We humans don't have control/introspection of our brains at the lowest level (neurons). Consequently, the rules and heuristics pros verbally tell us they use are very likely NOT what their brain actually implements to make their moves. So, when a strong player says, do X because of Y and Z, X is probably very good advice, but Y and Z may not be the reasons the strong player's brain actually chose X. Pros are experts at go, and probably experts at learning to be experts at go-- but they are not necessarily experts at communicating exactly what they do or how they became experts.

Pros have vast amounts of corner knowledge at their fingertips. It may not feel to the pro like they use joseki knowledge--and I'd even agree that they don't use it consciously--but any move they make in a corner is powered by that vast amount of unconscious knowledge. I personally would call that knowledge joseki knowledge. But it's knowledge that's baked into the neural circuits that they use to choose their moves; it's not knowledge that they're storing verbally as sentences. So it's not fair to expect them to be able to verbalize it on command, and it may even not feel to the pro like they are doing anything of the sort.

TL;DR: I don't think what actually happens in the pro's brain is what the pro thinks is happening in their brain. Of course pros "know joseki", for reasonable values of "know" and "joseki". (But, thank you, John, for the post, I really do appreciate your summaries of the literature.)

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The impression coming over to me is that rather many people are seeing joseki like chess openings. There may be some similarities, but it also misses some important nuances.

Joseki is a term that is part of everyday Japanese. The implication is usually "routine", not "correct" or "even". Taking the dog for a walk at 3 pm every day can be called a joseki. The rookie cop who wants to solve a case with his scintillating intellect might be told to do the joseki work first: knock on doors and take statements. When Mihori refers to "Mr Joseki" he is not praising him.

So when Mihori says pros don't know josekis, he is saying (and Japanese people would understand this) that they are untrammelled by the routine or the obvious. He is praising them for that. He is not saying they do not know any corner variations, and frankly I thought we'd discussed the term joseki often enough in the past for this to be almost as obvious here. The term joseki also exists in shogi BTW, but despite the the closer similarity and chess and shogi, it is not used even there in quite the same way as "openings" in chess.

Neither is Mihori (qua Go) saying that josekis don't exist. The book is called "How to think about josekis", for heaven's sake. But he does tries to explain why what is obvious or acceptable to us about a joseki may not be obvious or acceptable to a pro. They see more subtle shades. This is the point of the title.

No-one is saying either that pros don't study corner openings or josekis. Nevertheless, it does seem true that budding pros study them in different ways, and that may be part of their talent. In short, it seems they rely little on books. Through constant practice at thinking for themselves about corner openings they appear to end up with the different perspective Mihori describes. They certainly do not ever appear to study a corner opening and decide that a line is joseki and must be learnt, which is what most amateurs seem to do (except that for them the process is often reversed).

On a wider theme, it seems common sense to me that when new ideas are put forward for discussion, the intention is to open doors and windows in the mind - to stimulate. Let a hundred flowers bloom. I'm disappointed to see so many people take the polemical tack and try to apply what they see as killer logic. I would have thought they'd have enough experience of go to have been through the humbling experience of playing what they thought was a killer move only to find out many moves later that they'd had their window blinds drawn. Catalin Taranu's experiences with overcoming this constant urge to contradict or provide the counterexample with his teacher Saito are worth re-reading, I suggest.

In brief: by all means reject any new idea - but suck the juice out of it first.


Bill, as an aside, the low move 8 is still being played, and seems never to have gone away really. Look at Kombilo.

I'd love to - where can I find that?

If the word has different meanings in Japanese and in English, maybe it's best to use this translation when writing for a non-Japanese audience? It may not sound as cool as "top pros know no joseki", but it would lead to fewer misunderstandings. I think it would be unfortunate if the sentence as quoted were to enter western go folklore (and it sounds like the kind of thing that could easily become a meme).

I guess this just pushed a button for me; it sounded like an attempt imbue pros with rather more mystique than warranted (while also overgeneralizing and disparaging the approach amateurs take). I guess my point was: they're only human; but it seems it was only a language problem after all.


What exactly is the new idea though? Professionals practice a lot more and are good enough at reading and positional judgment that they don't have to rely on books for a lot of things that don't come as easy to amateurs? Or simply the advice not to play a sequence just because it's from a book?

John, from other things you have written about the language used in the original edition of Igo Daijiten,I am pretty sure that you have a copy. Would it be possible for you to comment on the concept of joseki as expressed by Suzuki in the intro there versus what Mihori wrote here? I do not have direct access to a copy and would not be able to appreciate the nuances of the language anyway.

