I though the lee chang ho series i had was Life and death, but it was tesuji.

this is funny because i ALWAYS know the first move usually to L&D but have a hard time with the variations. And now i know why.

Tesuji reallllly helps finding the first move or the vital point fast. Now to work on life and death!

Yeah I find that with a lot of tesuji practice, like with joseki, I can already visualize the result without having to read 10 or 20 moves ahead and that helps cut out needless reading time, giving me more time to calculate.

By the way, if you don't mind me asking, where did you find the Tesuji set? YMI has been sold out of it

I dont know its a couple years old . Its just funny because i can solve problems with a glance that i cant actually read out.

But thinking about it this book really helps.

I did like 6 hours of it while bored and in the car and etc. like 2 years ago. Visible improvement.


Then i did like 3 hours of it a couple months ago and every little bit i get better from it stays forever :O.

If you can't read out the variations, how do you know you've really solved it? (= <Note: As always there is an xkcd for this instance>


If you mean you are consistently getting the first move correct, that is a good thing, though I would say that's not quite the same as solving it. Many tsumego problems have easily deducible first moves out of necessity (e.g. If black plays anywhere other than 'A' a white move at 'A' will make two eyes for his group, therefore any killing sequence that has a chance of working must start with 'A'). Finding this move, and being able to carry out the entire killing sequence are two very different beasts. Of course that's not to say there's no value in being able to quickly identify that move, as it can not only help prune variations quickly, but in a real game you would be able to extend your thinking time on the problem by starting the sequence the way you know it must start and spread out the full analysis over a couple of moves (instead of before starting at all). Then again, if you do this and your sequence doesn't work, you might just be burning up ko threats...so as with everything, it's good when it works (=