Hi guys,

I've been studying essential life and death 1, 2 & 3 (4 is too hard for me).

For those who don't know the books:

Its about life & death (obviously), they start with one problem and work there way through the problem in steps.
Learning key vital points by repition and technique on how to read out life and death in the process.
As such, the books are not so much raw-reading training but vital points & technique studying.

I'm not saying you don't require decent reading howhever

Now one of the good things of this book is that after the first diagram, the second diagram will have one or more moves ahead. Then the next one will potentialy have variations on resistances that white (in case you are black) can do.

Now my problem is that I tend to miss a lot of variations. I do come to the final result by reading most of the main sequences which is good.
But some of the not so obvious repsonses I tend to miss a lot.

Does anybody else experienced this and has resolved it in their reading ?
How did you do it ?

I also notice this in some of my games, I read quite deep but only to realise that my oponent does something completely unexpected which leaves me having to re-read everything. It seems as if I'm having problems with knowing what to read.

Btw: I can give practical examples if you should not understand what I mean.

Cheers,
Otenki

This is one of the essential parts of getting stronger, I think. You can avoid missing variations if you consider each and every move in the area you're reading, but then you spend much more time and effort reading.

As you study shape and tsumego(among other things), some moves will start jumping to your eye before others, and make it easy to trim more useless branches from your reading.

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

The good news: a lot of them tend to just be perfectly normal tesuji (e.g. various eye-stealing tesuji), simply applied in weird-looking places. Practise and improve. The bad news: when they're designed to set up things like shortages of liberties, they are massively non-obvious and random-looking, at least to me.

My Tsumego-books only have one or two lines of resistance so I mostly cover these. When I didn't think about one particular resistance I mark the problem as "wrong" since I figured the move will have some merit otherwise it would have not been listed.

The important point is not to read everything without exception but to understand or feel which moves are important to read. That comes with experience, I guess. Just be open-minded and accept oversights, so that you can learn from them.

An example from a problem I just did:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bc Black to kill
$$ ------------------
$$ | . . O . . . . . . . .
$$ | . X O . . . X O X . X
$$ | . X X O O O O O X . .
$$ | . . X X X X X X X . .
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . .
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . .[/go]

My thought-process:


You see, solving the problem is not automatically solving the problem ; )

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go