Haeng-Ma Tutorial for Beginners

Table of contents Introduction Accomplished chapters To do

Introduction

This tutorial is meant to help beginners get an idea of haeng-ma, or "correct (reasonable) moves in local fights". The literal meaning of the Korean Go term is "the movement of horses [stones]." It is used to describe the way a stone is developing, flowing, and preventing the opponent's stones from developing in a local context. Correct and reasonable haeng-ma will make your local position solid, strong, and efficient, and eventually this good local position will be converted into territory.

The rules of Go are very simple but learning how to build, connect, and make your stones develop efficiently is neither easy nor simple. It is time-consuming work and requires experience. Even worse (or better), due to the complexity of the game, memorizing all the correct plays in local positions is impossible. However, by studying standard and common positions which come up frequently in Go, we can gradually learn what reasonable play looks like and apply it to other cases. This is the purpose of the tutorial.

I, Minue, assume that you are familiar with some elementary Go concepts and tactics, like atari, liberties, ko, territory, corner, center, tengen, net and ladder. Target readers' level varies from 30k to 15k. This tutorial is also not complete and I continue to work to expand it little by little.

Accomplished chapters

You can browse through the existing chapters on the following pages:

1. Stability and development of stones
2. Simple positions of single stones
3. Four basic moves for building positions
4. Basics of positional judgment
5. Intermezzo: Ja choong soo
6. Cross-cut position

To do

Some more things to be done in this chapter. - urgency. (stability vs potential of development). (heavy stones vs light stones). (solidness vs flexibility), (thickness vs thinness), (influence vs secured territory),...