I just finished reading Yuan Zhou´s "single digit kyu game commentaries" ( off topic: whow; 5 chained nouns, what a title! ).
Nice book, good author. I won't say excellent, beware me.
On topic now. In the last game of the book between two 5 kyus move 164 was the first move at the edge of the board. Anybody knows of a recorded game where the first move at the edge occurred even later in the game?

i suggest that you dont waste your time with kyu players game commentary.
you will learn much more by studying professionals.

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Magicwand, I cannot tell you how blatantly false that is.

cyclops, your question is slightly interesting, but its hard for us to provide an answer. I agree, Zhou Yuan is an amateur and a subpar author. His commentary is appropriate for weaker players such as you however.

What?

I could go either way on this one, but I usually tend to lean heavier in Magicwand's direction here.

I bought just today three books by Zhou Yuan ("How not to Play Go" and "SDK Game Commentaries vol. 1 & 2)...

I read a post on L19 where the first 6 replies were all off-topic remarks and meta-commentary. Anyone know of a post where the first actual response occurred even later in the thread?

Remember Sakata's statement, "Go is not about winning through brilliant moves, it is about losing through bad moves." I think studying amateur go has a place for those at a similar level who are struggling to understand what the mistakes are. I think it takes a lot of skill and dedication to study professional games fruitfully.

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
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Hm, but... can we kyus even see what the mistakes are? It's easy to see mistakes we would never make... the mistakes we continually make are harder to spot.

That's the point of the high dan/professional commentary

This is the weirdest collection of posts I've seen in ages. Does Kageyama's review of his game against a 1k amateur somehow become useless because the player in question is a non-professional? Surely it's the comments of the annotater / author rather than the player level that matter?

Yuan Zhou is only a couple of stones or so off the weak end of professional strength (at AGA 7.5 dan) and his commentaries have been well received in general. Robert Jasiek's book collection on fundamentals is all geared around weak players' games and the mistakes they have made, and it seems to have been very fruitful for players to have commentary on games played by others near their own level.

I spend a lot of my time looking at professional commentaries on professional games, and can nod sagely when the comment says "and this result is clearly bad due to the placement of White's stone at C6 instead of the normal C7", but in reality, do I get why? Sure, I can kid myself, but when you see the insane depth of reading that professionals have, the amount that they take for granted before even beginning to parse the game comment is beyond what my comparitively mediocre skill and knowledge can grasp.

If someone, at or at near professional strength, comments on a collection of 2-5k games in a way that is designed to be insightful to other 2-5k players, I suspect it will be of considerably greater value than a collection of the last 50 professionally commented games from 2012 title matches.

Could it be that my goal is to enjoy reading go books, go discussions, go commentaries besides improving my go skills? Well, I enjoyed reading that book.
On topic: So no game yet of more off edge moves known up to now?

There's no reason to be sad about this. His books are fine, easy to read, and I've learned something from all of them.

I’ve read and enjoyed “How not to Play Go” and <gasp> I believe I have even learnt something from it. So, all is fine, isn’t it?

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One of my favorite sets of go books is Takagawa's "Go Reader" series in five volumes (in Japanese). (Out of print, but I know that the Yale Library has a set. ) One thing that I greatly appreciated when I was studying it was that Takagawa took many examples from kyu vs. kyu games.

Pro vs. pro games show you good moves. Well commented kyu vs. kyu games show you moves to avoid, and why.

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Wow, getting logged out ate my post. Frustrating! Once more, then...

Topazg: When I was thirteen my French teacher thought she would help her students out my putting a big poster that said PRENDU by the blackboard. Guess how I conjugated prendre for the rest of the year? One of the common differences, in a number of fields, between people who know a subject well and those who can teach it well, is that the knowers think that (i) negative feedback works better than positive feedback, and specifically, (ii) identifying mistakes preemptively makes it impossible for people to make the mistake again. It's easy to feel this way when you know the material really well, and find it really exciting. If you know it less well or find it harder to focus on it, which is the situation many students are in, you are likely to remember that something was emphasized, without remembering that it was emphasized as a mistake.

There are different learning styles, of course, and sometimes an expert is writing specifically for an audience of peers, which tends to lead to the sort of writing where if you start in the middle it's impossible to tell whether the author is talking about a proposition he accepts or a mistake he rejects. This kind of approach is sometimes unavoidable, but it's an awful way to introduce someone to a subject; commonly, he'll read the book and get about half of what the author wrote backwards, because he remembers which subjects were emphasized, and probably some of the pros and cons, but not whether the author ultimately accepted or rejected it.

"Kage's Secrets Chronicles" has four games, right? If I just wanted to get good at playing black, I personally would stick to the pro-pro games. If I wanted ideas for how white can profit from passive play, I would look at the pro-ama games.

Cyclops: How extensively have you looked at this? I have hunches, but if you've already looked at a ton of games I don't want to spend an hour mucking around, reduplicating your research.

Thx jtx for being on topic. I confess I haven't searched at all. I haven't learnt yet how to. I don't want to invite anybody to spend hours searching but maybe someone remembers spontaneously.
And off topic. Yes jts I understand your objections. I've been reading Ishida's joseki dictionary. Often he refutes a sequence as bad. But I tend to remember the sequence; not that it is bad.

For all: Sadly I leave this thread to you to fill in the topic as you want.

I glanced through six games just to get a first impression of what's normal. I looked at the first first-line move simply, but also for my own curiosity looked for what I considered the first yose first-line move, defining that as "not a move that is a forcing move w.r.t. the life or capture of a group of stones, nor one that is forced in that respect." You can whine about how I defined that, and the line isn't 100% clear, but here is what I found.

#1: 40, 213
#2, 91, 204
#3, 22, 192
#4, 62, none (resignation at 254)
#5, 108, 173
#6, 116, none (resignation at 130)

So I suspect you're right, 150 is a little late, but something later doesn't seem out of the range of possibility.

Thx jts for searching. In the game I refer to, W 164 is necessary to make a group alive. It is next to the corner. W166 was also a first line move and also meant for life but it was deemed unnecessary by Yuan Zhou. I guess 164 it is not a bit late but an extremely late first first line move.

On topic? How boring... unless you are some sort of data nerd.
So the first ~7000 games in GoGoD (i.e. about 10% of the total; from the earliest through 1932) yields the following games with the first play on the side on move 160 or later:

Edit: A quick review found 3 missing (including the longest!) so with 70 examples out of about 7000 games, we have about one in a hundred games like this.
And for fun this is the move 205 game...

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Wc Han Xuenyuan - Huang Jilu, ~1730, Move 205
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . O . . . . . X . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . X O . X O O X O O . X O . . |
$$ | . O . O O O . O O , X O O X . X X X . |
$$ | 1 X O . . X X X X X X O O O O X X O . |
$$ | . . X X . . . . X O X O X X O X O O . |
$$ | . . X . O . X X X O O X X . X O . . . |
$$ | . O O X X X O O X O . O X . . O . O . |
$$ | . X X O X . . . O O O X X O O . O . . |
$$ | . O O O X X O O . , O X O X X O X O . |
$$ | . . O . O O X . X X X O O X X X X . . |
$$ | . X O O O O X . X O O O X O X . X X . |
$$ | . X X O X O O X . X O O X . X X O O . |
$$ | . X O X X X X X O . O X X . X O X O . |
$$ | . O O . . . . X O . O O O O . O . . . |
$$ | . X . X . . O O X X X O . O . O O O . |
$$ | . . . X O O . X O X X O O X X X X O . |
$$ | . . . X X O . X O . . X X . . . . X . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

_________________
Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21