Dieter Verhofstadt
Born in 1971, I work for a company in digital mapping after short careers as a math teacher and an ICT consultant. I learned to play Go in 1995, together with Stefan Verstraeten. We immediately decided that having a club would be the best way to improve. The club is still there but since 2007 I'm not an active member anymore. I am 2 dan in Europe but I do not care about rank so much as when I started playing. Since Sensei's Library has started back in 2000, I have been a regular contributor. I've seen SL weathering many storms and growing in interest, thanks to the Go community but also thanks to the spirit of the administrators, who allowed it being steered by the community and not by a few grumpy territory-oriented contributors such as myself.
My favourite players are Go Seigen, Otake Hideo, Kaoru Iwamoto and Gu Li.
You can send me a message at first name dot last name at gmail.
Articles as sub-pages
- /Ideas on Go Theory
- /Teaching experiences
- /Advice To Beginners
- /Ideas on improvement
- /Thoughts on attitude
- /Thoughts on computer go
Noteworthy techniques
- Race to capture in the corner
- Keima side connection
- Sealing in by striking at the waist
- Two-stone edge squeeze
- Connect instead of hane
- Three three point sequence with surprise clamp
- Mixed four space extension, invasion
- 44PointDoubleLowApproachKosumi
Other pages I fancy at SL
- In a Korean Baduk school
- Benjamin Teuber / Guide to become strong
- Haeng-ma tutorial for beginners
- dnerra's ideas on improvement
- Stone Counting Teaching Method
- Generate diagram from SGF
- Recognizing an eye
Approaching the game
Over the years, my playing interests have continually shifted. There have been times when I approached the game from an opening perspective (see Dieter's fuseki experiments), as do many amateurs because they know the opening makes a difference for pros, the opening is where you can apply intuition most and because some authors, like Kajiwara, urged us to emphasize the opening. There have been other times where I emphasized shape (see a static treatise on shape), as do many amateurs, because shape is a seemingly nifty way to get rid of the nuisance of reading. Also, I used to replay a lot of pro games, to get an instinctive feeling for the game. In short, I definitely used to substitute reading by set sequences and shapes. I am still unsure about the very nature of human learning. Is it biased towards imitation or towards logical reasoning?
A major change came when I read Killer of Go by Sakata Eio. It's a smashing book, making you eager to go and kill your opponent's groups. Suddenly, I didn't think the opening was so all deciding anymore: if you could read better than your opponent, there are always possibilities to kill groups. Also, it dawned upon me that doing tsumego is the key to reading ability.
In 2001, I had a friend living in my place (he was having his boat built in Ghent and needed a place to stay) and we played many serious games. We used a kadoban principle, stretching our abilities to the maximum. Afterwards I used to review and analyze my games. This is the time when I experienced most improvement. Since then, I keep the habit of review and analysis to discover mistakes.