This small guide is written for each player
Table of contents |
Many times I hear questions and requests like "How can I become strong?" or "My Go lacks this or that. Please teach me how to be better at it!". In general, I think many people overestimate the role of a Go-Teacher. Of course, it's very important to play and analyze with stronger players too, but still the teacher is not everything. Most of the learning consists of exploring Go for yourself, and not by have every single move explained.
Actually, most part of my study in Japan did not consist of being taught by pros, but of studying by myself. One big point of being next to professionals was that they explained how to do this.
For you, these lines mean that you don't have to go to Japan or find a 6-Dan teacher to become incredibly strong!!! Instead, if you are ambitious, you just have to know what to do by yourself. This is why I decided to write this small tutorial.
Many people keep saying that Go is mainly about territory, and that Life and Death is just important for stubborn killers, who use Go to escape their own aggressions but never understood the real game. I believe this is rubbish!
At first, let me talk about Go-history and philosophy:
In ancient China, people were not scoring territory at all, but instead just the stones on the board. So originally, Go was about "gaining life for as many stones as possible" instead of territory. Building a territory - i.e. an area where no opponent's stones are able to live - was just one strategy to secure life for many stones later. In other words, Go was just about life & death! When the Japanese changed the rules to territory scoring as they found this more elegant than scoring stones, the rules of Go were cut apart from the original idea, which lead to the widespread misbelief among amateurs that Go would basically be about just fencing in points.
All professionals know better. Just recently Saijo Masataka 8p visited Hamburg, and while commenting on a game, he said: "In Fuseki and Middle Game, territory is not important, but strength and weakness of groups".
Now the five-hundred-million-dollar question: How to improve your judgement of weak and strong groups? Hint: Look at the Headline.
I think you are beginning to get the point. Be honest: How many of your last ten games were decided by just building territory, and how many of them by either killing stones or, if you are already a dan-player, by the implications of misjudging the strength of a group, for example being heavily attacked and therefore losing too many points by its implication?
Voilą
There's maybe one more point to say: By doing much tsumego, your reading ability will increase in general, not just about life and death and tesuji. So you will have an easy time calculating endgame sequences and other stuff, so this will also be affected greatly by doing tsumego.
Right, this really happens sometimes with players who do tsumego the first time in life, as it is the first time they start to focus on strengths or weaknesses. But this is just an in-between stage and still an improvement compared to before, when weak groups were ignored by both players half of the game. It's ok for a while as you can try out and find the limits of your new knowledge. After losing enough games because of trying too hard, your way of dealing with weaknesses will become more subtle: You will create double threats of killing and making points, and you learn how to fight in a safe way that pays attention to both attack and defence. After really mastering life and death, many players suddenly change to a very calm, peaceful style, as they know when to avoid having a weak group and when to refrain from hard fighting since they can read out when it doesn't work.
For asian people, tsumego doesn't mean go problems in general, but especially life and death, and also problems about escape and capture rather than just building eyes. From my point of view, a mix of about 60% "real" life and death plus 40% escape and capture sounds nice.
There are three levels of difficulty that may appeal to you:
Lee Ki-Bong, Korean Go professor and 8 dan, recommends to do 1/3 of each type, but I believe that you should concentrate on the problems you enjoy most: If you like the feeling of having solved a problem, you can do problems that are not too hard for you, if you're looking for a challenge, try out harder ones (but don't spend more than 10 minutes at one time for one problem).
Now the most important thing:
Let me explain why: The right way of learning Go is to find new ideas yourself, instead of copying those of others. It won't help you improve, if you know one solution by copying. As you weren't able to find out alone, your reading ability is not yet good enough to understand the problem completely. Even if you know the solution, you don't know why it is right and why the other moves don't work, because you couldn't read out all variations. So even if you feel wiser, your reading didn't improve and the problem was useless.
If you are frustrated with not solving a problem, just continue with the next one without looking at the solution!
This is the right approach, used by all ambitious eastern students. Your reading already improved while trying to find out yourself, even if wasn't successful yet. Just do other problems to divert your mind from the unsolvable one. After a few more problems or after being through with the whole book (just as you like), you can have a second try with the problem, and maybe you can solve it this time. If not, continue in the same way until one day you made it! I can tell you, the satisfaction from finally having solved such a hard problem will be much bigger than your initial frustration, so you will be very motivated to do more.