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

After all this clarification, my impression is that pros know the routine plays in a corner and use them as handy reference points. Their way of thinking about corners is to view them as part of the board. My question is: how does this way of thinking apply to amateurs, and what role should the study of joseki play in our regimens.

While pros perhaps do not learn their joseki from books, their understanding of the logic of such routines is to some extent reflected in joseki books. I am sure that I am nowhere near able to reproduce this logic on my own, therefore, when the ins and outs of a certain joseki are explained to me, it is somewhat similar to getting a fantastically detailed commentary of a sequence from a pro game. It shows lines of thought that are determined by reading farther than I am able to. The difference however, is that this corner pattern is significantly more compact and easier to remember and recreate than some sequence from the middle game.

The danger of using this as a crutch is obvious, and the comment about studying joseki and losing two stones is also regularly replied to with the caveat that there is however a right and a wrong way, and the above applies to the wrong way. So what is the right way? At the end of his essay, John points out that understanding the moves simply in the context of the joseki is inadequate. For a pro, certainly. A sequence does not truly end until the game is over. Yet even Go Seigen who envisions sequences well beyond what is generally considered the outcome of a joseki does not bother - or is not able - to draw a final conclusion. He simply stops later than the joseki dictionaries.

In our games we are implored to "look to left and right and decide which MOVE to play. " We are told to attempt to achieve a specific purpose and not lose sight of it. But when we study it makes sense to abbreviate these purposes as joseki dictionaries often do with statements such as "white is thick" or black is settled. Whether not the dictionary declares the result "even, " it is obviously also our intention to use this result in some way to gain the upper hand. John says that this sort of thinking doesn't go far, but for crying out loud, that's already beyond my abilities if I can't even remember how the routine sequence goes.

Yes, I did read this:



In order to evaluate a position, whether it is a joseki or not, one must be able to visualize it, and for me personally, memorization seems not a bad way of practicing this skill. The concept of a joseki "outcome" may be nonsense in a game situation, but as an aid to both memorizing and learning to evaluate, it is a crutch that serves a purpose.

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I have already written at some length about the evaluation criteria in Big Joseki Dictionary so I have no inclination to repeat that, but it's a slippery slope anyway to compare one writer's definition with another's. Even though there is this strong overtone of routine in Japanese usages of joseki, it is a case of usages plural even there. Just as here, we get writers who just mean any corner opening, others who insist on a definition such as equal division of the spoils, and yet others who insist it has to be a well established line. Maybe the majority use a mixture of all meanings, and routinely (to coin a word) there are uncomfortable blips when the discussion turns to a "new joseki" (how can it be both new and well established?) or "old joseki" (how can it still be called a joseki when modern pros think it's unequal?). Japanese people seem less bothered by fuzziness in language than we are. Indeed, if you follow Roy Miller, professor of Japanese, you can even say they exalt and cultivate fuzziness. All we can do, I think, is try to treat each individual writer on his own terms.

One Japanese go book which might be useful for this discussion is Quickly Understand! Encyclopedia of Joseki Formation (明快!定石誕生事典). This book talks about the evolution of joseki over time.

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A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

I think about joseki in the following way: I 1-space pincer, he jumps, I jump, he shoulder hits...

How I imagine professionals think about joseki: if I 1-space pincer these are the results (projects numerous end-results he has memorized onto the board), if I 2-space pincer...

My way is a lot less efficient and tiring, and I usually end up just "playing" a joseki. The professional, thinking about joseki in a super-efficient way from tireless study, is then able to customize the moves to better fit the global position.

I'm not quite sure where to begin... But I found these sections, and especially the bolded concepts, the parts which spoke the most to me. Because, these are ways of viewing the game that I've come to value as very important. I'm not certain that the traits outlined are unique to top professionals, but I think that they are unique to anyone wanting to create fresh and interesting games (because even professionals can create boring games). And I also think that only players of a certain strength can begin to develop and cherish a deep appreciation for these concepts. Though I could go into more depth, I just wanted to share these thoughts at this time. Thank-you.

It isn't what I want to read or watch TV shows about, but joseki police work is what solves most cases. I believe "do joseki work" is a good advice to the rookie cop, much better than "do it like Sherlock Holmes" would be.

