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