Whether someone asks a specific or a generic question, answering "the basics" or "the fundamentals, it's huge" or "that", is not helpful. Such answers are either telling a person that there is something you know and they don't without telling them what it is, or being mystical about Go for whatever reason.

If you give generic vague answers to generic questions, and specific answers to specific questions, you are missing opportunities. A question lacking specificity may need an answer with concrete examples to bring more focus to the question, perhaps clarifying what the question actually was. Similarly a game review may reveal a generic flaw in the player's reasoning, not merely a move that could be played elsewhere. You infer the generic from the specific and explain the generic through the specific.

The basics start from the rules. What else could they start from? Here are the rules and some basics to be deduced from those:

1. players take turns; so whenever you play a move, think what your opponents answer might be and if you like the result
2. a stone/chain is removed when it has no more liberties; so, keep track of liberties of stones and groups
3. the purpose of the game is to have (the potential to put) more living stones on the board; so, keep track of the health of your stones while increasing the scope of development
Some more fundamentals:
4. towards the end of the game, liberties become scarce, so it becomes especially valuable to have unremovable liberties (eyes)
5. in the earlier stages, it's up to twice as easy to increase liberties than decreasing them, so defend before you attack
6. the more groups you have the more eyes you need, so connect

etc etc

This is where the basics start. I found greater knowledge of the fundamentals in Minue's Haengma tutorial for beginners than with the much hailed Kageyama, who's also guilty of giving esotheric advice like "it's the fundamentals".

Nothing like a good mystification now and then to arise interest, but when it comes to real understanding, some real explanation and/or thinking is called for.

True.Sorry, that "you" was confusing. It was the same we-"you"
as in "if you want to improve at the piano" in the immediately preceding corollary questions.Actually my focus there was not about pro lessons, but the cultural differences --
On Go servers and here, sometimes people ask about pro lessons prices.
And time and again some people (including myself) would suggest they think about private piano lesson fees. Many people (all over the world) understand and appreciate about the piano. This is different for Go.

Interesting question. What is your gut feeling on this ?
If most of them have had a pro or near-pro level teacher for some period of time, what do you think of it ?
If not, what do you think of it ? I'm curious about your feelings on this.

Also saying "basics/fundamentals" can be rather demeaning on condescending: it's not intermediate or advanced stuff you fail at, but basic stuff: you're such a noob! What are the basics? Anything you don't know that I do and think you should know? Do they change on the rank of the reviewer and/or player? "You need to work on your intermediate level Go techniques" might not have the same ring as "You need to work on your basics" but that doesn't make it wrong.

First, I do not think that Ed is adopting a superior attitude. That does not fit with what I have observed of him here (which is the only place I know him from). Second, his first response to Tami which brought up the question of the basics ( viewtopic.php?f=8&t=10884&p=174083#p174083 ) makes a good point. To paraphrase it, when an amateur is frustrated (puzzled, confused) about a certain kind of situation, the problem often lies elsewhere, in some gap in basic knowledge or technique. Nearly all amateurs have such gaps. Take care of the basics and the puzzling situations disappear. (To be replaced by other puzzling situations, OC. ) Now, without a good teacher, the amateur is somewhat at a loss, because she or he does not know what to work on to alleviate the perceived problem. That is one reason why I advise people to study everything. And, I suppose, why Ed focuses on the basics.

When I was a kid I bought a book by Red Auerbach, legendary basketball coach. I was surprised to find out that, even with championship teams, Auerbach drilled his players on the basics. To stress the basics is not demeaning.

When I first discovered go literature the English literature was almost non-existent. But I easily found Takagawa's Go Reader (5 vols.), Sakata's Killer of Go series (6 vols.), and a Nihon Kiin series of Basic {fill in the blank}, all in Japanese. Not that I still did not have some basic gaps, but they gave a pretty well rounded introduction. This morning I made a quick survey of current English go literature on SL. It is wonderfully vast. At the same time, I don't think it would be all that easy to come up with 5 - 10 books that pretty well cover the basics. {shrug} Until after you have read the books, OC.

