There are many ways to improve at go, the most often recommended being tsumego, but there are tons of books written on go that aren't just problem books, and I'd like to talk about how to learn from them.

I read a fair amount of go books, but I don't often do what I would call "studying." Studying would imply making a conscious attempt to learn how and when to apply a certain technique with the intention to remember it well enough to actually do so in a game.

What happens with me is that I read about some technique and think "oh, that's interesting," but don't make enough effort to imprint it on my memory.

My "method" has been to assume that with added experience and increasing reading skill due to tsumego and my visualization practice, I would get better at recognizing situations and remembering what some book said to do. Well, "better" is relative, and in my case it feels relatively lousy. It seems to me that if I am to continue to improve that I will have to put in as I believe Mivo once said "effortful effort"

What I would like to hear from you is how and what you study, what you do to retain what you've learned, and how well it works. In general, I'm more interested in what you actually do than in what you think is best.

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Patience, grasshopper.

What you are describing is my exact experience.

I have, in the year I've been playing, read a ton of books, and seen a lot of concepts, and I was making the assumption without knowing it that I would just be able to recognize the concepts in the wild when I saw them and just do the right move, which turns out to have been totally wrong.

So when I get some instruction, the player helping me says "so here we have a blah blah blah, which is a fundamental concept..." and I say "oh, yes, I know blah blah blah", and go on to explain what it is and how it applies in this situation etc. and the person helping me is just looking at me like "well, why didn't you just play it on the board here instead of this stupid move that you played instead?"

And the answer is, of course, that familiarity with the concept is only the starting point to being able to use it.

So what I'm doing is going back to beginner-ish, fundamental stuff (GGBP 2 and the like), and doing a kind of spaced repetition on it where I review it about 4 times over the course of 2 weeks or so, and I have found that it has helped a lot with making that stuff more automatic, although it is somewhat depressing because I have this whole shelf of more advanced concepts that I need to set aside until I have these more basic things mastered.

The more advanced stuff I've read and enjoyed has given me this illusion of a mastery that I don't actually possess and I'm having to go back in this way and fill the gaps.

What I have to say won't be of interest to 99% of this forum but some other beginner might find it interesting:

I read and reread books, posts on here or websites etc. (Books are interesting for their own sake for me) I also watch lectures aimed at 30-20k players because I know I haven't picked up the basics right, my rank is an illusion. Try to apply knowledge from one, screw up and then go back and read the section again. I sit down and do tsumego most every day, but I enjoy logic puzzles so this is a hobby in and of itself for me. I mess around with joseki websites, mostly to learn what's good shape/good extensions etc. Mostly I just immerse myself in whatever I find interesting about go at the moment and take some ideas into my next game with me. I could just play lots of games but that'd be far less interesting!

But yes, reading a book isn't enough to get the knowledge into your head unless you a rare and lucky individual. Most of us have to learn by doing and repetition.

I do mainly Tsumegos at the moment because I'm very bad at Life-and-Death and can't even get right common corner shapes. For a couple of weeks I made the effort to sit down one hour and only solve Tsumegos (now other things come up and I'm back to my "doing-it-in-the-meantime"-solving). The amount of problems was not important, I just wanted to train me to stay focussed for that long because this focus troubles me sometimes in tournament games. I also experienced that I'm getting sloppy and click-happy, when I solve a lot of easy problems very fast. Since I know a lot of the most common shapes I'm very confident to hit the right spot and don't bother checking every alternative. It works with the easy problems, but because of that I do get click-happy in my games where situations are not that easy.

So, primarily Tsumegos and focus training.

Second comes replaying and memorizing professional games. I'm actually very much opposed to this "training" because I can't say what the real benefit is, but people around me keep telling me it is a good way to become stronger so who am I to not give it a shot?
Memorizing is actually not very important but I was curious how many different games I could remember (see memorizing 100 games as told by the late Hans Pietsch or with reference to him by Antti Törmänen).
I started with "The 1971 Honinbo Tournament", replayed the game, read the comments and looked at all variations. The book has 14 games and I actually was confident that I could manage to memorize them (approx. to move 150 to cut out the endgame). Well, well, it get very confusiong after the fifth or so game. Mosty I know how the board looked like at the end of the game but the opening stage is really troublesome. My only anchor are Josekis (no matter if known or unknown to me) since it's easier for me to remember those moves - somehow. Middlegame is no problem as well, when they are not playing some seemingly random Kikashis ^^
At the moment I'm at game eight but I completely forgot game seven already and I don't get the eighth game right, so... I need more time to keep this games in mind then learning new ones ^^

Third comes reading books about theory, which I did not start just yet. Mainly I want to read "Positional Judgement" and "The Endgame".

