Life In 19x19

I am sure that virtually everyone on this board would be interested in translations of current Chinese go materials (Weiqi Tiandi?) You might even be able to find people here who are willing to help with editing the translations.

However, do you have the consent of the publisher? Even if your ...

This is a great question. There are many ways to get started, but here are some things I think about.

1. Look for obvious blunders that you (or your opponent) made during the game.

2. Were there any life-and-death problems during the game that you had trouble analyzing? Any capturing races? Any ...

I actually find the "date format debate" to be perversely entertaining.

I really want to be a Gu Li fan, but I always worry that I'm going to go into cardiac arrest when I watch his games. And I have low-normal blood pressure.

Na Hyun has an interesting solid style. Reminds me of Kong Jie for some ...

What an interesting position!

Thanks, guys, for playing this game.

My eye keeps coming back to a point like this:

$$Bcm11 Prisoners ...

Okay, I just did an experiment and sacrificed two white stones to the cause of science.

Both the marble stone and the Yunzi break by chipping when dropped a few times on concrete from a height of about five feet. The marble maybe chips slightly more easily.

The Yunzi is actually harder in the ...

I own both.

Marble is a lot stronger than the Yunzi material (which is a little bit brittle.) Yunzi do break from time to time.

As for hardness, I've never actually tried to test this. Marble stones have a kind of polish/coating on them (bare marble is porous) so you're really looking at the ...

$$c
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . 1 . . . |
$$ | . . b ...

As to balance, overall, the middle-game portion gets 178 pages, compared to just 115 for josekis. I may have lost touch with the English literature but I suspect that, if anything, the ratio might be reversed here, and if you strip out the problem type format which tend to characterise many of our ...

I'll interrupt this thread with the not entirely logical assertion that I think Gu Li will win against Na Hyun in the next round.

Na is playing very impressively, but Gu looks to be in top form with a decisive win against Kim Jiseok.

I'm hoping for fireworks in the semifinals.

I remember reading in another of John F.'s books about how Go Seigen and one of his match opponents (Kitani, perhaps?) would sometimes consider extremely different variations in analyzing a position but nevertheless come to the same conclusion as to which move was the best.

If you pose the question ...

There are a bunch of reasons.

The typical chess database includes master-level games, not just GM games. If you count only pro-level chess games (GM and strong IM) the number of games drops dramatically. For example, http://chesstempo.com has a free database with 2 million games, but if you ...

When we refer to calculation/reading in go, there are actually several different kinds of mental processes involved. Some of them include:

1) Brute force visualization (we've all done this)
2) Intuition
3) Logic
4) "Technique"/"Knowing the answer beforehand"

At any given time I think most people ...

In the second game, at move 93, Black to move can save his stones. Think about it for a minute.

Just a few comments.

10: This is slow but playable, as is the kick at R15. I probably would have pincered at R12 (to force White into the corner and take influence on the outside.)

12: I would already be thinking about helping Q6 by playing at R9, attacking White's two stones while making a base ...

Basically, I agree with the general idea that if you enjoy doing this kind of visualization practice, it can't hurt. There's one exercise you can try if you encounter a problem that you can't read out completely because the mental image of the stones "gets fuzzy" after a few moves. Suppose the the ...