Greetings,
I think it is well time that I adopt a course of study. My rank seemingly flaots from 6-9k depending on the means of life I am deling with during that time.

Currently on average I usually do about 200-300 go problems a day at about 3 days a week, most of which are Life and Death. I am able to go through that in about 1 1/2 hr. Problems 10k and under I get easily and quickly at a 100% correctness with only one or two problems rarely slipping by. Problems between 9-6k I get at about 80% correct working at the same pace as with lower level problems. I do not do many problems ranging from 5k and up, when I do I get 55% - 60% correct. This percentage runes to about 2D then I get about 20% or less right. Since most are Life and Death I plan to cahnge the average and do less L&D and do more Fuseki and Whole board problems.

Fuseki , I have a slight sence when dealing with fuseki and Direction of play but that is only when dealing with the 3-5 Joseki and at times I can loose it. I have set down the 3-5 recently to work with the 3-3 and 3-4 so my fuseki are even worse than before. This is something that I need to work on the most and will probably drop my go problem ratio to about 25 problems a dayand spend more of that time to work on fuseki and Direction of play.

Joseki, as I said I am working with the 3-3 and 3-4 now and I plan to continue to work at the pace I am it is doing quite well. Joseki is probably a strong area of mine though I need to take more time to work on the direction of the joseki.

I Study pro games, this is probably my favorite area of study though the games I read through have no comments since you have to pay for any that do have comments. I go through 1 game a day.

Books, I have the Fundamentals, Attack and Defence, and Sakata Eio's The Middle Game. The Middle Game feels to be the most helpful to me. I read one book a week then another the next and so on and so forth and I read the book of teh course of the week. I have a few other books, Gokyo Shumyo, Igo Hatsuyo-ron, and Gengen Gokyo these are where I get most if not all of my life and death problems from. I want to get Opening Theory Made Easy, and the first three volumes of the Elementary Go series I believe those will help out with what I need the best.

The amount of games I play are less than what they used to be. I use to play about 7 games over a 2 hr period some of them being simultaneously, doing about 20 games a day average time setting being, 30min main - 1min byoyomi. I now do about 3-5 games a day at 4-5 days a week, with work and everything I can easily keep this up.

So my Study Plan Overveiw--
1. Go problems 25 or 30 min max for 4-5 days a week at about a 5k - 1k level since I do well enough for lower levels.
2. Joseki, I study joseki about 1hr a day ill keep this up at 4-5 days a week.
3. Study of pro games I will keep up at 1 game a day 4-5 days a week.
4. Untill I get my hands on new books Ill keep up the same method a book over the course of the week and when I get new books I will just reaqd it over a week.
5. Ill aim to play 3 games a day for 4-5 days a week. Three is enough for now and it gives me time to do other things.
6. Fuseki and Direction of play, well I have no real idea what to do here currently I am trying to pick it up from studying pro games but it does not help alot.

Goal!!! I have no goal... I will do this for the course of a month then I will reassess the situation and see where I stand and then from there I may set a real Goal.

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Only a child can ask questions that the wise can not answer.

my advice do not waste time with josekis spend that hour in tsumegos
for 250 tsumegos in 1.5 hours its average 21 seconds per problem so you should focus on doing less but reading all the possible variations since the key point is reading and not feeling.
Do not study pro games since at this level you mostly wont understand anything just replay the first 30 50 moves of many games and just feel how they place the stones
you cannot read one book a week you will hardly understand anything and will damage your future play
since you have kageyama book read it
play slow games because will help you to improve since you will be actually reading a lot during a serious game
read thishttp://tchan001.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/the-important-skill-of-calculation/

The mass of tsumego so fast is from previous study of them going through variations and ect. Depending on the grade of problem I may choose to do them slower. I purposely go through easy problems fast to just remember shapes and get the instinctive move for the situation. Almost anything below 10k I can do in less than 10secs now either from memory or instinct or the sort. So the more time is actually spent on harder problems. And I like to do tsumego fast personally and Im do them fast because of article I read about studying, a pro's idea of doing alot of easy problems vs a few hard ones so that it starts to become second nature. And when I do a problem if I get it wrong Ill move on to the next come back to it another time and try again later. What I do most of the time now is open a book drop a coin do the problem it lands on so alot of the answers are memory or instinct. I like goproblems.com for the reason that it is random but it does not have as much as the books I have do. But im dropping most tsumego for now as I have already done so much so 30 mins or 25 harder problems instead of the easy ones that I can do off the top of my head. I want to get my hands on the korean academy go problems I hear thats worth getting.

I play slow games as it is, I play 1 blitz probably out of every 30 games I play. Ill spend at least 30secs on a move even when I know where I want to go just to give it some thought over. I do the 30min main and 1 min byoyomi time currently which I think is fast I like to do a slower 1hr main and 1min byoyomi after that but alot of people online dont care for this probably because they dont have the time for it which I can understand.

Reading a book a week is actually quite slow in my opinion and for me and thats playing out all diagrams in the book also. For the books I have, I have read them each about 4-5 times each and each time I pick up something new mostly from Sakata Eio's.

I understand quite a bit about Pro games past 50-60 moves, I usually just go from move 1 to end look at the situation then say ok black or white should play here on next move then go to the next move to see if I was right. If I was wrong go through a few variations, ponder why and why not ect ect I tend to learn more this way than anything else currently.

