k and that Takemiya helped with the 5k barrier.
Chris Hayashida: I tried to memorize a game earlier on. I think it did help, but not so much in the tactical or strategic ways mentioned above. I think that being able to remember up to 200 moves sort of "cleared space" in my brain so that I was able to remember longer sequences. I found that my reading improved directly as a result.
I didn't find it that helpful with strategy, as I could only guess what the pros were thinking, even when the game was commented. I also found that I couldn't read out some of the tactical issues (Why did he tenuki? Can't he be cut off?) That being said, I still think it was beneficial to my game. Good luck.