Strategy

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    Keywords: Strategy

The term strategy in Go covers both

and

For those learning go, there is perhaps a surprise in the way that discussion tends to be dominated by what players call 'strategic concepts', rather than planning issues. That's because some matters such as aji and kikashi are relatively subtle, but essential for major progress. There is a great deal of freedom in how one plays, but that goes for the opponent as well. Therefore a grand plan isn't enough - may simply represent a rather self-centred view of things.

See for example no plan in the opening.


Strategic skills include: intuition, sense of direction, understanding the importance of stones (disposable stones and key stones), knowledge of life and death and positional judgment, which in itself includes skill at counting territory and evaluating influence.

Two very basic ideas are covered at counterattack and shut in. A summary of fundamental strategic ideas is at basic strategies list.

An English language go book dedicated to strategic concepts is "Strategic concepts of go", by Nagahara Yoshiaki and Richard Bozulich. It lists the following eight concepts and expands on them:

One should add also

for perspective.


A strategy is also an game plan, a overriding principle or set of principles that (hopefully) guide you to victory. Here is a list of a number of strategies and strategic principles in go.



There are many pages here at SL with a "strategy" keyword, which are like general overviews of whole-board positions. In a sense these are always introductory, compared to real middle game analysis. Just because people would like there to be a short description of strategy doesn't mean that this can be done usefully. One really must unpack the concepts of

to understand the factors that determine fighting strategy. Opening strategy also depends on the same factors, but at one remove. Without some idea of those, one opening plan probably looks just as good as another.



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