After repeating a book two to three times, almost all of the problems will be very easy for you, and you can continue with a harder book. After you did the Chinese classical books, your reading ability is exactly like a pro's, and you should be able to rise to 7-8 dan. That's it!
Nowadays there's much tsumego available on the net, but I personally prefer printed media most of the time. Try both yourself and decide.
I believe that it's important not to submit to your teacher completely. Instead of just accepting everything he or she says, you should explain what you thought when you played, so both of you can compare his ideas with yours, and you can try to judge together whose were better. Of course, most of the time, the stronger player will be right, but sometimes he will not!
My teachers in Japan insisted that during analysis, there's no teacher and no student, but instead two equal partners who explain and compare their ideas, maybe even in a sort of fight/discussion if they disagree. In this way, all participants can learn from the game, though usually the weaker player of course gets more from it. But in this way there's a chance that he really understands instead of just copying blindly.
If you know a few more ambitious players in your town, maybe you should ask them to found a study group to meet like once a week to show and analyze each others games. This way all of you learn to get new ways of thinking and estimating, and as you are together you can try to decide which one fits best into a situation. It is said that the Korean and Chinese top-professionals are recently so much more successful than the Japanese because they are studying together, not alone.
Japanese pros recommend repeating and learning professional games (I had to do 100 when I was in Japan). By this you can get a nice feeling for flow and shape, and you find a lot of new ideas how to use your stones. On the other hand, most Koreans believe that before being around 7 dan, pro games are almost useless as you don't really understand most of it before you can read like a pro.
So you should find out yourself how many pro games you want to look at. It might also depend on your goal: If you want to win as much as possible, pro games don't help too much IMO. But if you see Go as an art, you will love the beauty of their play and it might help you finding elegance in your own games.
It's up to you, whether or not you want to do this. Just do what you enjoy!
But which games to look at?
Maybe you should concentrate on games of real top-players, as their Go is even more complete than other pros - and there are enough games, so why not choose the best of the best? There's much choice, from Shusaku to Lee Chang-Ho, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. All of them are very good, so you can decide what you like. If you like straightforward, understandable moves, you might prefer older Japanese games, i.e. Shusaku. If instead you love violent, chaotic fighting, you could chose some modern Korean stuff, i.e. Cho Hun-Hyun. Maybe you should try out very different games to find out what you like. Then you can start learning games of one or a few special player(s).
How to learn games?
Like with everything else in life, you must find your own way to do so. I can just give some proposals, but please feel free to adapt:
All of the time, focus your mind on these topics:
Also, always try to imagine where you would play in this situation and why. Then compare to what you believe the pro's aim was. Most of the time his idea is superior to yours, but not always. Don't think too hard to decide this, it's already great if you can get his idea.
One game alone probably won't affect your style too much, so if you are serious, give yourself a challenge like 50 or even 100 games - yes, it's possible if you're not too old.
At last, I give you one warning:
After you looked at some games, you will be tempted to copy pro moves blindly. That's a very bad idea, as it will lead you to play moves whose meaning you don't understand at all - this is not Go! Although it's useful to develop a good intuition for shapes, you should never forget the objective behind a move. I know what I'm talking about, and because I never heard a warning like this, I'm still fighting against this bad attitude. With this, learning pro games can even affect your Go negatively! So just make the same move the pro did after assuring that the idea behind it fits to the position on the board and thinking about alternatives.
In general, every minute you spend with Go will help you improve, so feel free to do everything you enjoy. But you should always be aware that successful home study consists of maybe 80% life and death, and you will realize that joseki and endgame also have a lot to do with it.
To talk about joseki, you know this proverb: "Who starts learning joseki will become three stones weaker". The meaning behind it is exactly like mentioned at the warning above: It tempts you to copy moves you don't really understand, which is a very bad habit. If instead, you replay joseki while always trying to find out why the moves are better than others, it can help you improve indeed, but before you can do so, you must be able to read very well.
Charles: One question. There must always be players who lose more than 50% of their games. Is this course of study enjoyable for them?
