Hi all,

I am bit puzzled by an explanation given by Nakayama Noriyuki in the "Treasure Chest Enigma". He writes:
Tradition has it that a go player plays with his teacher only twice in his lifetime. Once is when he is formally adopted as a disciple; the other is when he becomes a professional shodan. In some cases there is another occasion, the meaning of which is is supposedly to say to the pupil: "There is no hope of your becoming a professional. It's time for you to go home. This game is to be your farewell present."

I think I really don't get this. How do teach without playing. Or is there a difference between "teaching games" and "serious games". Or do the inseis play each other and the teacher will only do reviews?. Can anyone shed some light on this?

I think this applies more to the stable/dojo system than the current insei system. If you look at statements by people who went through the Kitani dojo, they often say that they practically never played him. I think they played each other primarily, and he might look in and comment occasionally, but the school was mostly run by his wife.

Yes. Most of the work is done by the students themselves --
they play each other; they review their own games; they study.
Occasionally, if they're lucky, they'll get a review from a teacher.

The teacher is there to open a door here and there for the student --
it is the student who still has to go through the door and do most of the work by themselves.

(This is true not only for Go inseis, not only for Go amateurs, but basically for all students, in any field.)

Here is a quote from John Fairbairn's Name Dictionary entry for Iyama Yuta:

"He eventually became a pupil of Ishii Kunio. Since Ishii lived rather far away for regular commuting, they hooked up via modems and played each other remotely. Ishii said they played over 1,000 games that way."

It appears that different teachers have different ways of teaching their pupils.

Best wishes.

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That's an interesting factoid --
of course, every teacher and student situation is unique,
but Iyama still had (and continues to have) to do most of the work himself.

This discussion has come up a few times in different forms on L19. What I've gathered is this -- instead of thinking of the teacher as a teacher - it might be better to think of them like a trainer, much like a boxer might have. The teacher might prescribe exercises the student to work and or a workout path for them to follow. Similarly a boxer will have a trainer making sure they are performing the correct exercises to maximize their potential (working on footwork, hand speed, etc), but in either case the vast majority of the work is done by the person receiving the training. At the end of the day, a boxer might never step into the ring with his/her trainer in a boxing match.

It is clear that whatever one learns, one has to learn oneself. But I think there is quite a difference between doing most of the studying onself and a tradition that seems to say that you essentially never play against your teacher.

I was also a bit puzzled, because Kageyama gives a lengthy analysis of a game he played against a student in "Lessons in the fundamentals of go", and there it was quite clear that they regularly played against each other.

On a side note: There is always the question what implicitly is the aim of the teaching. Because no matter how bad the teching is, If you have a large enough pool of students, the brightest ones will work it our for themselves (Or at least the ones that good autodidacts). So I see how that system can work (essentially without teaching) in professional Go, where you have a large number of inseis that compete for an incredibly small number of professonal ranks. My understanding of good teaching would be different one, though...

I understand the analogy, but I think there are some important differences, too. E.g. in boxing the coach would be typically an older guy who is past his active time. Usually the coach would not stand a chance in the ring against his student. The situation in Go would be exactly the opposite.

Also, often times in professional sports the real good and sucessful coaches were not the top contestants themselves. They are good coaches exactly because they are good in coaching, which requires a quite different set of skills. In Go, however, (at least in the older times that are descibed in the book), it seems that being a great player seems to be the qualification to be considered a good teacher.

I think that this was an amateur paying for lessons, as this is a fairly common way for pros to support themselves, rather than a student being trained to become a pro. You'll note that Kageyama mentions being worried that he would lose the student, which to me implies a loss of income, and that Kageyama was never a top competing pro. Golf instructors are pros too, and PGA members, even though they don't compete at a high level, after all.

Beides the example of Iyama there have been many pros who played often with their teachers. Takemiya, for example, was a pupil of Tanaka Minaichi before joining the Kitani dojo and worked his way through many handicap games. I think the idea behind teachers not playing often with their students does not imply that the students had no contact with their teachers. The teachers reviewed games the students played with other students or in tournaments. The best way to learn is to play with others who also are striving to reach the top. The professional go world is extremely competitive. One of the benefits of fighting your way through many games with fellow students is learning how to compete. The present insei system in Japan, at least, involves playing your way through the lower insei classes until you can play in the pro qualification tournament. There are many pro study groups, usually with a highly ranked pro as supervisor who critiques games played by other members of the study group or from tournamentnts but doesn't play with the students except as a special challenge or encouragement. Things of this sort can be seen in Hikaru no Go in Morishita's study group.

Hi,

my first guess is, that you guys take this quote literally. In my opinion it may translate in something like "only in those particular games I value your worth".
Judging from what other people wrote, there are some pros who play regularly with their students, but the only games, which really matters, are the first and the last game between teacher and student.
Well, maybe I'm completely wrong, but that's my first suggestion to the question

I'd go further and say just ignore Nakayama's statement. It sounds nice in a story but has no particular relationship to the real world.

_________________
Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21