For dan level opening understanding, I agree that there is still a big gap in Western literature.

Did you ever considered trying to publicly fund those book projects? Websites like kickstarter.com seem to have the finger on the pulse. If your start-up capital is not reached you only lose the time, that went into presenting your idea.


post scriptum: Sorry, for derailing this thread again :O Tami sure does promote discussions =D

_________________
My "guide" to become stronger in Go

Go books publication does not need start-up capital any longer in the age of digital printing. Capital is useful to slightly reduce average printing cost though.

Go books publication needs contents and at least one kind of distribution.

I am no professional so giving my perspective on fusiki is somewhat uncomfortable.

as i mentioned before, fuseki is the hardest subject to master.
IMO, you are strong as your reading. (correctly analyzing which board position is better is a part of reading)
Fuseki will test your intuition and experience.
If you can not decide which board position is better, then you are lost.
therfore you need to have experience to have intutition so you can analyze the position correctly.

my suggestion to Tami is...do what i did as a SDK.
try to imitate professionals by playing their game and reading their review.(reading their thoughtprocess is a goldmine.)
after many games of imitating you will feel why that move was a good move and you will improve 1 stone. (and your opponent will fill that pressure too)
example: when i was SDK, i imitated takemiya's 4 starpoint fuseki. Now i rarely play that opening but it was good experience (i apply his idea of thick influencal moyo game on many handycap game and results are phenomenal)

another suggestion which will contridict above suggestion. (in some perspective they are actually same..)
free your reading from textbook and try new ideas and positions that you feel is a good move.

P.S.
Robert please do not create any rebuttle on my thread for i dont wish to read my thread quotted by you.

_________________
"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson

I could imagine, Go-book authors like some compensation for their time devoted to write books. That's how it generally works, if you have a publisher (as far as I know). If the actual sell is not as good, you at least got something.

_________________
My "guide" to become stronger in Go

I would immediately pre-order. How many orders would you need to make it viable?

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

Replies like this, and also suggestions to use SmartGo, kickstart, and the other ideas miss the point, and after a while it becomes depressing.

I know I can speak for at least some of the other regular go authors and publishers when I say that it is not a question of funding or making pots of money. All of us can afford to fund the odd book or two, and we don't need the money. But we do like to see a financial return for what I suppose you can call psychological reasons. None of us likes being taken for granted or being ripped off, for example, and the money is some sort of token that that is not happening unduly. (I don't want to get into a debate about the psychology BTW)

The real problem, and the reason for collaboration with a publisher, is that producing a go book is tedious work. It helps enormously if someone will share the work. If someone helps with the collection of the source material, making the diagrams, doing the proof-reading and dealing with distribution, the actual work of writing/translating becomes just about bearable. With my Slate & Shell books I had the benefit of Bill Cobb doing the diagrams and distribution, while T Mark helped with sources, lunches, the psychiatrist's couch and proof-reading. For the Shuei books I took on the extra burden of the diagrams but I still had T Mark for the other burdens. Struggling through each hoop just seems to make the next hoop seem smaller, and so I'm less and less inclined to do anything new.

As someone said, this is way off topic, and if anyone wants to continue on this theme a new thread shoudl be started. But, important issue though it is, I don't intend to contribute there. I've said my piece often enough.

However, so that people know what I'm talking about, I may well make a post here later with an illustration of the Igo Kansai series mentioned above.

MagicWand said

This is not only quite right, but also more important than most weaker players realise, I think.

In my experience, weaker players tend not to know what the fuseki is. They think it is the opening. But in Japanese the opening is "joban".

Fuseki is the "distribution" or "spreading out" of stones (or groups). It is all about, and only about, finding the big points all across the board. As mentioned in a previous post, "big point" is a little bit of a misnomer that has stuck with us for historical reasons, and it really refers to big areas where there is at least one but often several strategically important moves. Being good at fuseki means being able to identify these strategically good moves. Being very good at fuseki means being able to evaluate these good moves and to choose the best ones.

Tactics (i.e. josekis) can play a part in the fuseki but only through the prism of fuseki and only in a supporting role. For example, if you identify what you think is a big point (a "hot" area strategically) on the side, you can evaluate it by assessing what joseki is likely to be played in a nearby corner. If the likeliest joseki is one that leaves you with an open skirt, your move on the side is rather unlikely to be a good one after all. Note that this is how josekis are best evaluated - not as locally equal results, but as practical fighting shapes in a given overall position. A book about fuseki is essentially a description of the various ways to play big-point moves. Tami's list in orders 0 to 5 provides a fairly comprehensive and reliable list.

