the answer to this might be obvious but here goes, how are you supposed to go about solving tsumego? is it recommended to copy the problem onto the board and play out the possible solutions physically\literally? or are you supposed to do it all in your head?

at first the book i was using had very easy problems that i could solve very quickly in my head but eventually i got to a point of increased difficulty where i was making mistakes, like forgetting about stones and things like that when i tried to do it all mentally so i started copying them onto a real board and actually playing out the problem so i didn't lose track of anything. i just wonder though if i am making a mistake by doing this because in a real game i would have to solve the problem in my head, i wouldn't be able to work it out on the board. but maybe i am too new to worry about this. just wondering what people think about this as i have looked around but not seen it really explicitly stated anywhere.

Your stated rank clearly shows you're a beginner. That you can do relatively simple tsumego mentally already puts you a step ahead of your competition.

If you find a harder tsumego I'm of the school that says it's okay to put it on a board and figure it out from there. Read as far as you can, then try out different lines with stones.

Also, there's no rule that says you can't re-solve tsumego. Dan players often go back to easy tsumego and go through about 100 as quickly as they can. It's part of upkeeping your reading skills. And as you solve them, you'll find it easier to read deeper, faster, and with more lines.

So keep at it!

Having studies both ways, I would strongly recommend solving the problems in your head. Otherwise you aren't increasing your reading ability. If you get a lot wrong, that just means that you should try the problem set again to get more practice. If you get too many wrong that might mean that the problem set is too hard for you, but never use a board.

If your goal isn't to improve, but just have fun, using a board isn't the worst thing, but it won't help you improve much.

I think the fastest way is to look at the answers and burn the essential patterns into your mind. Then ask yourself what you would do if someone plays a slightly different variation.

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Exactly. It's best (in my opinion) to regard tsumego as reading practice - in that way it's easy to see that taking shortcuts may solve an individual problem, but it won't improve your reading much.

tchan001 recommends pattern-drilling; I think this is really useful to a point (memorising the basic unsettled shapes like straight three, bulky five, L+1 group etc.). After all, you can't read everything out from scratch every game - you need to build intuition, and that will naturally involve a bit of brute force memorisation. The main drawback is that you can't do this forever. (Even really simple shapes like the various L+(0, 1, 2) groups have a hundred variations. They're all equally simple, but only if you know how to read, and not if you've just memorised two or three variations.)

As a halfway house, I would recommend alternating between lots of easy tsumego and Davies's "Life and Death" (Elementary Go Series, vol. 4 - it's a good introduction to life and death and it gives you the most common patterns). Try to read out every variation yourself carefully, but don't be afraid to memorise a few common themes or simple proverbs if it speeds the process up.


That happens. It's not a sign that you're doing anything wrong, it's just a sign that you're lacking practice. Find some more easy tsumego, or even just turn your book upside-down and start again - there's no harm in reading the same shapes two or three times. I think if you start playing out hard tsumego on a board you simply won't get very much from them.

I'd encourage doing tsumego in your head. The practice reading is much better then the benefit of solving a single problem.

On a somewhat related note. How to read. James Davies Tesuji has a chapter on reading. It prescribes the following method.
1) Begin with the most obvious move. Be this a hane to shrink eyespace, a placement on a vital point, what ever.
2)Now picture the most obvious response.
3) Continue doing this until either black or white fails. For the sake of argument where saying white is trying to kill black, and white is the one who fails this line.
4)Go back a move and try the other options for white, do any of them work?
5a)If one of these moves work then go back a move and see if black has a better move.
5b)If still no move works go back to whites next move and try his options there.
6)continue until all(relevant) variations have been processed.

This is the brute force way to solve tsumego. And I've found that reaching an endpoint and backing up from their to the start point makes it easier to hold the position in my head. The important thing is that your picking the most obvious move to you. As you get stronger(i.e. you have more practice with tsumego) you'll find that more often then not the obvious move will be a correct answer. I hope this helps.

I second Twitchy Go's suggestion to read to the end and go back. I find reading out the problem in a straightforward manner often reveals what the challenge to the problem actually is. White might want to kill, but turns up two liberties short in the end. Ok, now that you know that you can go back to the start and search for sente moves to increase that group's liberties by two. With more difficult problems there are often multiple, distinct approaches. If you keep restarting and trying a different path, you'll start to see that certain spaces are important in each variation: these are often the key points to the solution, or at least will point the way to them.

I've found that approaching a problem in this manner helps with reading depth. You're able to conceptualize 5 moves as 'ok, I increase my liberties by 1' or 'I seal off this path to escape', and at least for me chunking them together like that makes it easier to recall those stones locations when needed, and push them a little further out of mind when focusing elsewhere.