Greetings, I have lurked here soon for a few years, and I have had always the intention of starting a study journal. Many start a journal to track their progress to 1 dan, and I have chosen to start a journal about studying to mid-level EGF dan.

I have played go soon for few years, with some breaks (all the way to half a year) in between. As a DDK I studied mainly from sensei's library, and as a low SDK the elementary go series paired with Yilung Yang's Fundamental Principles of Go brought me quickly to mid SDK. I guess I met my first wall at 4 kyu, but a contributing factor was "studying" joseki. From there studying shape, fuseki and tesuji problems brought me to EGF 1kyu. One thing I haven't really done is life and death. As a mid SDK I studied some corner positions and did some of the problems from Cho Chikun's life and death collection, but I found tsumego more or less boring and not really affecting my play, where as tesuji problems were game improving and interesting.

Now I know that tsumego is essential for strong players, and after picking up Maeda's intermediate life and death problems, I have realized this. Tsumego skills can be game breaking when certain situations arise in a game, and they teach you to read. But reading can also be trained through virtually any type of go problems, and thus I don't feel I have missed that much yet.

My approach to go problems might be a bit different than what is generally recommended. I have found that studying the answers of too hard tesuji and go problems have improved my go quite significantly, allowing me to solve similar level problems much quicker than by just studying those I can solve. Of course, quality of problems and their answer diagrams are essential, including failure diagrams. I think that go problem solving can be roughly divided to set of "skills":
1. Reading ability: Here I mean the ability to read long sequences and visualize stones on your minds eye. Also intuitive eye for shape points .etc is related to this skill.
2. Knowledge of specific techniques: With this I mean things like under-the-stones, snap-back, nose-tesuji .etc

When solving too hard problems, the issue isn't usually the lack of reading ability, but the lack of knowledge of proper techniques you can apply to the problem. By studying too hard problems, I usually learn a certain important principle or way of thinking I haven't thought about. This way I get new ideas with which to approach the game, and thus my game should improve. Of course, this approach won't work if the problem difficulty is too great when compared to rank, such as DDK trying to solve 1 dan level problems, but after mid SDK this is highly unlikely if we forget some truly hard tsumego collections. If the go problem book has quality failure diagrams with the correct solution, then this is even less of a problem.

With the above, I divide my go problem studying to two types:
- Easy to solve problems which improve my reading and intuition
- Hard to solve problems which teach me new techniques and/or principles.

In general I value tesuji problems over life and death at this point, but it maybe that later I will shift my attention to life and death, as most of the classical hard go problem sets aimed for strong players are to my knowledge almost solely life and death. I just feel that places to apply lessons from tesuji problems crop up all the time at the board, whereas a truly game deciding hard life and death problem appears quite rarely, at least at my level of play (of course I'm capable of missing certain really hard kill-able groups, but they are still rare in my opinion).

Having reached this far, I realize there indeed is a shortage go literature for dan level players. I have skimmed through quite a lot of books, and my main tool in my studies will be the Graded Go Problems For Dan Players series. The books are excellent, especially the tesuji books, since they have given me really a new way to look at quite a lot of situations. I have studied totally the 5 kyu to 3 dan tesuji book and I'm currently doing the 4 dan to 7 dan tesuji book with 5 kyu to 3 dan life and death. With the first tesuji volume I had plenty of "how can black ever get a good result here?" reactions, and more so with the second volume.

I will be studying by doing problems from those two GGPFDP books daily, go through some professional games (few each week, but no memorization) and of course play 4-5 serious games per week. I will add some other studies to the side according to time, and my current plan is to read through Reducing Territorial Frameworks.

Best of luck!

You write about life&death seeming relatively unimportant, because game deciding living sequences are rare. That is true, but there's another way to look at it. When I play stronger dan players, they often defend in very creative ways: a simple move is enough to keep their group alive, but they play a strange looking one because it gives me fewer forcing moves on the outside.

Knowing which moves are dangerous by your opponent (death? ko? seki?) and which moves in conjunction would be dangerous let you better understand the aji on the board. Knowing weird shapes that could result in a danger in your position let you choose your moves to avoid those shapes, or force them on your opponent. The faster and further out you can solve these problems, the better the information you have about the board and the more efficient you can make your moves. So I agree that in most games a corner group doesn't just die, but I think in most games you should be solving many tsumego to see all the possibilities on the board.

So I have been rather busy recently and haven't had time to update here, although I have still found time to study. I have read bits Kageyama's Lessons in Fundamentals of Go quite a long time ago, and recently I finished it for the first time. The book is well known, and I regret a bit that I read it with thought at this point, since it is contains tons of useful information, regardless what one considers to be the fundamentals.

The one topic that made the biggest impact on me after this readthrough of the book was the chapter 9 discussing about proper and improper moves. The chapter illustrates quite well that as we get stronger, we aim to play more efficiently, and thus for example in cases of capturing single stones we make large scale captures instead of just tightly gripping it or capturing the stone immediately. This on the other hand leaves some aji in the position, but usually it seems quite trivial at the moment. However, this aji is a constant threat and thus sometimes the "efficient" way is inferior to a clean capture or tight grip of a stone. I like to think this is a bit the same thing as not capturing with a ladder immediately. I have been paying more attention to this thing in my games recently.

I have started reading Reducing Territorial Frameworks by Shuko Fujisawa, and it has given me new ideas about different probe + reducing move combos. Now that I think of it, I really don't use reducing moves that much, and if I do, they are nearly always straight capping moves or shoulder hits. I have a feeling that I really need to start using the knight cap reducing move a lot more in my games, since I have been misplaying the shoulder hit.

I have continued to drill some life and death with Maeda's Intermediate Life and Death book, and I can solve most of the problems quite quickly. The Graded Go Problems for Dan Players volume 4 is quite hard, as the sequences are quite long and might require usage of multiple tesujis. I have learned a lot from it, and I have observed my reading ability improving.