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 Post subject: Review: The Basic Principles of the Opening... Middle Game
Post #1 Posted: Sat Oct 04, 2014 7:16 am 
Judan

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Review: The Basic Principles of the Opening and the Middle Game

GENERAL SPECIFICATION

* Title: The Basic Principles of the Opening and the Middle Game
* Authors: Rob van Zeijst, Richard Bozulich
* Publisher: Kiseido
* Edition: First Printing September 2014
* Language: English
* Price: EUR 17.50
* Contents: opening, middle game
* ISBN: 978-4-906574-83-4
* Printing: almost good
* Layout: inefficient
* Editing: almost good
* Pages: 142
* Size: 148mm x 210mm
* Diagrams per Page on Average: 2
* Method of Teaching: principles, examples
* Read when EGF: 9k - 5k
* Subjective Rank Improvement: +
* Subjective Topic Coverage: -
* Subjective Aims' Achievement: o

**************************************************************************

Introduction

The Basic Principles of the Opening and the Middle Game is Volume 2 of the series The Road Map to Shodan. Every page shows two 19x19 diagrams and their comments. Every chapter starts with, or is continued by, a principle or a few related principles and a very short general explanation. After ca. two examples, every chapter concludes with a few problems and their answers. As the title suggests, the topics and principles are about the opening or middle game.

Chapters

The book's table of contents lists the principles (whose copying here would be unfair), problems and answers sections. The topics are missing. Since they guide to the contents, I cite them and state the page numbers of their headings here:

Extensions and Efficiency...1
Confinement, Linkage, and Separation...27
Weak Stones and Weak Positions...41
Handling Moyos...61
Escaping...65
Handling Thickness...77
The Third and Fourth Lines in the Opening...92
Defending Against a 3-3 Point Invasion...97
Turning a Moyo into Territory...113
How to Make Sabaki...120

Contents

The principles are the book's core. Everything else explains, illustrates or practises them. The basic ideas of the principles, the text and the move sequences are correct. The text, examples and problems are suitable for becoming familiar with at least the basic ideas of the principles. However, the text often is elliptical and the stronger readers would want to see many missing alternative moves and variations.

Contrary to the advertisement speech in the title of the book series, the restricted scope of the principles and variations makes it hard to recommend the book for players EGF 4 kyu or stronger. Contrary to the title, almost all principles for double digit kyu players are missing (compare First Fundamentals); therefore the book also cannot be recommended to them. Surely the book's principles are basic or fundamental and important for improving as a kyu player. Although everybody would have learnt part of them from hearsay, every written account provides a sufficiently useful reference to recommend the book simply on the ground that no player must miss any relevant principle.

However, the definite article starting the title ("The Basic Principles...") repeats the same mistake of the book The Fundamental Principles of Go, which had to be renamed to Fundamental Principles of Go. The Basic Principles of the Opening and the Middle Game is an absolutely improper title for a book offering only principles for a small range of playing strengths, only a selection of such principles of all basic principles for the opening and middle game, and often only weak versions of such principles.

Judged by its own title and series title, the book is a failure. Ignoring the initial definite article and the series title permits a clearer view on the intention of the book. It is an easy going approach for intermediate players wishing to enhance their knowledge of basic principles.

The topics do not get a consistently, equally long discussion, but some topics are explained with greater care than other topics. Luckily, the important thickness chapter belongs to the former. Turning a Moyo into Territory is an example of a somewhat disappointing chapter; a useful general characterisation of urgent moves does not find its application throughout the chapter.

Most of the explained knowledge belongs to verbal Japanese heritage. Modern Western style knowledge is mostly missing with the exception of characterising territory efficiency or overconcentration in my way. Unfortunately, a naive reader might easily overlook such relevant information amidst ordinary text. Only the principles are highlighted in bold font.

There are no principles for specific opening theory, such as "Avoid opposing 3-4 points.". The principles in the book are suitable for both the opening and middle game.

A still small but already significant part of the examples or problems is about joseki or tesuji knowledge. This is a bit disappointing considering the promised opening and middle game topics.

Principles

There are 20 principles and 6 additional variations of them, but 1 principle and its 2 variants amount to just 1 reworded principle. Therefore, 24 is a reasonable number of the principles in the book.

Although they are called principles, the authors oppose them by discussing major exceptions in the text and speaking of training the, as they call it, intuition. There I have to disagree. The purpose of principles should not just be guidelines for subconscious thinking - principles must strive for great generality, even if exceptions must not be overlooked. Why do the authors not fully trust their own principles? These principles are not always developed and worded as powerful and general as they should be. 19 of the 24 principles should be formulated more generally or more correctly. 2 principles should be less general so as to be correct more often. For example, if the authors had learnt from my principles, they would know that a general advice for weak stones can be right for important weak stones and wrong for non-essential weak stones. Kyu players on their way to dan level need such distinctions, but the book over-simplifies as if the basic principle "Sacrifice non-essential stones." would not exist.