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At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
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Visualize whirled peas.

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Oh but I wholeheartedly agree on that! What I wanted to say is that it is even less helpful to be mystical about it than to not mention them at all. This is why I continue to highlight Minue's "Haengma tutorial for beginners": this was the first time I really felt someone explained the fundamentals and made me understand why they were fundamental.

As much as I hate analogies for their obscuring effect, I must harvest from my recent immersion in table tennis. Here the basics are: grip, bat angle, swing, body position & footwork, in short, all joints of the body cooperating in the play. As an aspiring player you get caught up in spin, pivoting, disguised serve, 3rd ball attack, in short, winning tactics ... Every so often you hit a plateau or get into a slump and the best thing to do then is to get back to the basics.

I won't dwell on table tennis but the call for basics is very true there as well. It's however imperative that the basics are known: how to grip the bat, how to tilt it, how to swing your arms, keep your body and feet, all this for the four basic strokes and how to return to a ready stance. After a while you know this and can rework it on your own. First, someone needs to explain it, because figuring it out on your own will be time consuming and you'll have developed bad habits before you got round to do so.

The same is true in Go, although it seems harder to discern the basics. I think Minue did a tremendous job there.

The whole godots analogy is interesting, but one thing I think it doesn't surface sufficiently is the difference between knowledge and conditioning. When an SDK misses an important atari due to a lack of attention, we don't say: ah, let me explain this basic you must be ignorant of because you ignored it. It's called atari, and it happens when...

Such a criticism would be ridiculous. And yet, there is something there that is pretty important.

It's possible to pick up a lot of knowledge that isn't very useful (yet) because it is not crystallized. It's there, somewhere in the cobwebs of our minds, but it's awkward to access and not automatic or integrated. The only way to integrate it through thoughtful practice and repetition. But as the saying goes, practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.

The stronger player doesn't miss fewer ataris because of a deeper understanding of atari. It's more likely that the reason is that the stronger player has more experience looking at and playing many, many, positions where liberties matter. Their better habits of shape help them avoid shortages of liberties in the first place, and their conditioning helps them trust their sense of shape more.

For fighting, we have a problem pedagogically, because, as Ed mentions so much depends on the specifics of the position. Thus it is harder to drill (i.e., condition) correct play...sometimes the bamboo joint is a good shape here, except well, when it's not, so you don't want to over-condition making bamboo joints. So where are the good forms to use to condition fighting skill? Maybe the best is from pro games. But then we have this infuriating problem that all pro games and fights are different. This is hard. But no one said it was easy...

Maybe godots is okay. But what really happens is that you have to eat the same dot dozens (if not thousands) of times before you can digest it. The first few times you try to eat it, you just spit it up...

I'm not saying Ed means to be condescending, but it could come across that way. Also maybe he calls things basics which I don't consider basics. For example is a snapback basics? Even though I've seen loads of them I still think they are pretty cool and clever and am not sure I would classify them as basics. Maybe everyone else would. On the other hand something like "extend to make a base" I would call a basic idea, though of course the exact place to extend, when and how is far from basic. His favourite shape of the ripped keima I would also call a basic, and yes this comes up a lot in kyu reviews here so I understand focusing on it, but also one cannot blindly apply the ripped keima detector or else it will stop you playing good moves, it is not basic/simple to see when it is ok to allow. The basic instincts like blocking a push I would consider prototypical basics, but there can be multiple moves that are all "basics" (e.g. hane or extend) and choosing which one is best is far from basic so it's not useful to just say "learn basics" when they do the wrong one.