Some will notice that there's no point about playing games and yes, I don't at the moment (except for teaching games). I need to change that. At the moment I, too, ponder if I should join some of the new leagues to get the most out of each game.

As for reading about a concept and not applying it: I think it is not possible to grasp everything, which is included in a concept, the first time you read about it. You read about it, you should play a couple of games and review the lost ones. If certain situations look similiar to the ones you just read about, check if you could apply the concept. After some more games, I'd advice to re-read the book completely. A lot will be familiar now but there might be small fractures of knowledge which slipped the first time. Then again comes the playing and reviewing circle. After the third re-read you should be confident with the matter. If not, stay in the circle.

A lot of Dan-players are saying that until Shodan everything there is to learn are concepts/fundamentals. And as closer as I get to this rank, the more I believe it. I played a lot of Shodans on KGS already and most games I won because these players severely lack some concepts about thickness, influence, sacrificing, playing light and so on but fight to the last all over the place. These are the players who achieved this rank by brute force, respectively they just outfought their opponents.
I'm wondering if I shoud not make the effort to re-read every book, I found useful until know and look for the bits of Go wisdom I missed until now. Maybe this would be a faster way to Shodan than keep reading new books or just doing Tsumegos. (But Tsumegos are fun ^^)

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

Due to mental exhaustion I have reduced my activities to almost nothing (e.g. cancelled playing in the ASR league). The remaining activities can be summarized in five items, and I do them just for fun with no real hope of substantial improvement:

1) Play real-life tournament games (5 serious games on long time controls, 5-6 tournaments per year), forcing myself to use all the available time and read out everything that I can. This is probably the main source of improvement.

2) Playing about half a dozen turn based games on Brettspielnetz, the yearly championship. 5 to 20 moves per day. However I plan to stop playing there after the championship has finished (except for playing teaching games with beginners).

3) Watch games (and try to read out the position, especially at slow time controls):
a) IGS Pandanet European team championship (4 parellel games; slow)
b) KGS: irregularly watching high-dan games on the top of the active games list (fast), or random games of the German Bundesliga (3-4 parallel games; slow), or games of friends around my strength (usually fast). Around 10-20 games per month.
c) Kaya: Handi games: Watch the dans eliminating the kyus (fast)

4) Review weaker players' games or play teaching games (irregularly, maybe one or two per week on average).

5) Reading go books or doing tsumego on Sunday morning, around 1 hour (currently RJ's Joseki vol 2, and GGPB vol. 4, usually 5-10 problems per week).

Doing almost nothing this way got me from 6-7k to 4k in the last five months.

Right now I'm studying Life & Death. I'm working through 1001 L&D problems (the 5 move problems have slowed me down a lot as has life in general), but I'm not going to open another Go book until I've finished. It seems obvious but up to recently I didn't manage to commit to one book or subject properly like this. I've got loads of Go books (100+) and the temptation was to swap books all the time and never really knuckle down, read and re-read (and stop reading when tired) until it sank in.

p.s. moving house and having most of my books in storage helped develop focus for me.

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I am John. John-I-Am.

I'm watching videos/do tsumego/read books in different "amount" + always play games. Recently I was more stressed about life and my rank ( ) so I'm playing less games but as I think it is the most important part of improving, I am trying to play at least those two games a day...

I think that doing "tons" of tsumego is an "easy" and "sure" way of improving. It wont happen over a day, but if a person solves 30 problems a day in a proper manner, not improving would be a surprise for me.

Too bad watching lectures and reading go books is more enjoyable than tsumego for me

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Formerly Gorim

I have read several theory books (a lot, maybe) but in the end you only grab the concepts when you find them. Currently I'm doing tesuji and tsumego problems, and when I'm done, I'll grab endgame problems. No more theory: with the reviews & lessons in the Nordic Go Academy, the occasional review in the Advanced Study Room and the few classes I'm taking with Lluís Oh 6d here in Barcelona I think I can fill a lot of theory gaps, in a far more effective way than re-reading a theory book.

