I am currently playing a turn-based game, and I recently played a move that made me wake up in the middle of the night to think about how awful it was and why.

Now I did have a reason to play it, but it soon became apparent, that that reason should have been subordinated beneath all of the reasons not to play it. Basically, my move had the merit of shouting: "How DARE you tenuki when your stone is already at a disadvantage!", but also had the drawbacks of touching a weak stone that I wanted to attack, neglecting to play a big point when nothing was urgent, and allowing my opponent to take an advantage on another part of the board. Basically, I played a weird move, and what made it weird was that it ignored what I would have to call fundamental principles. These are things that you should or shouldn't do in certain situations.

The difficulty I think is not whether the fundamental exist, but rather whether one can correctly recognize and analyze the situation at hand. Had I judged it better, I would perhaps not have played a "good" move, but I might not have played one that was contrary to fundamentals.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Pretty often. It is also what I do in teaching when possible. Many mistakes can be cured by very simple explanations. Explanations the pupil did not think of at all and is astonished: "How could I overlook something so simple and why does it feel like an entirely new view?" Typical example: Choose the biggest space! This is so simple, but also so often neglected...



Precisely.

While (high) dan read a lot more to verify things (Is this good looking shape really connected?) by reading, at the same time they also prune reading (Moving in that direction is bad, so I do not need to read whether a good shape move there is connected.). So I would not say they read everything out. Rather they do verify by reading what needs to be verified by reading.

I see this post was liked by Bill Spight. Must we conclude that Bill has some griefs against Kageyama's book ? Since I like both (Kage's book and Bill ), I'd like him to explain.

Thanks for all the replies.

To be honest I was expecting more answers of the kind "what a silly thing to say that fundamentals don't exist, how dare you you silly guy, ..." But most people tried to understand what I was aiming at, for which I am extra thankful

My conclusion:

First, my initial interpretation of the term was "a (probably huge) set of well defined simple rules that boosts your strength when internalized (i.e. not just learned but overlearned)".

What I was saying was that such a set of rules does not exist, or if it existed it would be so unreasonably large that it would be practically useless.

However, reading the thread I guess that my interpretation of the term is not shared by most people. It is more interpreted like "don't go on to chapter 2, first re-read chapter 1 over and over again" or "prioritize solving easy problems over difficult ones"

That is at least my impression from the posts, which will be useful when I find the time to reread Kageyama again.

Thanks

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If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

At the risk of repeating myself, I think that such a set of simple or reasonably simple rules exist (and for a good part but with topic restrictions is in my books) for great parts of the fundamentals but mostly do not exist yet for some parts of the fundamentals (like life and death problem solving) and for the necessity to read (ahead moves and variations) or count (intersections when assessing positional judgements). The ability to count does not require a rule but elementary school practice. The ability to read at all is also not (sufficiently) learned by learning rules. Rules can "only" prune the reading amount. For life and death, rules are still very weak.

http://tchan001.wordpress.com/2011/06/0 ... lculation/
Let's see what Cho Chikun has to say about what is important

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

To me, it sounds like the original poster read the foreword/intro/back-cover of Kageyama's book, saw enough sentences with "study fundamentals", and abandoned the book without reading any actual content.

Wow, that sounds obnoxious! He wrote that he's re-reading it. Did you actually read his post, or just a few sentences?

For those of you who have also read it, please see my poll.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Thanks for translating that tchan001.

[/quote]

No, I read it. I would not write any comments about any book without reading it.

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If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

I will have a look at your books Robert. If they present such simple and useful rules (which of course cannot replace reading but help tree pruning as you say) I will happily recommend them here

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If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

The things is, I am not saying or claiming he/she/they didn't read the book. Somebody said his problem is that he is reading Kageyama. I think, on the contrary, the problem is arising from not reading Kageyama. I don't mean not putting your eyes on the text, but maybe not grasping the point of the book. Because the book is full of examples of very useful fundamental ideas, quite opposite of what I would call non-existent or useless.

