I'm looking for a basic english Joseki dictionary. I've been using Kogo's, but I've heard some pretty bad things about how well maintained it is and/or it's accuracy. I see that Kiseido has the Dictionary of Basic Joseki in 3 parts by Ishida Yoshio.

I didn't know if there were any other books. I'm not looking for a problem book or anything, just something as a reference, to look up things when reviewing games.

I'm looking for a basic english Joseki dictionary. I've been using Kogo's, but I've heard some pretty bad things about how well maintained it is and/or it's accuracy. I see that Kiseido has the Dictionary of Basic Joseki in 3 parts by Ishida Yoshio.

I didn't know if there were any other books. I'm not looking for a problem book or anything, just something as a reference, to look up things when reviewing games.

Is 38 basic joseki still worth getting? I don't have it and am planning to.

SmartGo also works with other game collections you may have. For example, there are about 10000 games in the GoGoD game collection that are not in SmartGo. SmartGo will detect and discard duplicate games.

Is 38 basic joseki still worth getting? I don't have it and am planning to.

It seems to me to be a good 'My First Joseki' book. It shows some common ones, but spends a good amount of time going into why you would choose one over the others, and why some of the critical moves are chosen. It doesn't try to be as comprehensive as a dictionary, but does try to answer more of the 'why' questions.

I'm working my way through it now, and trying to learn enough to recreate the joseki by 'This move feels right because of this reason'.

I've been thinking about getting Jungsuk in Our Time but from what's been said here, I'm wondering if the Ishida collection might be better given its breadth. On the other hand, why not just get both...

Ishida's three volume dictionary was first published 33 years ago, translated from an even earlier Japanese edition. As a result much of the book is out of date. Especially the part on 4-4 point joseki is weak. A lot of developments in 4-4 point joseki occurred after the Ishida books were published. In the other volumes there are variations listed as joseki, i.e. even results locally for both players, but which are no longer considered joseki by professionals. A new edition in Japanese was published in 2009, edited by Takao Shinji. Ishida's disctionary is so old ... we need a newer version. I hope the Takao edition will be translated.

There are two aspects to studying joseki. First is the idea of a sequence of moves locally giving an equal result. Studying these you can learn a lot about positional judgement, shape, and tesuji. The idea is not just to memorize sequences of moves but try to understand why each move was made, what is wrong with alternatives, and how to take advantage of errors. This is a life-long project. The second aspect is learning when to play joseki depending on the whole board position. Probably the best book about this is Yilun Yang's Whole Board Thinking in Joseki These books give you wonderful knowledge of how large scale issues affect somewhat distant corner developments.

Another way to study joseki is to play through lots and lots of pro games, watching what they do in corner sequences.

Ok, that changes things a bit. Now I'm leaning against the Ishida collection. Is it worth the $75.00 dollars, if it's so outdated? If money wasn't an option... but it is. It sucks being a weak player.

Well, if it's of any comfort I have the whole series and it didn't make me one bit stronger. It did cost a lot though. I suspect you actually have to read them in order to gain from them. Not just stuffing them away in a box somewhere like I did. Perhaps if I sleep next I could internalize some by osmosis. Worth a try.

Do you realize how much you need to study those books to get your money's worth? Eventually you'll will be awesome at joseki but still being crushed on wbaduk by some Korean that just wreaks havoc on your pretty sequences and kills them all. Futile I tell you!