Assuming I’d spend some long hours at the airports and over a dozen of hours in planes, taking a go book along with me seemed like a good idea. And it soon proved me right. Straight from the beginning I was surprised by another wonderful introduction to some Go concepts and some very basic strategic guidelines. Remembering of Tesuji, I can recall having read an interesting explanation on how to read as an introduction. Tesuji isn’t intended for dan players, but more for the DDK and SDK. However, its introduction is just perfect when trying to explain how the mental process of reading works for newcomers.

In spite of reading the whole book, I would suggest beginners to read just the introduction of these books. And I’m sure there must be some other good newbie focused material around. Since I can’t actually buy all the books around just for the introduction, these introductions just brought to my mind the existence of a internet file with some tenths of go books I wrote about long time ago, the Go Education Collection.

The introduction of Five Hundred and One Opening Problems has two parts:

Concepts: it defines and gives one or two samples of the following concepts: aji, atari, gote, hane, miai, moyo, sabaki, light, heavy, sente, tesuji, thick and thin. This section appears in every book from the “Mastering the basics” collection.

Strategic considerations during fuseki. The part I like the most… and my pupils hate the most, since I say it a few times while reviewing their games:

• Is there an urgent move?
• One that makes a base for your stones.
• One that takes away the base of your opponent’s stones.
• One that takes the initiative in a certain area
• Is there a big move?
• One that extends from your own position
• One that prevents an extesnsion by your opponent.
• One that threatens an invasion.
• One that prevents an invasion
• Is there a big moyo?
• Do you need to expand or close off your moyo?
• Do you need to erase or invade your opponent’s moyo?

If you want to go for a newbie-focused book, I might go for the “A complete introduction to the game” by Cho Chi Kun, who starts from the very basic go rules to somewhat harder tesujis and strategic concepts by the end of the book. Obviously, reading this book needs to be accompanied by some games, otherwise it’s useless. By the way, thank you Matrod for letting me know about this book.

Would anyone want to comment any book?

Related posts:

1. Discovering Go Books – Elementary Go Series: Tesuji
2. Go Education Collection

Though registering only takes one minute, I’d say it’s usefulness relies on the amount of players on your area. In my case, since there isn’t any other player within 100km, it’s a bit useless. However, if I hadn’t registered and someone on my neighbourhood joined the site, he wouldn’t be aware of my presence.

The more users joining the site, the more useful it’ll become. There are about 1700 users from around the world, but you may be lucky if you live in certain cities… specially in cities with Go clubs

On the other hand, Go clubs may find in this site a nice management tool, but I still have to experience it.

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A side effect of this playing pace is the lack of games to review and the lack of interest in improving (reading, learning, watching pros…). So I focused my attention into Go software, which seemed to be quite an unknown field, since there weren’t reviews or comparisons available on the internet. For some reason, I considered it useful to have software reviewed and commented, users have shown me the opposite. There has been, if any, very little feedback, comments, suggestions or collaborations. Till recently, the reason for posting was the joy I obtained with doing so, added to the increase of visitors; it doesn’t appeal me any more.

Though the site will remain open to suggestions and collaborators, from now and on, I’ll post about whatever I enjoy, which will be mostly but not only: boardgames. Ultimately, the purpose of posting should be to enjoy doing so. And I’ve started by adding a “Recently played games” column on the right sidebar.

Enjoy

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Private banners from Go business either pay too low or just don’t want to be announced around here. In fact, a couple of bloggers have already asked me about this issue, the lack of support from Go business is somewhat surprising compared with other games/sports.

Selling links is somewhat controversial, though the benefits are by far the highest, it is against the Google crawling system, so your site may be punished for doing so. How? The list of results in Google’s search engine is based on the relevance of your site, which they call PageRank. When you sell links by this method, you’re actually selling the influence of your PageRank. If Google finds your selling links, your Pagerank will be decreased and, therefore, the amount of visits from their search engine will decrease.

Recently a new age for blogs has started: social monetizing. Well, there are already a couple of sites running these sort of systems.