A good point. Yesterday in a cafe game (I wasn't paying much attention in an even game against a 3-4 stones weaker player) I (white) tenukid because I didn't see the following tesuji (which includes a snapback) to ko connect (which meant a big group came back from the dead):

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
$$ . . . O . X . . .
$$ . . . O . X . . .
$$ . . . . . X X . .
$$ O O O O . O X . X
$$ X X O X . O X X .
$$ . . X . 1 . O . X
$$ -----------------[/go]

It's not something I spot at a glance, though if I read I can find it. Probably if I did more tsumego with kosumi tesujis I would spot it at a glance. Is this "basics"? I would say no. Maybe a pro would say yes: it's "basics" for him.

while I agree with Bill that Ed is not intending to be condescending, I agree with Uberdude and Knotwilg that mentioning "the basics/fundamentals" without defining what those are exactly, does not come across as being very helpful -- and can feel quite condescending.

but, then maybe the student needs to just "suck it up", and not let his feelings get hurt so easily. Keep practicing and learn to ask the right questions. Maybe we're also doing the student a misservice by making the teacher worry about having to walk on eggshells with his teaching.

there's a balance in there somewhere. not sure where it is exactly.

Discussing the quality of Ed's teaching misses the point of this thread. The question is not how well Ed gets his ideas across, but rather what those ideas are.

His main point in my opinion, is that there is a general flaw in the approach many of us have to improving at go. Instead of taking it seriously, and building solid skills from the ground up, as we would if we were planning to excel in some other field, such as playing the piano, we jump to trying to learn high level skills before having an adequate command of the basics. Similar to a child taking algebra who does not have a good command of the multiplication tables, one's ability to progress will be impaired.

Telling someone to learn the basics when they have a specific question may not be helpful, but in the context of this thread, the point is that questions about high level concepts are misplaced if the prerequisites have not been met. For example, the question about the best joseki to play in a certain situation is not the most important question to ask if one fails to count liberties while playing out the joseki.

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

If that is the gist of this thread then we're fighting the same battle. I'll rest here.

Analogies have their place. Their purpose is express a concept in terms that may be more readily understood.

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

Disagree, analogies borrow a truth from another context to pretend a similar degree of truth in a more contested context, without proving that the transfer preserves all necesary attributes of the comparison.

When I talked about table tennis - reluctantly - it is a field which I currently concentrate on and learn from conceptually. However, I am fully aware its concepts cannot be transposed to the field of Go just like that.

For example I could use "young kids (should) start on small fields with small goals in football" to advocate that "beginners should start playig go on small boards". But football is a physical sport and young kids are physically small, so that overall size reduction may be a good measure in football. It is not proven that beginners have smaller sized brains which thrive more on small boards. I should use go arguments, not football arguments.

Leaving the domain in which the discussion resides, abstracts out aspects of the domain which are often vital for the truthfulness of the proposition. Analogies are a rethorical (de)vice: because you can't really argue about the analogon, when well chosen, you're left to disprove the conservation of all aspects in the transfer. Which can be fun, I admit

That's just a bad analogy Your table-tennis analogy however was not. This was a good analogy, because it reinforced the point that in a skill-based system, when difficulties arise, it is common and valid advice to revisit basic skills. This rhetorical device may be effective when despite previous arguments specifically concerning how to improve at go, some readers might still follow the misconception that the best way to improve is to learn more and better high-level techniques (disguised serve, etc. ). The truthfulness of this analogy is based on the idea that there is an essential similarity between two skill-based systems, one that a go-centric person may not have recognized. This does not sacrifice truthfulness - no one thinks that go and ping-pong are the same in all aspects. What it does is offer a different perspective. In this thread, Ed has proposed an analogy of "go-dots" as a tool to get a handle on a difficult concept: understanding go. Examining the ways in which the analogy works or fails is useful for clarifying what we think understanding go means.

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

Hi snorri, that's a nice idea.

Well, dots dot.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Good point. What is basic is not clearly delineated from what is more advanced. I have mentioned the books that I studies that covered the basics pretty well. But a few years ago I got a good deal online for two go books, one of which I wanted, and one of which was a go primer from the mid 20th century. The primer introduced the idea of the Big Eye, which none of the books I had studied did. I would say that it is a basic concept in go.



In this (partial) joseki, I would consider all of the plays except maybe the attachment to be basics. But I never learned the counter hane as a basic play, nor the solid connection in response to the counter hane. Even though they are common and basic responses.

Gotta run. More later.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.