"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