The debate is over fuseki not joseki. I don't think anyone would disagree with you that knowing complex joseki >10k is inefficient.

He has a point though. At a certain point learning fuseki is useless without joseki knowledge to back it up. Understanding the idea behind the low Chinese is useless unless you know the line to punish approaching your 3-4 directly. The same could be said about the Kobayashi. In fact it is very difficult to study fuseki at all without touching on joseki.

This is true however I mean in terms of, say you study the low Chinese, you need to know some basic joseki for dealing with approaching your 3-4 stone directly (when playing other beginners), but this doesn't mean you have to study joseki in depth but know which joseki to choose. You don't necessarily need to know complex joseki to play the low Chinese against other beginners. You'll most likely just get into a fight in the corner, which is fine at this level I think. Further, arguably you learn a lot about the weaknesses of the fuseki you're playing with by making mistakes in the joseki elements.

If things get complicated, well, you fight and learn by doing and at a beginner level this is probably good for you anyway. If you're playing other beginners they are very likely not to know complex joseki anyway and especially not likely to know how to punish mistakes in said joseki, so you're not at a disadvantage not knowing them really.


I mean, speaking as a beginner, fuseki can be fun, so why not study it a bit? I'd agree that spending hours going over variations is probably a waste given your opponents won't play optimally but you can learn something about how to fight, how to form a game plan and how the game flows from early choices from fuseki patterns. Yes you have to touch on joseki but you don't need to study complex joseki in depth to have some fun with something like the low Chinese. A dan or strong sdk player will crush you because you don't know how to punish their approaches optimally sure, but they'll crush you if you keep things simple but a beginner isn't even likely to know how to approach that 3-4 stone.

When I play strong sdk players or dan players and use what I'd consider an interesting fuseki, I get punished but I learn something. Isn't the whole point of playing much stronger players? And really, I, and other beginners, make so many basic errors anyway that 10 point/20 point errors in joseki stages of a fuseki rarely decide the game anyway.

TL;DR: Yes, joseki are important if your opponents are strong, no I don't think they're that important against other beginners.

I think we are seeing a lot of equivocation between studying opening principle and studying macro-joseki, both of which are called "fuseki".