A Wider Field

Well, it has been quite some time since my last post! Between school, summer job applications, and my continued attempts at obtaining scholarship funds, I've fallen a little behind on both my go studies and this blog. In fact, I still have yet to post the specific book reviews that I had planned and promised. Unfortunately, that's not my subject today, and I'll have to make it up another time.

Today I would like to talk a little bit about Baduk. As I've played Igo more and more, and gotten a better sense of its history and culture, I've also come to be aware of a number of different fields of Igo. Past and present, Japanese, Chinese and Korean-- while it's still Igo, these 'Igo cultures' all have their own differences-- enough so that I'm starting to feel it's appropriate to identify whether you're talking about go, wieqi, or baduk, and not just because of the slight komi and scoring differences.

Up until now I've been influenced mostly by the more modern Japanese go scene. The books I read are written by Japanese pros, and the games I review are played by the same people. This is not so much because of a lack of chinese or korean texts, or even because of relative strength levels (of the three, it could be said that Japan is in a bit of a tight spot, in fact.) It's mostly just because I study Japanese.

Earlier today I was looking around for more random texts that might interest me, and stumbled across Cho Hye-yeon's Creative Life and Death (prescribed for a ranging of dan level players.) Cho Hye-yeon, of course, maintains her own english language blog, "Full of Surprises" (http://loveku.livejournal.com/) which I had run across from time to time. What I didn't know about her is that she was 8p, and one of Korea's strongest female baduk players (astounding in itself, as she also attends college full-time, and is fluent in several languages.) My interest was piqued, and I started to look around through her various posts. I found the following, on a certain opening to be particularly interesting, and would reccomend looking over it. (http://loveku.livejournal.com/2009/04/04/). Of the players listed on this page, Lee Sedol and Lee Chang Ho are both players whose game records I've occassionally run across, and both are highly esteemed players.

The Korean players that I've viewed have all been spectacular fighters, and are also fast-paced and flexible. Originally I felt affronted by the messy way they seemed to play, but what I've realized is that these are players that have guts that I can't fathom, and a beautifully expiremental nature. Because of this, I decided that I would really like to look into some more Korean baduk players to study in my free time.

Do you have a culture that you study from? What do you think about the different evolutions of the game of go?

Great Existential Questions of Our Days

Is it alive? Is it dead? Should I protect my territory, or try to kill straight out? Am I secure enough to press forward, or do I have to swallow a bitter gote move? Can I make this a ko? Will this become a ko at a point when I can't afford to lose?

Like many poets, writers and philosophers over the ages, Go players are troubled and frustrated by the questions of life and death. In my everlasting mental trek along the lines of the go board, my broad goals are both stern and creative play. Step by step, I've been trying to grind blatant weakness and insecurity out of my play.

Life and death has always been a severe weakness for me. As games are growing steadily more complicated and more competitive, and my opponents know more and more about what they're doing, poor training in the language of life and death seeds growing insecurity. Soon, the time will come when I'll have to make the complicated kill without missing a step, or I'll have to find the difficult path to life in order to save a game. A lack of experience with life and death no longer seems like a luxury I want to afford myself.

Now, certainly, that's all well and good. But what am I going to change my current inexperience? I've always hated life and death problems. Out of all the go books I've taken up, life and death books are practically the only ones that I never finish. The responses are so unknown for many problems-- the ways of life and death are eternally shrouded in a deep mist. Suddenly, however, I discovered myself accidentally enjoying a new life and death book that I purchased for cheap. Just a small pocket-sized book, "Life and Death: Intermediate Level Problems" by Maeda Nobuaki 9 dan, available at Slate and Shell (http://www.slateandshell.com/SSGR005) has been steadily guiding me down a path to some semblance of understanding.

I reached the last page this morning after a week of randomly selecting starting points in the book, so that I did several problems multiple times. When I finish the last two problems, I plan on starting over and going through one more time. If someone is searching for a tidy little handbook, I would certainly suggest this one.

As I progressed, I found that I was starting to get a hand for spotting the starting move on site, without really having a preset idea of where I had to go, but finding my way nonetheless. Because understanding how to start can be really crucial, this is a source of comfort for me. Ultimately, it's been an enjoyable experience.

However, I have two things that I'm curious about. . .

I'm genuinely uncertain why I suddenly found life and death problems not only something I could tolerate and kind of understand, but actually enjoy. Perhaps it was my relative strength growth-- that I'm finally capable of reading out the possibilities. Or perhaps my desire to erradicate the weakness just grew powerful enough to change my taste. In anycase, I wish that I had started focusing on life and death earlier. I feel certain that if weaker players could find it in themselves to seriously study life and death, they would be much stronger. It's often in games against weaker players that they let living structures die, or, like myself, kill their own structures by being unobservant.