Honestly, how many amateur players do you know who play obvious, routine moves? I believe most would be a lot stronger if they would do the routine work - check your eyespace, look for the cuts, keep connected, watch out for follow ups - joseki are about that, if you study them. In fact, when I look at professional games, despite obviously lacking the reading muscle to read out what is actually behind the moves, I was most astonished how often 95% of the moves look like routine moves even to me, and likely of the remaining 5% 4% more would look as routine to a stronger player. In my experience the amateurs who study joseki often try to get an early edge, trick the opponent or do fancy stuff. The others are discouraged from studying joseki by a strong anti-joseki bias in the community and ironically end up playing the single line they learned somewhere all the time.

Hasn't Go Seigen been saying recently that Japanese go is too much about joseki? Certainly he has been rejecting the long, complicated "joseki" sequences that go on for 40 moves and take up more than a quarter of the board. I like John's idea that fuseki thought drives "joseki" thought. I think the joseki innovators like Kitani and Kajiwara tried new sequences because of fuseki goals rather than just staying even in a corner.

Firstly and superfluously, John, your contributions are surely one of the reasons why people come here. Of course the discussion they elicit is mostly about disagreement or puzzlement - that's the nature of discussion. When I teach, I hope there are many questions. A silent room is unnerving.

Secondly and more to the point, your reflection on how to think about joseki makes it very clear that professional players stay clear of playing routine moves. Since what we call joseki are routine patterns, if they occur in pro games it is because even the search for non-routine moves results in the joseki, which may have been inevitable in the circumstances. Pros do not look for even outcomes: they don't believe in the concept of 100% even and even if something would be 100% even they have no interest in playing it. That's very clear.

The question is now whether amateurs, beginners or advanced students of the game should think the same way about Go. The stronger you are, the more you want to think like a pro. The weaker you are, the more you want to act like a pro. Imitation is a strong technique for improvement and should not be eradicated for the sake of reasoning. Mankind has always relied on imitation because it is so efficient. Imitation is good for beginners but it is of course not good anymore for experts.

As a beginner, you are not equipped to always reason about the best move. Looking for the best move can wear you out. The best strategy is probably to reduce risk. Playing joseki mindlessly is a risk reducing tactic. It is not the most rewarding way to play go, but it is not the worst either. I used to be anti-joseki. Now I consider it to be a starting point for analysis and understanding the implications of deviating from joseki and using such routine patterns in a global context. I think that is a more prosperous path to expert play than reasoning your way through corner patterns time and time again, without taking some food from pros and books. For an amateur, that is.

Finally, I used to take lessons with a Korean 6d amateur who has disappeared from the scene and all social networks. I hope Minue is fine. He taught me "whole board joseki", standard opening patterns which are considered even among pros. This seems to indicate that pro research is about the complete board (probably always has been) like you are advocating, but it also suggests they can still consider something to be an equal outcome. I posted some examples on Senseis: see http://senseis.xmp.net/?StandardOpening1 and up.

How to think about joseki? Embed them or non-joseki variations in an exhaustive understanding of meanings and purposes of moves, sequences, groups, local and global positional contexts and evaluation and strategic concepts, decisions and planning. All those fundamentals and aspects of strategy are more important than knowing standard sequences by heart. The same order I use in my book series. Nevertheless, fixed representative joseki sequences have their merit: During a game, nobody without at least a solid joseki variations knowledge can work out and reinvent everything afresh. Knowing several hundred basic josekis by heart helps to survive the running clock - not because one would have to play them but because one can choose to play them, variations or entirely unconventional sequences.

Ever since I've read John's post, when I review games for weaker players I've been very, very cautious not to say something like "This move is wrong, here is the joseki". Instead, I try to analyze each move just as much as I would if I was going over the middle-game and try to make no mention of the terminology altogether. It just doesn't feel right at all to say such a thing after reading his post, and I've noticed that it adds depth and clarity to the review. And not just for joseki, but for the opening as well. A lot of times in the past I would always say something like "This is a common pro opening" or consider a move to be questionable simply because it was an early move and not in a database. I also think this is no good, so I try to explain why an opening move is good, as hard as that is for me (...and maybe that's because I relied more on databases to determine my opening moves instead of my thought process). That's not to say I'm going to be burning my joseki textbooks and uninstalling my database programs, but hopefully I'll be using them as tools to think and question more rather than less.

Sounds like your new reviewing procedure may help your own game as much as your students'. Perhaps I should try to review more games myself...

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