I'm looking for recommendations on English books to help learn about ko. I tend to avoid them in games, because they seem like a nebulous cloud of potential failure. They're scary.

I'm bouncing around between 5k and 6k on KGS, and I'll accept "you are not ready for this info" as a valid suggestion.

This sounds like a bogus answer to your question, but it seems that you might be able to get better at ko, if you fight this tendency:



When you feel like you want to avoid the ko in a game because of potential failure, fight against that fear. Fight against your fear, and clear out that nebulous cloud so that the unknown becomes the known.

I actually used to (and still do, sometimes) be afraid of playing many games. I felt, "Well there is uncertainty if I play this game. I might lose. If I play someone around my rank, I might fail.".

What's the result of that thought process? I don't play games, and I never find out if I could have succeeded.

So these days, I am trying to play every day (Monday through Friday), sometimes twice a day. The feeling is getting less and less, but occasionally I feel some apprehension about playing for a given day - after all, I might fail...

But if I fail a lot, then I will someday succeed. I need to keep at it.

In the same manner, I feel that you should power through and tackle ko. When the result is nebulous, try to clear up the confusion. See through it. Do not avoid ko out of fear. Try to read whatever you can, but do not be afraid to play something new. That's just limiting.

Don't limit your power.

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be immersed

Stepping aside from the pep-talk, to give some practical advice:

You should consider some things when playing a ko:
1.) How much will you lose if you lose the ko? Will you lose a lot of points? How important is this ko?

2.) Look at the rest of the board. Who has more ko threats? Who can win this ko? It might sound hard to do, but it is possible to read out all possible ko threats. You can get to a point where you can say, "He can play anywhere on this board, and I can ignore it, because the ko is that big".

To know this, it is important to know #1, above. How many points will you lose if you lose the ko? That's very key.

If you know these two points well, I think that you can feel OK about playing ko.

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be immersed

One other thing: If you really want a book, I think there is a book called "All about ko" (http://senseis.xmp.net/?AllAboutKo). I'm not sure how good it is, but I've heard some recommend it.

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be immersed

I think it helps with the fear to know the point of a ko. Many kos you can afford to lose.

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Occupy Babel!

when I read James Davies: Tesuji it was a real eye opener on so many levels. There is one chapter about ko. problems that seemed unsolvable got a solution, dead groups could live in Ko, living groups started dying. Suddenly I sought and found Kos everywhere. The chapter also helps you to recognise different kind of Kos and how to start favorable (if there are different possibilities ..).

edit: I still have to fight my habit of starting Kos and only then go looking for threats. ..

Bill Spight has written some incredibly posts on ko in this very forum. Here, for example:

http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewto ... 7&start=40

Not a bad place to start, if you haven't seem them before.

All About Ko is still the only English book about ko worth reading but it contains just a small selection on the topic. Sensei's Library gives more selections but is hopelessly unstructed. A collection of special shapes you find on my webpages

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/ko.pdf
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/3_plays.pdf
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/long_cycle.pdf
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/ko_types.pdf

Ignore the theory and rules discussion and just look at the diagrams as if they were problems.

For specialized theory on one particular topic, you might have a look at

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/kodame.pdf

Thank you for the suggestions, everyone.

Ignore the text and just look at the pictures? That's how I read all books

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1k KGS