My second question is, "where should I go from here?" I've never done any research on life and death books. Is there a harder intermediate series than the one I just solved, or will I move to some so-called "advanced" set of problems?

If anyone has more experience with life and death, please let me know. I'm also curious when you started studying life and death, or if perhaps you're still struggling with the same frustrations that I experienced until just recently.

Keeping eating wisdom, and fighting for your vision of the go board.

-Zack

Trading Sleep for Experience

One board, and I stumbled into the mist. Four more boards, and I started to feel the cracks in the wall. Ten. Fifteen. I dared to start climbing upwards. Twenty. Twenty-three. The clock marked time as it flowed past, moving deeper into the morning; all the while stones and shapes flashed onto the board and then died like smoke; the trail left lingering in my mind was the only sign of what spirit and pain had transpired under the manila lamp-light.
Three nights passed in this way, studying as many as 20 games a night in the secluded plume of the lamp that glowered behind me, pouring light over my back that rubbed ceaselessly across the surface of my board and stones, and crept forward before loosing vigor and laying still at the edges of the dark corners of my room.

The desire to understand more about the landscape of the Go board drove me once more into study, although a kind of study that I have no previous experience with. I admittedly spent a week or two feeling depressed about my go abilities. Not because I consider myself a weak player (although I'm by no means a strong player,) but rather because I began to worry how far I can proceed in this game. When I started playing, I just wanted to feel like I wasn't winning and loosing games by luck. As I got stronger, I wanted to be able to adapt to new situations and develop a style. And from there, I merely wanted to learn how to play powerful moves.

Although on a minor scale, I feel that I've managed something of those goals. For a while past, my personal hope was that I would one day in my relative youth become a 5-dan player. For the past couple weeks, however, that hope has been failing steadily. First I decided that I could probably only get good enough to become a 3 dan player before my life disappears into the business of trying to establish myself in my profession and get my course for life settled a bit. A time period that *may* be several years without too much go. But from there I wondered if perhaps even 1-dan or 2-dan were beyond me.

Re-watching Hikaru no Go, thinking about the development of the character's play, and also looking over pro games, I've discovered a sheer cliff blocking my passage forward. Part of me feels that it's so tall that I never saw it before because it masked the true horizon.

I'm aware that a great weakness in my play is my general inexperience with shapes and situations. I also rush situations far more than I have to. But I've decided to put up a fight. Rather than making camp where first I became aware of the massive obstacle before me, I've decided to push forward and start climbing. I began by targeting these two weaknesses.

The method has proved to be surprisingly addictive, delightful, and also informative. I watched around on KGS, taking note of various players at different levels, and after a little while, I found a 5 dan played with a style and temperament similar to my own. When I watch his games, I largely feel comfortable with the kinds of moves he makes. So I went to the archive section and downloaded two months of his games. Since he plays anywhere from 5 to 15 games a day, this proved to be quite a collection, and the games range from even games all the way up to 5 stone handicap.

For my simplistic, straightforward style of play, 5 dan blitz games prove to be at a perfect level of analysis for me. The players exhibit better direction than my own (in general,) and while their play is far more complicated, and their reading abilities much deeper than my own, unlike with pro games, I can clearly understand what they're aiming for in most situations, and although my counts aren't too specific unless I examine my estimates on the board, I'm usually precisely aware of who has the upper hand in a semiai or a fight.

After playing a number of these games, noting especially my player's opening habits, as well as any pattern that appeared in two or more games, I got a really good feel for the impetus behind their moves and their temperament. While I have started to notice that my player is a little overly aggressive, and has some trouble following joseki (which he usually pays for, especially considering that I know how to punish several of the deviations that I've seen him try once or twice,) I feel my understanding of the game, semiai, and joseki patterns have greatly increased. Much of my fear has also diminished.

After spending a little over a week studying like this, I would strongly recommend other players do the same. It's a great way to see shape and get involved in complicated patterns if you take care to think about the games as you go (was this an over play; was there a move my player missed in this important capturing race; is this really joseki or something comparable?) and it's also great fun. I know that I've started to feel my player's pride, their race for strength, their disappointment and frustration as though the games were my own.

Keep eating wisdom,

Zack

"Vital Points and Skillful Finesse for Sabaki"

Hinoki Press' "Vital Points and Skillful Finesse for Sabaki" by Yoda Norimoto 9 dan, available at Slate and Shell (http://www.slateandshell.com/SSYN101) for a somewhat hefty (although, competitive for translated go books) price of $27.00 is a grand book on the subject of more flexible play. The first thing that you'll notice about this book is probably the bizarre, psychedelic cover. Shortly after that, you'll realize that the cover, and the pages are hardly bound together by what is probably the shoddiest printing job you've come across.

