This mainly just shows that an AGA 3dan can still be way off. That's a bit of an exaggeration.

At least Cho Seok-bin, a top European amateur an ex-Korean insei, says he doesn't study the old players much. His comments in this interview about the ancients are mixed:

Did you study historical Go players (for instance Shusaku, or even older)? If so, what do you think of those players - how do they compare to today's top players in terms of strength?


I studied some of Go Seigen's games, but I never studied Shusaku or so.

I think old players had good fighting skills but very bad opening, because the opening evolved so much in the past 200 years.

Also, I believe top players become stronger and stronger with each generation, so I think top players from today are better than the top players from 200 years ago.


As for myself, I study more modern games than old games, but that's mostly because there are more for them. More ancient games are being discovered thanks for the efforts of people like the GoGoD team, but of course the volume will never match that of incoming modern games now that so many are recorded and available on the internet. There are just more games today and more professionals being recorded, too.

Some players (Michael Redmond 9p, for example) study ancient games as part of endgame study, because before time limits players had more time to find correct play, so there are fewer mistakes and (one hopes!) no byoyomi-style moves.

Let's hope that JF will speak for himself. Nevertheless, in my imagination he is not an example of what I was seeking. I have the impression that he has spent vastly more time on the literature and culture(s) surrounding and deriving from Go than he has spent studying game records in order to become stronger. And thank God he did. Imagine how dull L19 would be if JF were just another reticent Euro 7-dan!

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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

I personally don't play very long games, so I don't study the ancients for that reason. The problem, is that many of the lines of play while being correct, aren't as robust to the mistakes I make, they also don't have great time suji, I was watching a 6 or 7 dan game on IGS and there was this weird exchange, I was watching the time, and I couldn't figure out why he played the exchange then, but then ah, he had a new clock. I can see how some people in search of perfect games would be fascinated by the ancients, and following those openings and techniques through history.

Maybe you can compare studying game records to academic research. It's not uncommon to have a scientific research paper including citations from a variety of sources, including sometimes sources that might date back 30 years. I suppose it depends on the area of study.

But to me, when reading a research paper, more important than the dates of the citations are the concepts and ideas themselves.

Coming back to go, probably more important than the particular date in time a game was played, is the idea that's being presented. It's possible that advancements have been made in go in modern times, just like advancements have been made in many fields of academia.

But in either case, an idea is an idea. So you can learn new ideas from many sources, both old and new.

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be immersed

I've gone through nearly every old game. The likes of Dosaku, Shuei, Huang, Fan & Shi several times.

I haven't made a systematic[i] study of games by historic players but I have studied quite a few, mostly from collections of commented gamnes. I've read most of Invincible, the eight volumes of the Nihon Ki-in's series titled [i]Koten Meikyoku Sen Shu (Dosaku, Chitoku, Shuwa, Jowa, Gennan, Shusaku, Shuho, Shuei), the Nihon Igo Taikei books of Dosaku's and Shuei's games, and others. I study these not so much because it will make me a stronger player but because I enjoy the story. I like feeling that I am part of the flow of history and it is fun seeing where the go that is played today came from. But I do think I learn from studying the old games. For example, if I see a move that isn't or wouldn't be played today I wonder why that is the case and try to figure it out.

I think one thing we must bring to the discussion is that old strong players like Shusaku and Dosaku were so ahead of most of players, than seeing their games an amateur can see a strong plan developing and punishing mistakes.

It's like seeing Capablanca or Alekhine in their plenty of chess power, they simply go to a clear win with the opponent sometimes unaware whats going on

That's a way to learn how to develop a plan and punish.

In modern games, with small differences of strength, the battles are so complex that we lot of times we (simply amateur) get lost in exchanges and reasons for a particular order of play. And without the detailed analysis or guidance the learning from the games is dramatically reduced.

It might be instructive to think about lines of play that have been rejected by later players. The Shin Fuseki period is a source of many of these. People really went overboard with trying different things that were rejected by later players. But at the time people were excited by them and played these flawed new ideas a lot. I think that a lot of the "new" stuff we see now will be rejected in the future. A more recent example is the "high" Chinese style opening, which was all the rage in the early '80s (in the Fujisawa vs. Kato Kisei title match all the games featured the high Chinese opening) but it is hardy played much any more. So studying the most recent games will invariably lead you to play moves that will be rejected in future years. It is still important to understand why the moves you play are good, not just play them because Gu Li did or some similar reason. Finally, some old moves that were rejected have come back in modern times, e.g. the Shusaku diagonal.