Hi all,

I just realized the "tesuji dictionary" genre is important for high kyu to dan players, and most famous books are written by Japanese, and when I check, there are four titles to choose from, namely:

Basic Tesuji Dictionary, 基本手筋事典 by Hideyuki Fujisawa 藤沢秀行, 2 vols., published in 1995

Tesuji Dictionary, 手筋事典 by Kensaku Segoe & Go Seigen 瀬越憲作 & 呉清源, 3 vols., re-printed in 2003 (originally published 1978)

Basic Tesuji Dictionary 基本手筋事典 by Yamashita Keigo 山下敬吾, 1 vol., published in 2011

Go Tesuji Big Dictionary 囲碁手筋大事典 by Ishida Yoshio 石田芳夫, 1 vols with Kindle version available, published in 2018

Please can you vote about which one you like the most, thanks in advance.

Thanks, Dino

I have the "Segoe and Go" dictionary.

The organization by move types is interesting in the first 1 - 2 volumes but at some point it becomes kind of silly because the moves involved are not really that move. The move types are really basic, not actually something that identifies a tesuji.

The problems are sometimes realistic looking but many times one really asks why not play differently and the solutions are very long and hard to keep in your head. I have tested some of the problems with unsuspicious pros. For example Hayashi Kozo of European go Congress fame looked at a problem, not even sitting down, for a couple of minutes and then declared the solution. It was same as in the book but he choice to capture the main cutting stones in a ladder instead of a net thinking this was more solid (if the ladder has no problem) and the ladder gets rid of the aji quicker. Me an my friend had the same thoughts about the final position being tenacious, so even though we found the solution earlier we also found that one could just skip the whole tesuji thing and just fight. When we showed him our move he agreed that was probably better.

So in these problems you can quickly realize that you are reading the solution because it goes on for many moves and end up ignoring your normal routine for finding a good move. Finally, I gave up on finishing the series because I found that it hurt my game, I'd spend time trying to make some wild tesuji work over the board instead of just playing go.

I'd say I don't recommend it or qualifying that I can recommend getting one volume at a time. All three is really a lot, and I don't think it is "the fastest way to shodan" as claimed somewhere on sensis. Besides, it is not compiled or written by Segoe or Go or so I have heard from people who spend lot of time studying the works of either of the two.

Hi kvasir,

Please allow me to further on this point about reading of a long sequence sometimes hurts your normal finding-the-best-move routine. Since I have read another book: "Yamada style strength training" in which some problems can have up to 25 moves as solutions. If we can find the long sequence to win a local fight and confirm this move works, then it should be great, but if we don't, then we can just choose another safer move. In either case, reading a long sequence is not a bad thing for me, sometimes, I really make profit from reading such a long sequence. Your further comments are appreciated.

Go has many kinds of situations, for example:

1. you have an opportunity, i.e. if you find the move and play it you can gain a lot

2. it is a do or die situation and you just have to find a move that gives any hope

3. it is time to take territory, you have a huge territory move or the opponent just increased his territory and now it is your turn

4. it is a yose situation, everything is fairly secure and it is time to play a big yose move

5. it is life and death situation, you need to live or kill a group that can't escape

etc.

It is mostly only 1. that could be a 25 move sequence (of tesuji moves in a crammed space) to read out. It is so rare to have to read like that, most of the time we are unable to to do it correctly during a game unless it is in a shape we have studied. There is also a cost of trying, besides missing something and failing on the board we can also end up wasting out energy and time. Remember that Go is played with a clock against another person who may not have spent any time trying to figure out if he could be cut just now (maybe because it is not really a problem).

The problem I found that caused me to shelf this collection was that the cost of considering wild moves all the time, I developed a habit to try to make the tesuji work. Obviously it is very good to be able to read very deep when needed. I am just pointing out that this kind of problem book has a very singular benefit, that is to train the ability to go through such long variations in your head. It is also a huge effort in time, and you may well find that you could manage your study time better than with a book that will take so much time and effort -- and yet only trains a narrow skill.

That said, you can also just check volume 1 out. I don't think they are usually so expensive. I think the Segoe's has been somewhat of a thing with people who like to take problem books and solve them back to back repeatedly. If that is what you plan to do you may just as well get the 1st volume like I said and see what it does for you -- it is obviously packed with very difficult problems.

Btw I think the Basic Tesuji Dictionary is available in English (if not then it must be out of print) if you want a book that goes through tesuji techniques in a more organized or structured way that is probably a good bet to learn these techniques.

I'd post some pages from Segoe's but I don't have it with me.

Thanks for the detailed explanation and experience sharing.

Just one more comment for the long sequence: if it's a 25-move sequence, then usually it's close to ichi-hon-dou (一本道), which means it has very limited branches of variations, otherwise it'll be very hard to read out. So really it's more possible to read out a long sequence if it's a known shape or a known "type". A typical example of a known "type" is "loose ladder", in which we should allow 2 to 3 liberties along the way, it's harder to capture if there are 4 liberties at any point, and usually there are very limited branches of variations.

As for Segoe & Go's book, I found a book at 101WQ, can you take a look, and see if this is the book that you see (total: 878 problems, the following diagram is problem 4, black to play)

https://www.101weiqi.com/book/doing/1314043/

Thanks again, Dino

I don't have the books with me so I can't check but the Chinese says it is this book. 101weiqi is one of those Chinese sites that seems to have lot of problems out of various books so it is pretty likely that they have the whole thing.

It is not always a one-way street, it is a very difficult problem book if you take the approach of completely solving the problems.
Don't get me wrong, it has a lot of very good problems and there are not many similar collections -- if it is what you are looking for then you could go for it.

I think this example from sensei's is pretty good https://senseis.xmp.net/?SegoeTesujiProblem2 it show exactly what you can expect on the solution pages in some cases.

There is something that I forgot to mention. The problems are rated A, B and C. A is usually fiendishly difficult while C can be as easy as spot the move in the chapters title.

My attempt at that problem you showed.

I found one page of the book, which is a Traditional Chinese translation published in 2000, so I assume it is translated from the 1971/1973 version of the Japanese original book, not the re-printed one in 2003, but I guess there are no major differences. I see this book is still pretty popular today, so it is really long lasting!!.

I recognize that, it is the first page of problems. You can see the style of having 4 half board problems on a page, there is some unimportant text for each problem and even a name. The solutions are at the very back of the 2003 volume which is nice because you don't want to look at them until you have solved the problem (and then you have no reason to look at them), many problem books put the solutions right after the problem making it impossible to find the next problem without looking. Overall the layout is really nice.

My attempts:

Problem 1


Problem 2


Problem 3


Already gave problem 4