I plan on having some daily-each 2 days look at pro games, but I still have to think how, why and where. Maybe I'll write a script to grab the most recent game from igokisen and get it mailed to me each day... Or just step through each Lee Ch'ang-Ho (or Xie He, for some reason Lluís looks fond of him) game and step through them.

And I have a theory book I want to read soon sitting around home: Go Seigen's A way of play for the 21st century. But I need to follow through a board and I'm not having that much time lately.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

It's also more enjoyable for me... But after some intensive tsumego-tesuji training for 3 weeks, I found I was not only feeling "stronger", but also spotting interesting tesuji in the wild. Then I was a convert, and now I do "hard" (more than 5 moves) tesuji/tsumego each day in addition to occasional quick passes of simpler problems (1-7 moves). It's like weightlifting

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

I think that it's generally clear that one way of improving is doing tsumego, which most of us do. There are different ways of approaching tsumego, and what I suspect most of us do - trying our best to figure out the answer to a problem and then go on to the next, is not what I mean by studying. Basically the above idea is to exercise our reading and our ability to find tesujis and vital points. It's strength building by exercise.

Another way of doing tsumego, one that James Davies Life and Death points to, is to study particular shapes with the intent of learning their ins and outs, so that when one occurs in our own game we will recognize the situation, remember its important aspects, and not need to spend so much mental energy reading out the 400 variations. This requires a different approach than just doing problems. Here, we are trying to learn something specific with the intent to remember it.

Another area where this has relevance is joseki. Without rehashing the pluses and minuses of memorizing joseki, the fact is that many strong players "know" tons of josekis. Yilun Yang says that it's really not much to learn - an amateur only needs to know about 300. So, how to go about it? Have any of you done it? Did you learn from a joseki dictionary? From replaying pro games? From Daily Joseki? For my part, I bought Naiwei Rui's Essential Joseki (which I'm hoping has the 300 Yang was referring to ), and it seems that the best way to benefit from such a book is to study the josekis with the intent to remember them.

This also seems true of many other aspects of go, where it is valuable to have certain shapes imprinted on one's memory. The idea here is to increase one's skill by increasing one's knowledge, and in order to do so, one must remember what one has learned. I suppose that some people remember a technique after having seen twoeye do it, and others remember one because they read about it before falling asleep. For me, these methods are enough to remind me that a concept exists, but aren't sufficient to allow me to remember it well enough to apply it.

I suspect that I'm not alone, and that others before me have combated the problem by "studying." There are many ways of going about it besides leaving a pile of books next to the toilet: Laying out positions on a board, using flashcards, using software, recreating positions from memory etc. What have you done, and do you think you've had success with your method?

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Patience, grasshopper.

I never really studied Joseki. I looked up some variations when I encountered them in my games or when I was reviewing a game for a friend, but I forgot them again very quickly if they did not come up frequently.
These days, when I am confronted with an unknown Joseki (-variation), I try to figure out the best move on my own (not everytime successfully of course) due to some fundamental concepts like not be enclosed but enclose the opponent, divide and conquer, making good shape for me and bad for my opponent, choosing territory or influence according to the surrounding positions and so on. I think this approach can teach me a lot more than just following moves by heart (from which my opponent can derivate everytime, leading me again to the approach mentioned above) and since I fail "once in a while", I can always review those games and make myself aquainted with the real Joseki (figuring out why the Joseki move has more benefits).

With regard to your comment about studying particular shapes as something different than solving Tsumegos, I think that is not entirely right. A lot of Tsumegos (and even more Tesuji problems) can be solved by certain techniques which again work together with certain shapes. So you study the shape as a byproduct, maybe even subconsciously.
I'm experiencing a very hard time when trying to find a vital point I have never seen before. Maybe this is pure lazyness because when I solve Tsumegos or Tesuji problems I don't spend all day trying to find an answer but trying two to three times and then moving on by looking at the solution. Personally I find this efficient because I will most likely remember this vital point afterwards. I might not have trained my visualization or reading skills to the maximum but at least there is a high probability I now know where to look for the right move in this particular shape. It's like you said, I increased my knowledge.

