I am interested where people find the tsumego they solve, if they solve any.

I am not a very seasoned problem solver, but I am doing tsumego once in a time, but then I am not sure where to look for them. And they are so different in didactical value...

Edit: People I screwed up, it was my first poll and I followed the suggestion to add an option... Can anyone reset this?

You can try looking for me in the L19 room on KGS. I have study sessions from time to time with various problems selected from my Asian go books. I can probably safely say that I have one of the best collections of go problem books around I'm sure I must have some interesting problems around which will interest you no matter what your skill level is.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

I mainly work through problem collections in books. The Graded Go Problems for Beginners series (4 volumes), Lee Chang-Ho's Life and Death set (6 volumes) and James Davies' 'Tesuji' and 'Life and Death'. Books are nice and transportable. Also, they are available in bed and other places where desktop pc's can't reach ^^

I've printed the Elementary and Intermediate problems of Cho Chikun’s Encyclopedia of life and death (from http://tsumego.tasuki.org/?page=tsumego)

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Sanity is for the weak.

Yes, by all means look for tchan001's problems. He posts some interesting ones. Often they're too hard for me, but that's cool. It's interesting to see them.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

Started with Cho Chikun's Elementary Problems (they are legally for free, see Li Kao's link) but never went over ~400, then got the "Graded Go Problems For Beginners"-series and "Get Strong at Tesuji" (both main Tsumego source, worked through them like four times already), aside of that I worked through some hundred to one thousand problems on GoProblems.com and in the WBaduk-client, bought and worked through "1001 Life-and-Death Problems" and "Tesuji".
Started "Making Good Shape" (less Tsumego obviously) and "501 Tesuji Problems" but dropped both, because I was not able to solve them.
Then I have one of the classic japanese Tsumego-books with 160 problems inside (9-1k), which I never solved completely (at 3k it was too hard, but this was more than half a year ago) and "Intermediate Level Problems", which I did not start until now.

Yeah, what I really can recommend is the Graded Go Problems series, "Get Strong at Tesuji" and "Tesuji". You can read and solve them a douzen times, there is always something fun about them : )

Then I heard, Yi Chang'ho's Tesuji series is great, but I don't have them so I can't tell you more.

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

For on computer problems, I would check out wbaduk's problem sets. I think they're fairly good.

Offline, I just have a ton of Japanese books for problems.

I have a Nintendo DS with a good set of tsumego from for the bus. Android has one program with tsumego but it's loaded with problems from goproblems.com which can be hit or miss for quality.
The DS game is http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%82%A8%E3%83 ... y_vg_img_b

All the tsumego I do come from books. Right now the only books (with problems) I have are Lee Changho's life and death series and James Davies' Tesuji. I'd like to get Lee Changho's tesuji series and Graded Go Problems for Dan Players at some point as well.

I get a weekly assignment from my teacher and have trouble even with finishing those.

I am surprised that flashcards are not popular at all. (In Germany they sell Go problems on flashcards.)

I worked my way through Maeda's three volume tsumego set and did a number of problems from the classics (Gokyo Shumyo and Gengen Gokyo). I also have collections of problems composed by Go Seigen. Lately I've been working on a Korean life-and-death "dictionary" (really just a large collection or problems). I found it in a Korean book store in Queens in New York City. I don't know or read any Korean language so all the problems become "status" problems where I have to figure out what happens when either color plays first. Usually they are easy in one direction but some are really interesting in both directions. I like working this way because it's more like how I'd have to evaluate the position in an actual game.

Maeda's tsumego is another set I'd like to get. How difficult are the problems? And do you know of anywhere other than Amazon Japan that I could buy it?

Slate and Shell has the middle volume for some reason. I'm curious why they didn't have the whole set.

book and other

other includes; people at the local club showing problems, situations from real games, Many Faces problem database, various (random) internet sources.

this sounds like a lot but I solve only a few problems every now and then.

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Laurens
Go school: freegame's Teaching School
Author of: The Next Move a book for 15-3kyu players.

The problems range in difficulty from around 10k to 4k in the first volume, 5k to 1k in the second volume, and 3k up to dan level in the third volume. The three volume set is different from the book published by Slate and Shell which is a collection of problems published in the old Go Review magazine. The difficulty ratings have to be taken cautiously. They were assigned when the book was written, in 1965, before the rank inflation. US players at the stated ranks would probably find the problems fairly difficult.

AFAIK the three-volume set is only available in a single-volume edition in Japanese. I don't know whether a Chinese or Korean translation was published. If you have access to used book dealers in Japan, like Akashiya Shoten, you can probably find the old three-volume set.

It is sold as a single item, but I would not call it a single volume. It contains three separate books in a box that holds all the books together.

You may want to add weiqiok.com to the poll.

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"Those who calculate greatly will win; those who calculate only a little will lose, but what of those who don't make any calculations at all!? This is why everything must be calculated, in order to foresee victory and defeat."-The Art of War

Back in the day I took all of goproblems.com, sorted them by genre, DE and DI tags, into sets of 20 or so. Then I went through them all, fixing broken solutions and removing problems I considered un fit for study (i.e. anything that required you to read instructions). I changed some of them into normal problems. I made sure they all worked with gogrinder as well -- in the process doing a little coding for the gogrinder project so it worked more better with the goproblems.com problem collection. Adum actually gave me permission to distribute the collection as I had it in 2006. The collection was so massive I only barely finished the life_and_death section.

A few months ago I updated the collection, changing some problems genre and doing work on the other genres as well. It's quite interesting to go through the sets -- of course they are tsumego and doing them is helpful, but doing them in order of difficulty is fascinating. You can feel them getting more difficult and you have a weird sense of progress that I have never experienced before -- except when playing MMOs. I believe I have learned something intangible by doing problems this way that I would not have known earlier. Something related to people's plateaus, how they get through them, visualization, and so forth. Very interesting stuff.

You have mentioned this before, and I meant to ask into it. Have you by any chance gotten permission to distribute the most current set? If not, do you still have the older distributable version? It would be great to have a set like that for use with GoGrinder (especially for my phone), but it would seem a bit silly to redo the work you already have, if it's legal and ethical for me to at least ask you you can share.

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Someday I want to be strong enough to earn KGS[-].

I did, but this removed the results. Dead in gote. Sorry to all.

Surprising for me was, that goproblems.com got less votes than gochild, nobody uses flash cards and special problem series are not widely used. If anyone can reset the poll please go forward or maybe it is better to wait for new votes.

what are the special problem sets?