Books about the joban, however (they do exist, but maybe not in English), talk about different things. They will mention fuseki elements, of course, because the fuseki is part of the joban, but they will also talk about things like probes, reductions and what are misleadingly called middle-game josekis (e.g. the standard ways to play against a shimari enclosure or to answer an invasion on the side). These josekis are really part of the joban, though they do very often define how the middle game will begin and how it will develop.

Many western players look for these kinds of tactics in fuseki books and often don't find them. They are therefore dissatisfied with the books. But that is unfair. The Japanese approach is to learn the fuseki points and their evaluation first and only then graft on the "middle-game josekis" and so on. The best way to do the former is not by making lists but by garnering experience. Obviously, in the game as a whole reading strength will tend to be decisive, but if you consistently get the fuseki wrong, you will always be walking up a down escalator with your tactics (which includes joban tactics, of course). Tactics work better if they are going in the right direction.

Depressing? Sorry. I wanted to be encouraging. I was trying to indicate that I assume that besides myself, many many people would be interested in such a book. Like a psychological boost in advance. I understand that you don't see much value in squeezing through tiny hoops to write more books, but it's not like nobody would appreciate it if you did.

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

I realised you were being supportive, and I appreciate it. But overall the support is not there. The fact is go books currently attract not much more than 100 people (though books for beginners can do better), and journals (or their readers) make no effort to do book reviews. I find it reprehensible in those circumstances that people here chide Robert, for example, for trying to promote his own books. He could arguably do it in a more affable way, but I'm right with him on the fundamental principle of self-promotion. But then I'm one of those old fogies who still thinks books matter to go players.

Sorry for continuing the thread-busting, but I didn't want to leave daal thinking he had misspoken.

Rather books of different contents generate pretty different sales.

This is an example of the Igo Kansai way of handling "How good is your go?" It's a monthly series and respondents accumulate points over the year with a view to earning a diploma. There are 100 points available each month. The allocation of points can vary over the years, but the type of fuseki problem shown below is generally considered to have the highest value and scores 20 points here. The other type of fuseki problem (where you just choose one of five marked options) scored just 15 points, and other problems cover the middle game, endgame and life and death.

In the position below, it is Black to play where? (Although it's not required for the answer, you can make it more stimulating by working out point scores for all the sensible moves. Over 60 are given.)

This series was set by Tafu Kae 3-dan.



The answer is hidden below.



It will not be apparent from this single example, but as I mentioned earlier, the same sorts of comments are made month after month so that eventually it is dinned into you by sheer repetition what is the right assessment (and score) for each type of move. You don't have to understand the best moves; you just need to reproduce them.

The standard is high, incidentally, even though diploma sales drive this exercise. To get a 7-dan diploma you have to score an average of at least 90 points over two separate half-year series (and be 6-dan already). 1-dan requires an average of 63% and the lowest grade acknowledged is 4-kyu, at 57%. A 1-dan diploma cost 30,000 yen in 2005 - not cheap!

In the month from which this was taken, no-one scored 100, and only one chap scored 99. The number of responses is not given but is clearly at least in the high hundreds, because about 300 scored 90% or higher and got the honour of having their names printed.

The difficult part about using "experience and intuition" in the fuseki - or in general - is that your evaluation's correctness cannot be proven. This can be contrasted to localized life and death patterns in which every branch can be enumerated for correctness, and a result can be proven to be true.

This is particularly unsettling to me, because I can never be certain with the correctness of my play (due to lack of proof), and as a result, will always doubt myself in global situations, starting with the fuseki.

Emperically, it is clear that experience and intuition do lead to good resulta, but perhaps this lack of certainty in the early and middle stages of the game leave me less inclined to even try to read globally - there's no way I'll be sure it's correct anyway, so why bother?

This is probably a bad attitude, but one that I for sure adopt. I don't do "global reading" for this reason.

_________________
be immersed

Isn't that a good thing about go? If the fuseki algorithm was 'proven', would we all just have virtually the same games over and over?