How complete or incomplete is the book's selection of principles? For example, my browsing through only the basic principles in Fighting Fundamentals suggests: none of the over 30 basic principles appears in The Basic Principles of the Opening and the Middle Game. What does this mean for its selection of principles? The book offers a broad but very incomplete selection of principles. This is useful but defies the title.

Expensive

There are 274 diagrams (of which only 2 are smaller than 19x19) on the 142 pages. Instead of having significant white spaces, the diagrams could be accompanied by more detailed, longer explanations in the text. It is difficult to put more diagrams on a DIN A5 page carrying two 19x19 diagrams. However, 152 of the 274 diagrams could have been shown on a quarter or about half of the board. This combined with efficient layout and avoided big to very big fonts to shrink white spaces means that the book, for which an experienced reader needs only 5.5 hours, easily could have been printed on about half the number of its pages, i.e., 70 or 80 pages. EUR 17.50 for this is expensive, unless one thinks that the 24 principles justify the price.

Conclusion

The book should not be bought for its title or number of pages. It is for 9 to 5 kyus preferring an easy going, selective approach to principles and tolerating their over-simplification, which requires having to learn more generally applicable or more correct versions of the principles from other sources as a stronger player.


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 Post subject: Re: Review: The Basic Principles of the Opening... Middle Ga
Post #2 Posted: Sat Oct 04, 2014 11:12 am 
Oza

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Quote:
There are no principles for specific opening theory, such as "Avoid opposing 3-4 points.".


I imagine this is not given as a principle for the simple reason it is not a proven principle. GoGoD has almost 4,000 games with opposing 3-4 points in the opening. 300 actually began with opposing komokus. Of course all these games include top pros and appear even in 2014.

Considering you need to filter out a huge number of games that feature star points and so don't lend themselves to opposing komokus, clearly a very high proportion of the komoku-based games that are left feature opposing komokus.

One does come across the occasional text that debates opposing komokus, and the particular writer may even dislike them, but it is best to regard the point of such texts as being not principles but parables, designed in this case not to draw out a moral or spiritual theme of course, but to highlight an equally tenuous issue by way of illustrating how difficult the opening can be.

In fact, a case can be made for saying that the opening in go does not have much in the way of basic principles at all. Titling books in that way is really a western conceit. The Japanese tend to favour things like "Guide..." "Explanation of..." "How to win..." "Techniques to ...", all of which tend to favour exposition by examples rather than principles. Since they've been at this longer than we have, they may have learnt a thing or two about go. Either way, opposing 3-4 points seem still to belong to the Empyrean rather than blackboard lists.

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 Post subject: Re: Review: The Basic Principles of the Opening... Middle Ga
Post #3 Posted: Sat Oct 04, 2014 2:40 pm 
Judan

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Interesting, but how many of those 4000 games were lost by the player creating opposing 3-4 points (i.e., 13 lines in between) and in how many of those won did the opponent not immediately continue to take advantage on that side of the board?

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 Post subject: Re: Review: The Basic Principles of the Opening... Middle Ga
Post #4 Posted: Sat Oct 04, 2014 3:07 pm 
Oza

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Interesting, but how many of those 4000 games were lost by the player creating opposing 3-4 points (i.e., 13 lines in between) and in how many of those won did the opponent not immediately continue to take advantage on that side of the board?


You've got GoGoD so I'll leave you to do the real work, but, as a snapshot, in the case of the first two moves being opposing komoku, Black generally scores about 55%, but this is biased because many of the games are pre-komi. However, if Black attacks the White komoku at once, his winning ratio is worse than most other cases. Generally, playing in the lower right corner (assuming first two moves at the top) scores best, and playing star point scores nearly 80%. The sample there is 19 games - too small to trust completely but big enough to wonder legitimately what's going on. Maybe the most significant point is that all those games are 1952 or later, and most have komi. The commonest move by White in response to the star point is to attack the Black komoku, but that doesn't stop White losing very often!

My own hypothesis (completely untested) of opposing komokus is that they are a special case of gote no sente. In his famous book on this, Sekiyama does not discuss fuseki very much, but his prime example, examined in depth, is the otakamoku (6-4) opening move by Black. Citing also research by Go Seigen, he shows that it is surprisingly difficult for White to get a good result if he invades that corner straight away.

With a gote no sente strategy you are essentially behaving like an angler fish. I think it's easy enough to see opposing komokus as a case of dangling bait.

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 Post subject: Re: Review: The Basic Principles of the Opening... Middle Ga
Post #5 Posted: Sun Oct 05, 2014 4:10 am 
Judan

Posts: 6725
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Rank: UK 4 dan
KGS: Uberdude 4d
OGS: Uberdude 7d
RobertJasiek wrote:
* Subjective Rank Improvement: +
* Subjective Topic Coverage: -
* Subjective Aims' Achievement: o


What do these mean? What is the domain from which such symbols are selected?

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 Post subject: Re: Review: The Basic Principles of the Opening... Middle Ga
Post #6 Posted: Sun Oct 05, 2014 4:24 am 
Judan

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http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/isbn.html

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