Luckily, this isn't a book we should judge by its cover, or its printing quality (which regretfully is horribly disrespectful to the work, and a bit of a hassle-- but if it gets to you, you can always buy some 32 millimeter binder clips to hold it together while you read it.) I first read this book somewhere in the fog of being a 10 kyu or an 8 kyu, and it really effected my understanding of play. Now that I've gotten stronger, and started to enjoy a decent amount of 'KGS dan watching' in my free time, I've come to apreciate this book even more.

When I cracked it open for a casual glance through this afternoon, I was immediately struck by the great problem diagrams it provides-- one of which closely mirrored a difficult situation I actually saw in a kgs 6 dan vs 7 dan game recently. Through my new eyes, I realized how much more value was contained within the sad binding than I ever originally thought. That said, I recommend this book to any 10 kyu player for a first read, and would encourage that they regularly re-read it every time they get 2 kyu stronger or so for a little while.

But enough about the cover and my appreciation. Let's talk about what this book's got.

It's broken up into 3 main sections (plus an introduction titled 'How to Think About Sabaki'): Ch. 1 "Fundamental Skillful Finesse for Sabaki," Ch 2 "Judgment of Sabaki" and Ch 3 "Real Game Skillful Finesse for Sabaki." I don't know about you, but that sounds like a lot of light footwork to me.

I think the primary benefit of this book is that it can break players into new though patterns. If you let it, it will rearrange your value system, your timing, and your concept of what's reasonable and what's unreasonable-- even more, it will even give you some neat tricks for finding reasonable paths.

Another benefit is that it provides sequences that can have a surprisingly wide application in your own games. After working through this book (which provides its problems in the format of example diagrams labeled with letters as the next move, and addresses most of the options in the answer, giving commentary along with the moves,) I found myself depending on sequences I saw in the book to get myself out of tricky situations in real games. And oddly enough, just going off of broad observations got me through rough waters about every time kept to the patterns. So in that respect, you can almost think of part of this book as a tesuji collection.
Even more than learning skillful plays to give yourself space (which a number of you may have already come across merely by process of playing, and are lucky enough to be familiar with them,) I believe this book will help you down the path of playing moves that pose difficult questions to your opponent.

Ultimately, what limits this book is the strict response method, which can be frustrating at times, or can give you answers that you realistically wouldn't see in an actual game. However, I believe that if you open your heart to this book and do the problems looking to merely think about the situations and experiment in a controlled environment, then you will stand to get a lot out of this text.
I previously rated "Punishing and Correcting Joseki Mistakes" on a scale to 5, but I realize that that's inappropriate. New scale is out of 100, with anything over 60 worth a read through, and anything around 80 and up worth owning.

Vital Points and Skillful Finesse for Sabaki: 85 out of 100

keep eating wisdom, and find a way to get your hands on this one!
-Zack Kaplan

Seeking Tesuji and Intelligent Fighting

(Above: example of a tesuji problem from the Go Seigen-Segoe Kensaku Tesuji Dictionary with the tesuji move solved)
Another day on the go board, another set of lessons and revelations. I took my brief break from Igo (I lasted five days without allowing myself to indulge in any thoughts about the game before I started to dream about sequences,) and now I'm back playing and studying. When I started trying to play on KGS more, I got frustrated really fast because I was loosing to opponents who were making (what I recognized as) inappropriate invasions, or sequences with bad timing-- and yet they were still winning because of my own screw ups in attempt to punish them. But I've realized something important.

The first realization that I had after playing some high handicap games with a 6 dan player, was that really, practically any area that hasn't been heavily fortified can be (with enough fighting skill) reasonably invaded. I believe that accepting this has added yet another level of expirimentation to my play style, and also has relieved my attachment to areas, and opened up my consideration of the whole board a little bit more.

The second realization was that while many players around my level on KGS have very poor strategic understanding, they are typically very good at fighting-- a huge weakness for me because of how I learned to play go. Because I also mostly study direction of play and strategic concepts, I really haven't given enough attention to learning tactical involvement.

Well now I'm looking to change that.

I started off by logging onto KGS and just watching high dan games. And to be perfectly honest, this did way more for me than I thought it ever would. I didn't build their games, or try to count, or finish (too many) sequences-- I just sat and tried to encounter situations. Even more than that, I tried to observe the value system of dan play, which I have discovered to be vastly different, because of how the game changes at that level. In the kyu games that I've seen, one typically doesn't encounter a situation where one plays away from a group in dire trouble, knowing that another area would be slightly bigger if taken unopposed. The stakes are higher, and the value system much moe intense.