Thus I still would say, one should primarily solve/make oneself familiar with a lot of Tesuji problems as presented in Tesuji, Get Strong at Tesuji, Yi Ch'ang-Ho Selected Tesuji Problems, Dictionary of Basic Tesuji and Seigen/Segeo Tesuji Dictionary.

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

Great question, I wish I had enough experience to answer it properly. I think many need to learn by doing, so you need to play out sequences either on a real board or a virtual one will help a lot of people. I was never strong at chess, but I found playing out games on a real board really helped get the sequences into memory better than just playing out the game in my head. Practicing playing out joseki from memory is good, be it virtually or physically to reinforce the patterns and shapes involved. Of course you're probably best off doing both and playing it out mentally as best you can, and then playing it out on a board.

Good that you remind me of learning tesuji. Long time ago I had planned to go through "501 Tesuji Problems" before the EGC starts (*just putting away the other books*). There are 97 days left, so I have to do 5-6 tesuji per day on average. When I had my first tesuji/tsumego studying phase three years ago, I did a lot more (15 to 20), but nowadays 5-6 seems a tough program. And that's why:


I tried this approach in my first tsumego/tesuji phase. My idea was to learn the shapes by heart in order to be able to easily apply them in games. I failed. But I have a clue why I failed. A few months ago when I was playing around at goproblems.com I got a 6k-tesuji and in spite of trying to solve for 15 minutes, I could not find the solution. When I looked at the solution, I had one of the few light bulb moments that changed my way of doing tsumego. I noticed that I lack knowledge of very basic patterns (the "ins and outs"), a huge amount of basic patterns. Knowledge of them is a prerequisite to reasonably solve tsumego/tesuji problems. And you have to do the right tsumego/tesuji problems, i.e. you must have internalized all the basic patterns that the problem consists of. If you encounter patterns that you cannot evaluate immediately (such as "oh the solution tells me that these two points are miai, but actually I cannot see immediatly why one of the alternatives produces a dead shape"), then this problem is too difficult. That's why I have restarted with easier tsumego/tesuji, disassemble them into their basic patterns, categorize them and write them down into documentation that is intended to be used by beginners very much later (it has already grown to about 30 pages so far). It is obvious that this takes a lot of time. However for the time being I will suspend the writing of the documentation in order to be able to get through the complete set of the 501 tesuji problems before EGC, however my focus will still be to learn the very basic patterns and then to learn the typical of the tesuji. And after the EGC I will continue to write the documentation.

Uh, that is a difficult matter. I hate joseki so much that I don't learn them actively. However there are two things that I do about joseki: When I messed up joseki in tournament games (which happens regularly) I look them up when I am back home. That way I learn 2-3 joseki per tournament. Besides I use "Daily Joseki" in turn based games against stronger players. A few months back I tried to create an SGF with important joseki variations that would allow me to know 99% of the moves and to actively know 80% of the moves. But I always got messed up with tenukis, so I gave up on that.

I think this is exactly what I have described above: You cannot remember it well enough, because you already haven't internalized well enough the components of a problem, concept etc. You have to go one step back, look at the situation and learn the basics well enough before you can come back to the original problem/concept. Doing a few problems this way is probably better than doing loads of tsumego that are inappropriate, because they require knowledge that you haven't internalized yet. I have wasted a lot of time by doing inappropriate tsumego.

Karaklis,

Your idea of disassembling tsumegos and categorizing them for beginners sounds excellent, and is a great example of what I mean by "studying." Trying to discover the elements of a tsumego and presenting them in their simplest form sounds like a great way of recognizing and internalizing these fundamental principles for yourself. It reminds me of Richard Hunter's Cross Cut Workshop, in which he shows the basic patterns underlying the response to a cross-cut, and discusses which pattern is more or less appropriate in which situation. Writing or of preparing such material is probably of much greater value than just reading someone else's thoughts. On the other hand, it's significantly more difficult than remembering what someone else has congealed and prepared for presentation. Which is also why I brought up the subject of joseki. Whether memorizing is good or bad, it's a study technique that I know how to do.

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Patience, grasshopper.