I am a proponent of Kageyama's Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go, so I will weigh in. Just a little redundantly (My hat off to most of the last three pages).

His "fundamentals" are go-to answers for common conundrums. I'm not sure if you are agreeing with him that this is what "fundamentals" should mean. I think this thread has been a little sidetracked by speculation on what could possibly be meant by that word.

Some examples I recall:
A situation with a ladder, it is specified that the ladder does not work for you (enraged me the first time I puzzled over it). His answer was "ladder block, of course!" Rather than try to come up with something fancy. You got peeped? Connect it. Rather than trying to come up with something fancy. You couldn't connect a peep, and the opponent pushed in? Still play the block, even though your opponent will get to cut one side. Don't start trying to invent something new. How to tell the best net, even when more than one net works.

(NB he emphasizes surety by calculation (ie. Be sure you can read the ladder. You can read the ladder.).)

My post really just becoming longer:
When I jump at the end of my 4-4 point, low approach, one space low pincer, 3-3 invasion joseki, I am avoiding pushing from behind. Fundamentals! When I am watching two 7ds duke it out at the top of the active games tab on KGS, and I am having trouble seeing how white will resolve a corner fight- and suddenly, he skilfully forces black to push from behind to live. My fingers tear over the kibitz: "White's thickness is superior!" Same fundamental.

Really, probably too long:
Note the format of his book. Present and illustrate a common situation, featuring a kyu or low dan mistake followed by a common (so far as pros are concerned) correct answer. A series of progressively trickier problems where that technique - or the threat of that technique - leads to success.

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Revisiting Go - Study Journal
My Programming Blog - About the evolution of my go bot.

I do not call them rules there but principles, definitions, methods, values. Most are very simple via simple to reasonably easy. There is some problem with their number: hundreds of guidelines. This means that different rules cannot always be applied without conflicts. I offer some suggestions and methods about analysing then - like suggesting to do a positional judgement if simpler rules do not provide an unequivocal answer. Of course, the fundamentals alone are not the Stein der Weisen and it is, in principle, always possible that a position requires more advanced understanding than what fundamentals alone can offer. Rather my books provide a high probability of greatly helping with answering a positional problem whenever it can be solved already on the levels of fundamentals.

As I was reviewing this game, I realized that I had made (in addition to many modest mistakes) a huge mistake at move 277:

[deleted]
(A17 kills)

Now, as you can see one reason I made this miserable blunder was that I only thought for three seconds about the move, when it was worth using up my entire remaining time to make sure I got it right.

This got me thinking about this conversation. Why on earth did I not only make "5 in the corner", but make it instinctively? It's a combination of (i) confusing {fill using nakade shape, leaving one extra space} with {fill with nakade+1 shape, leaving one extra space}, and (ii) doing a batch of tsumego at one point which involved 5 in the corner in a shortage-of-liberties situation, or something like that.

So where does this leave fundamentals? What are fundamentals? You could say that one fundamental is knowing nakade so well that it's like breathing; but then if a wrong shape has wormed it's way into your subconscious, you (I, hehe) make mistakes that you could have avoided with reading if you were simply unsure what to do. But if we reverse it and say no, reading things out is the fundamental, then what is there to "fundamentals" other than sheer mental brawn?

@jts

Speaking for Kageyama, you didn't check the fundamental technique of reducing eyespace in L&D, instead you tried an inside move.

Your opponent made the same mistake the previous move, trying some kind of inside play rather than increasing his eyespace, preserving life (through seki edit: durr not seki).

(Edit: NB just commenting on 276 and 77)

Further verbosity in the name of helpfulness:

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Revisiting Go - Study Journal
My Programming Blog - About the evolution of my go bot.

Thanks, Loons. That's really helpful.

(And I can't believe that I didn't see that after the hane, white's left with an L-group! That's two chances I had to reduce the eyespace.)