Related posts:

1. Most important go sites

THIS JUST IN (3/4/2008): “LEGENDARY” TARTRATE TO PLAY JANG BI ON KGS WEDNESDAY: Tartrate will return to online go this Wednesday when he plays Jang Bi on KGS. The legendary – but mysterious – online player known as Tartrate blazed a virtually unbeaten path across KGS in 2003, defeating Alexandre Dinerchtein 1P, Svetlana Shikshina 1P and Kim Myung Wan 6P before vanishing without a trace. Tartrate’s fabled invincibility was only broken once, when he took White with no komi against Charm, and the ease with which he dismissed tough opponents led many to people believe he was a strong professional. Amicable and somewhat chatty, Tartrate insisted on anonymity, however, refusing to answer personal questions. His impressive performance in 2003 was followed by a long silence; during a short comeback in January 2004, his winning streak continued and his game against Weems 9d attracted over 400 observers. “Tartrate has a message for the online go world,” a reliable source tells the E-Journal, “he strongly suggests that while he is playing games, all the dans — especially higher dans — comment on his game for the community, and is disappointed when they don’t.” Jang Bi is the Korean insei who’s been living and playing in the United States since last year. The tartrate-gentlerain game will be played Wednesday, March 5 at 6:30pm EST (3:30pm PST) in the English Game Room.

In fact, news have risen a lot of expectancy in the GoDiscussions forum, so we expect there to be some hundreds of observers, and lots of dans comments. I’ll see you tonight at 23.30 GMT!!!

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The first post related to this topic which amused me was the one called my two teachers, where she talks about how she learnt go and some possible reasons on why children don’t learn it nowadays.

Yesterday she wrote a new post: Only a matter of TIME, talking about the differences on time settings among the main go playing countries. It is a like a punch in my stomach to see how time settings are arranged to suit TV broadcasting. Amazing. Obviously, decreasing the time given for each move has dramatic consequences, but you’d better read them by yourself. I really recommend reading this post as I can’t really transmit all the fustration and pity you can read between her lines.

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The opinions in GoDiscussions highlight how useful this book is and it has received top marks by most of the reviewers. I happened to find by error an illegal copy on the internet so I could take a look at the book level and the writing style. After a quick glance I realised that the book could work wonderfully for me, so I headed for the library.

The level progression seems to be fine and today I reached page 40. I’ve got some sort of tesuji saturation in my mind currently, but I already start seeing the results, which is something that encourages me to go on. Where can I see my improvement? I saw it in page 40, precisely in this tsumego I’m going to show you.

White to play

I can tell you I wouldn’t have solved this a week ago. I guess I would have probably given up the white group in the corner and moved elsewhere or pushed at Q6 (poor me). Solving this tsumego without any hint, though having done some similar ones previously, helped to raise my moral a little bit this morning. I’d like to see whether I’m able of not to see this tesujis during a real game where noone says "white to live is possible".

I’ve left the solution in the continue reading section

Related posts:

1. Introductory books’ introductions

So I started wondering about the Go magazines. How many are of them?

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The purpose of the game is to surround as much territory (sounds familiar?) as possible with your camels but, on the meanwhile, you have to make long chains of them in the different colours because the one with the longest chains will recieve lots of points. Once you start to play it is very easy to realise the three different phases openning-middlegame-yose. Funnily enough, both of the us where Go players and ended up looking for sente moves: “Hey! I took that oasis in sente!!” and “Let’s see how can I reduce your desert moyo…” came up from time to time.

I must say, though, that the similarities are limited to the area scoring system as there are many big differences. Let’s say: camels can’t die if surrounded, the longest chain of each colour gets 10 extra points, there are trees which give you 5 extra points… And, what scares me the most, the game is up to 5 players. The only time I’ve played there were only a couple of us and, at the end of the openning phase, we felt that the board was already full.

Just in case you want to know more about this game, you’ll find more information HERE.

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The game commentaries are only available at EuroGoTv’s site. Indeed, there are up to 10 available channels for us to watch though there is usually only one “on air”.

Today, Saturday 20th, champion Merlijn Kuin 6d will play Frank Janssen 6d(former Dutch Champion) for the Dutch Topsport competition in the Kunwa (Japanese) room at the European Go Culture Center in Amstelveen.