Benjamin: Sorry, I don't get your question at all. I mean, for statistical reasons, of course all of the time someone has a worse score than 50%, but do you think these will always be the same persons? Your score depends on your rank, so players with permanent bad score probably are ranked a bit too high, those with good scores too low. I don't understand what this math stuff has to do with the way people should study...
Charles: Well, I do wonder about this, for everyone. Maybe, for the fast-improving player who wishes to continue to improve fast.
Lop: I'm sure there are players who don't enjoy the methods Benjamin suggests. Although I don't think that it depends on their winning percentage. One can lose many games and still have fun studying tsumego. Anyway people who don't enjoy studying as Benjamin suggests should do something else they like better. Why should anybody do something he doesn't like? I'm certain that there are at least some players who appreciate Benjamins tips. No way of studying fits the personal preferences of every player.
Benjamin: What exactly do you you mean with "the method Benjamin suggests"? I don't think there are Go players who don't like to play, and not so much ambitious ones that don't want to analyze, so I think you're talking about tsumego. As I've written there, I know there are many people who don't enjoy tsumego right now, but as to my experience, once they really started with the right method, most of them start to love it - try it out yourself maybe...
Charles: As I understand it, there are basically two approaches, which one could call the Rob van Zeijst and Pieter Mioch styles. Van Zeijst would emphasise tsumego, while Mioch sees study of pro games as important. In a sense, I feel, the van Zeijst ideas tell you about necessary conditions (no one becomes really strong who is weak at life-and-death, endgame). Sufficient conditions are more interesting, to me; though obviously there aren't any: it is simply not the case that one can identify ways that guarantee progress. That is what I wanted to say first. If you have to rely on (i) opponents who actually know the important things and (ii) learning from analysing your games (very important) with others telling you what you need to know, then again these seem to be necessary conditions. Obviously my interest, from teaching a few hundred players, is more related to the articulation problem.
By the way, I thought a separate discussion page was a better idea. I'm sure Benjamin's ideas are interesting for everyone; my comments weren't meant to imply otherwise.
uXs: You say never to look at the solutions of the tsumego exercises. But then how do you know you found the correct solution ?
Niklaus: Easy, you are just not done with the problem until you are 100% sure that it is correct. Also, often the solution has got a certain elegance, which makes you recognize it. If you have to look at the solution to make sure, then you are probably wrong :)
Chris Hayashida: There is the danger that you find a wrong "correct" solution, though. I agree with not playing it out, but I think knowing about the pit falls of your wrong solution does help.
One thing I did, once I was stronger, was to re-read the Graded Go Problems for Beginners, and read out the solutions completely in my head. This included all of the variations I could see, as well as the life/death of the groups in question after the final position. It probably force you to read four or five moves beyond the solution, as well as a number of branches. I think it helped my reading, but possibly just because I was practicing reading more.
Robert Pauli: (Meta)
Benjamin: Dunno, what would you propose instead? Thought the subpage-thing would give a better separation about what I consider "my" pages and where I want to help creating normal wiki-pages (didn't know that subpages don't have seperate discussion pages). Don't like it? Better ideas?
BramGo: I am amazed. When I read your page, I totally agreed on every item you mentioned. This page really is a nice job. And still so many negative comments?!?! About life and dead, the "not looking at the answers"-method is something I heard before. It's mentioned at the life and dead section on gobase for example. Also on sites like DashN it is impossible to look at the answers. So it is not like this is a crazy idea. I totally agree with Benjamin here.
Grauniad: The IGS Art Gallery Problems are published without solutions so you can't look at the solutions. These problem seem very difficult to this KGS 12k player - do they even have solutions? And if so, where? :-)
Rich: Thankyou for your advice, Benjamin. I must say, in addition to tsumego, I also found a big improvement on studying linking and splitting tesuji - this ultimately then comes down to the fact that your chances of surviving life and death (or inflicting it on an opponent) improves.
Do you have any recommendations for tsumego anthologies in the high-kyu/low-dan range? I'm somewhere around 5k and seem to be between a lot of the bigger collections. Also, it seems to me that most tsumego is based around corners, at which point 2-2 plays and so on become very atypical...