Well, it started to make an impression on me. I played a game, just trying to feel the values. I got distracted at a key point in the middle game and fell to a disadvantage, ultimately loosing by 13 (before my opponent, our very own Joel got komi,) it was probably one of the better games I've played, and I encounered a lot of things that I had never seen before. To say the least, I was quite pleased.

Now, something that I didn't mention is that right after I ended my forced vacation from the game, a tesuji book that I ordered arrived. This book, Go Seigen and Segoe Kensaku's Tesuji Dictionary (vol. 1) ( which you can breifly read up on here: http://senseis.xmp.net/?SegoeTesujiDictionary and can be purchased at www.kiseido.com under the Japanese book section) is a very difficult tesuji book, recommended for players from 5 kyu to high amateur dan. The problems are divided both by catagory (kind of tesuji) and difficulty (which ranges from the easiest problems at level C to the hardest at level A.)

I discovered quickly that I could often solve the level C problems, although there was often a variation answer diagram that really surprised and challenged me. The B level problems, I usually got the right spot, or the right idea, but had issues with the execution because I was uncertain about the mechanics or the values of certain items. Lastly, for the A level problems, I sometimes couldn't even tell where the conflict was because I considered groups unkillable or totally dead. The first A level problem resolved itself on the 23rd move, and the tesuji itself appeared on the 11th.

After a couple cumulative hours of watching dan level games for exposure, and having the benefit of the answers in my lovely book adjusting my value system, I've found that I'm already starting to see a lot more in the B level problems, and my direction for some of the A level problems was a little better, too (although really not by much! haha). My plan for now is to play through the book only doing level C and B problems, and then I'll go through a second time and attempt the level A problems also, although I expect i'll mostly be just analyzing the answer diagrams. Sometime in the near future, I hope to do a thorough book review on this text, although the book is perhaps a little unreasonable for Americans, because it has to be imported, and that means high prices. I probably won't buy any more of the series until I'm in Japan and can find a way to pick it up for its native price of roughly $20.

So for now, the goal is to study tesuji, watch dan level games, and play pressure handicap games (Leo gave me the idea for this-- if whoever looses two times in a row has to take a stone) at club. I'm looking forward to how my understanding of the game changes.

On a final side note, after trying to find more modern games, and looking back at shusaku games, I'm really shocked at the difference in play style which had never been apparent to me before. Modern games seem to often be so much more straightforward, and I think that until you get to a really high level of professional play, people try to keep things much, much simpler. There also seems to be more emphasis on brute force now. It's really a curious thing. Has anyone else noticed this?

Keep eating wisdom, and make sure to tell me about what you've done to learn how to fight!

-Zack Kaplan

Burnout!!

Have you ever found yourself spending too much time with go? It's relatively easy to do, in my experience. Playing a lot and studying a lot is the way to get stronger-- however, sometimes in the midst of all this go, it can be easy to loose track of things. The last few weeks I spent a lot of time with go. Five whole hours, one day. Okay, so that's not quite honest. Five whole hours every day for almost half a week, hot on the tail of two to three hours every day, passionately trying to get better.

I noticed, however, that as this trek wore on, I started to see less and less, and my play concepts started to be too rushed and insecure. I was getting rushed and trying to play my games based on the strength of others-- using sequences that had been perpetrated against me just recently as an attempt to get them out of my head. So the result?

I've put myself on suspension. The goal is to not study a lick of go, or day-dream about the game itself (my thoughts are still free to wonder about the forming up of Oklahoma's Go community) until my prized tesuji book arrives here from Japan. I estimate the time at just a little over a week. I presume that the book shipped by the seventh (when i ordered from kiseido immediately before the holidays, they were out of stock and I received an email apologizing and informing me that nothing in Japan was going to move until about the 7th, the latest the book should be shipped by) and so I only have another five days or so, since kiseido is magical and always manages to get their books to me in five days or less. When it does come, I'll be able to study go, but I won't let myself play for several more days after.

It's been a hard task so far-- I keep finding myself gazing longingly at my new Joseki dictionaries (i'd already burned through about 25 pages dense with diagrams and explanations) or sitting at my go board. But I feel that if I leave the game alone for a little while and let my mind absorb what I have seen and learned in these intense couple weeks past, I'll be able to give it another go with an undistorted mind. I need to get back to playing moves that say "go ahead, tenuki. I dare you" and away from moves that say "fear my general strength and please please please play protectively so I can go back and grab the important move that I *should* have played!"

Sometimes, I think, a little time away from the go board can be far more beneficial than a couple dedicated weeks boring into the depths of its landscape. Does anyone have similar or opposing experiences? Maybe there are a few of us who just need a deep breath right now!

Wish me luck on my abstinence. I'm studying kanji to fill the void! (JLPTのため！)

Keep eating wisdom (even if I took a break,) I'll see you on the board when I return to OK!

-Zack