I guess so. It doesn't stop me from playing nim, though

_________________
be immersed

I have a terrible subconscious fuseki move generation (and, as discussed elsewhere, no intuition) and "focused on this" because of, you guess, understanding and reasoning. To start with, only in that area there are unsettled important groups with too restricted numbers of development directions.

John,


Okay folks, move on, nothing to see here

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

If you sit down to play a few games, you begin to realise how impractical it is attempting to use any sort of "Order" as a move generator.

Again, I made that list and looked up Yang Yilun because I`m seeking to get a better sense of structure for all the bits of advice and ideas that I have learned in recent times. However, practically speaking, such lists seem most useful for consulting away from the game (to prompt your subconscious to get busy organising), and for guidance when intuition and reading fail in a live game.

So, being a practically minded person, I will concentrate on

* getting as much experience as possible
* really getting a handle on L&D
* other forms of study, but emphasising the concrete (i.e., shapes and tactics you can use)

With respect to L&D, I used to try to learn it in a "principles and terms" fashion, but could never recall the shapes, no matter how descriptive the phrases I used. If my experience of learning kanji is a guide, then the breakthrough comes when you understand the structure of a shape, and after that the labelling becomes helpful. My Nihon Kiin L&D "bible" is very structured and comprehensive, starting with each shape, then adding one leg, one hane etc. If you learn to solve the shape, then recalling it by name is easy; but if you try to make a short cut by learning the name and the killing/living move, then it is not easy to remember.

It is beginning to seem that reading strategy books is fun, but in terms of improvement is not as useful as it feels. The real problem seems to be enforcement. The better you are at L&D and tactics, and the better you are at shape, the more easily you can get your way strategically. Conversely, there`s not much good in building a beautiful moyo if you don`t know how to convert it into real points.

It`s a similar phenemenon in chess - weaker players get all worked up over complex systems and positional theories, but then go and hang a knight. First you need to see what`s going on, and then you can play positionally. (BTW, when I last took chess seriously, in 1999 my rating got close to 2000.)

There may also be an interesting illusion going on. Learning strategy may seem harder and more "advanced" because it involves abstract ideas, rather than concrete things. So, many of us study strategy because it is fun to do so, and because it feels like we`re starting to really understand go (or chess!). However, in reality, it takes a fair bit of effort properly to learn a L&D shape (i.e., to spot it anywhere, to know the possible attacks and defences, to know why they work or fail, etc. as opposed to just being content with "yeah, L+1 is unsettled"). Not only does it take a lot of effort, but the gain seems small compared with "learning" a large-scale strategic concept. But, every L&D shape is something that crops up over and over and over again, if not on the board, then in the background. So, I think it`s worth doing all the labour, because in the end you build up knowledge that you can apply, even if each item seems small and mean at the time.

To Bonobo

_________________
Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here:

Of what I have seen so far, he does not offer enough detail to support well a better sense of structure. For structure, one needs a reasonably exhaustive treatise of generally applicable information. Just a few principles don't suffice.



This is a premature conclusion based on insufficient sources for the intended purpose of seeking understanding of structure.



Principles and terms for shapes for LD are still weak. Principles and terms for functional aspects of LD are still hopelessly under-developed. So, at the moment for LD, your failure of learning by that approach is expected.



Oh, you already speak of structure when considering only one shape? I prefer to see structure in dozens of thousands of shapes:)



The thick encyclopedia? It has only a bit of basic structure; I would not call that "very" structured. However, maybe you could tell me which structure the many index diagrams use? I am still trying to figure out that.



I think the contrary.

Bonobo: I don't know who you are referring to, of course, but he is a fellow author and I empathise with his frustrations. For you to describe his attitude as "whining" tells me any relationship with you could easily start off on the wrong foot. Obviously, I understand that your offer is basically a very kind one, but I've been down the path before of being told before that I need to buy very expensive hardware or software (or download it illegally), and spend weeks learning to use it, probably screwing up my existing set-up in the process, just to produce a book for a tiny number of people. I would start to believe that the whole business is becoming more worthwhile only when more go players start buying existing books again.

However, if you have an itch you really want to scratch, there is a person who wants to typeset the complete Shuei trilogy as a book, and he would certainly need help with diagrams. His idea is to produce three presentation copies (me, Mark and him). He may be willing to add a fourth, but he awaits the final volume (soon) before really getting down to work.