As for Josekis Ill work with them so I know how to deal with them appropriatly, im my games I used to play the 3-5 in all corners to purposely let my opponent in and starting a long fight that merges across the board. When entering my opponents corner mostly it being a 3-4 I would do a simple enter at the 3-5 or 4-5 and try to extend out choosing that move over more of a fighting style in an area im weak. Probably not the smartest method compared to going in and learning what not to do next time, but after I get to know the joseki I am good at using it well even if it is facing the wrong direction. This is probably where I need to spend more time in my games and read out the joseki and see how it faces the board and see if another one has a better out come.

_________________
Only a child can ask questions that the wise can not answer.

well it is my opinion



if you read many times each book then you haven't pay attention to it

if you are seriously solving 300 tsumego in a day youre doing something wrong. when i studied tsumego my teacher then said that you should do 20 easy and 5 hard ones a day, any more is not really helpfull, you should rather play 1 serious game + review that on your own.

so my advice is to do a few 1d+ tsumego or tsumego you can't find the answer in half an hour. This will improve your reading ability much more then doing 300 easy ones.

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

FWIW, I have found the opposite to be true

How many problems do you have to draw your daily problems from? If the number isn't exceeding some thousand you likely memorized them. There is nothing wrong with it, but that isn't exactly a reading exercise anymore.

You should give playing serious games and reviewing them a higher priority. (You can solve more than 100 whole board problems in one game!)

And most important of all, you should be honest to yourself. You may have played 20 games a day with 30 minutes maintime each, but likely both you and your opponent finished without spending more then 10 minutes each. Otherwise, I don't see how you get any sleep or meals fit in your go studying schedule.

Wow. Another one.

These questions aren't just directed to you, but in general to anyone who has a plan to allocate most of one's waking life on go:

I'm wondering: how long you plan to stick with this program and how it is possible for you to do so? What is your source of free time? Are you retired? A student on vacation? In prison? Homeless?

I can understand why an insei---who hopes to become a professional and is in a place that can facilite that---could do this. It's hard for me to imagine an ordinary amateur considering it, when there are so many other interesting things in life.

Lets see if I can answer a few questions.

@Kaliwan
I know what advice your trying to give me, I feel as though I have gotten what I can out of the books untill I possibly get stronger. Some games I'll recite the fundamentals everymove I play and see if it acheives a fundamental. But it is usually after 30 moves or so the corners have all been played in and a few stones stretch along the walls where I have sente or a opening to play somewhere worth while where the fundementals can be vague usually a case of keeping ahead that I flounder it letting my opponent take sente for the bigger plays and this is usually where I lose out at especially if they keep sente.


@stalkor
Everyone has a different method that works for them I know a few people that do lots of easy problems quickly and it works for them so its a method that I tried out, since that is not helping me im dropping it to a few harder questions then a mass of easy ones.

@tapir @snorri- even though its not directed at me.
Your right even though ill spend more time on a game dosent mean my opponent does, some times we both spend little time each usually in which case I am winning from a big capture or something and that its an obvious lose for my opponent at which case then I will play faster, sometimes when my opponent plays quickly it reflects a bit and I will start playing faster But I enjoy longer games.
Playing the 20 games a day was when I was in school and the work all being on the computer I would play games at the same time as I did my work, the teacher did not mind as long as I kept my grades up but some of those were played simultaneously. And when I said 4-5 days a week it was usually just 4 days. Even now I could do around 10 or more games a day for 4 days a week if I wanted to, I am self employed as a photographer, and video post production assistant which I dont get alot of work currently aside from a wedding her or there or a commercial from time to time and network support. Most of my work currently is doing computer repair so when it comes time to let the program do its thing for its 20 mins or so I'll play go and its not that hard to do something with the computer at the same time I play either. But most of the time I will not do anything as I play a game so that it doesnt interfere usually if I do something, its cooking. Im not a shut-in or anything I go out and do auditions for theater and movies on the weekends go to the movies time to time, the bar the beach, taking 3 language classes japanese, french, gaelic and I still have alot of time that I have nothing to do. I am probably just good at managing my time when I think about it. Im 22 just got out of vocational school a year ago after taking 2 classes thinking about college now and I think im a normal average person.

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Only a child can ask questions that the wise can not answer.

Well, then just one more advice: Don't multitask!

It is great for routine work, but as study time it is wasted immho.

Re: problem difficulty:

Easy problems (by which I mean those problems you get 75% correct or better. It therefore varies by level) are good at reinforcing basic ideas and honing intuition. But they aren't good at training reading skill, and they obviously aren't introducing new ideas to you.

Medium problems (by which I mean 75% to 50%) are good at practicing reading. You should be able to read out all the variations, confirm that the right answer is right, and be surprised by an unforeseen refutation only occasionally. They are, however, rather exhausting. I can't do more than maybe 5 medium problems in a single sitting before I go stir crazy.

Hard problems (by which I mean 35% - 50%) are good for introducing new ideas. You shouldn't spend too much time trying to read them out. Just stare at them, get an idea for what you'd do in an actual game, then look at the answer and see if there's some clever tesuji or something. A lot of these problems look impossible, so seeing a solution that works can be interesting and maybe reinforce some loosely understood tesuji.

Impossible problems (less than 35%) are useless and frustrating

As far as a daily routine, I actually work through problems by rank. So I have 1500 30k-1k problems. I start at 30k and work up to 1k. Then I start over. It takes me about 3 months to do that, I think. I'm not sure if that's optimal, though. A better idea might be to figure out how many medium problems you can stand to do in a sitting, and then subtract maybe 3-4 from that, and add maybe 20 easy problems and 1 hard problem. I like the idea of doing more easy problems, but you really do need to stretch your reading if you want to get better, and medium problems are the way to do that.

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1k KGS