Related posts:

1. EuroGoTV.com

Talking about the professional Go world, we have a new incorporation to the Go Blogsphere: Cho Hye-yeon (Korean 7p) writes her own blog at Full of surprises, where she talks about her last games, how she faced 132 mirrored moves (except for a move) during a pro game and other experiences related with Go.

If we refer to computer go, we have a couple of good posts made lately. The first one of them, made by the creator of Deep Blue, Feng – Hsiung Hsu: Craking Go at IEEE spectrum, where he talks about the future of computer go while making a correlation with the development of chess software. As resources should always be mentioned, this was referred to by through computer-go mailing system.

The second one involving computers can be useful for most of us. Xed-over, at GoDiscussions.com, mentions a command-line based way to use Gnugo in debug mode… Personally, I think the best thing you can do is to try it and you’ll have a nice surprise, it is very easy to use and the weaker you are, the more it’ll help you. There has been a lot of computer activity at GoDiscussions since there are even two posts going on at the same time talking about ranking and club managements software: 1 & 2.

Another interesting post at GoDiscussions.com, not focused in Go but in intelligence, there is “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments“. It’s a scientific research on this field which awesome results.

On more Go related, we have the The Gokyo Shumyo a day Calendar: “The Gokyo Shumyo is a classic tsumego text considered “required learning.” The tsumego range from very easy to very hard.”

Related posts:

1. Recommended articles IV
2. Recommended articles of the week II
3. Recommended articles V

If you are interested in professional news, you should know that the second game of the Meijin title has been already played and players are now on a draw. You can see the games and some uncommented variations at “Meijin 2007 – 361points.com”. And based on the first game of this Meijin, Shorin created a very interesting entry on this blog: “Learning from professional games (1)”.

On another level, far away from final games of the Meijin title, but equally interesting for its familiarity with our games, there is a nice post called “Don’t Panic - at Because it’s there”.

On the last pack of recommended articles, I must say that there has been quite a lot of activity at GoDiscussions with some good topics going on.

1. “How’s your intuition?”: A user posts one situation from a professional game and asks player from different categories about their next move. One day is given for each category, so DDK answer first, then SDK and finally dan players. There are three posts of this “collection”: One, Two and Three.
2. “Favorite Pro?“: Some users discuss about their prefered pro player and their abilities.
3. “Studying amateur games“: Discussions about the value of studying amateur games instead of professional ones. Here you’ll find the “pros” and the “cons”.
4. “Ladder breaker: How to respond it?“: Rable shows us a real situation from a recent game and different users discuss about possible responses for a ladder breaker move. This discussion is held at a quite high level.

Related posts:

1. Recommended articles V
2. Recommended articles V
3. Recommended articles of the week II

Related posts:

1. Recommended articles VI
2. Recommended articles V
3. Recommended articles IV

At GoDiscussions there are a couple of topics which are quite interesting (the first two links) and some other interesting news

• How to play a stronger player with 9 stones handicap
• Video Lectures
  
• How to enjoy your game – at 361points.com which links us to the Korean Times online journal.
• 32nd Gosei title decided – From Go Aggregator
  It’s all decided: Cho U defends his Gosei title against challenger Yokota Shigeaki, 9p with a convincing performance. Most observers on PandaNet long thought Yokota would pick up his first win but Cho played the endgame meticulously. The Gosei title was covered live on PandaNet.
• Yu Changhyeok vs. Kim Jiseok, 2007 Korean Baduk League at Contemplations on Go.
  This is one position from a new blog I discovered a few days ago; it has very good studying material from real games and a few tsumego. Well done Grandyan!
• EGC 2007: Villach 14-28 July – at Go Around.
  Another incomer in the Go Blogsphere. Though the blog is in italian, it has some nice pictures of the European Go Congress 2007 and it comes which a surprise at the bottom of the article. Something which reminds me of this nice post at Yehuda.

Related posts:

1. Recommended articles of the week
2. Recommended articles V
3. Recommended articles VI

This videos are hosted on youtube, so their load should be quite fast indeed, not as the website itself, which is currently being developed but it is worth to keep it bookmarked.

This is an extract from their own site:

Related posts:

1. EuroGoTV broadcasting live