How to study James Davies' "Life and Death"?

[billywoods]

scalability

Scalability, in some sense, comes for free. The best go knowledge doesn't seem to come distilled into proverbs or nuggets of information, but comes through experience and practice and repeated exposure. Life and death seems to be very difficult to write scalable rules for, whereas certain kinds of tesuji are easier.

[Bantari]

There seem to be widely differing opinions on this book, both its usefulness, and the level of player at which it is aimed.

I am finding it a little dry. It seems to be a case of: "Here is a rule, here is an example sequence, now solve these..." There is not much in the way of explanations, principles or scalability.

I don't think this is a book which is supposed to be scalable.
It is a book that gives beginners exactly what they need - a bunch of basic shapes and ways of handling them. Those shapes will stay with the player for the rest of their go-playing life and benefit them greatly throughout.

Its like learning a language: you need to learn some words before you can make sentences and talk about all the scalable rules which govern the sentences. You need some vocabulary first.

'Life and Death' gives you a good start on the Go vocabulary. From there you can go on to scalable principles. But I don't think you can go the other way... or at least - this would not be very efficient.

Same for Davis' Tesuji.

PS>
As for 'dry' and the rest of the things you say - it is very subjective so I cannot really comment on that. If this is how you feel, all I can say: good thing we are all different or the world would be a boring place.

[PeterPeter]

It is a book that gives beginners exactly what they need - a bunch of basic shapes and ways of handling them. Those shapes will stay with the player for the rest of their go-playing life and benefit them greatly throughout.

So are you saying that each of his basic shapes (the 'starting point' for each chapter) is something which should be committed to memory?

How many variations should also be memorised?

Or should it be treated more as a dictionary, to look up a shape you encountered in one of your games?

[Bantari]

It is a book that gives beginners exactly what they need - a bunch of basic shapes and ways of handling them. Those shapes will stay with the player for the rest of their go-playing life and benefit them greatly throughout.

So are you saying that each of his basic shapes (the 'starting point' for each chapter) is something which should be committed to memory?

How many variations should also be memorised?

Or should it be treated more as a dictionary, to look up a shape you encountered in one of your games?

The shapes should be 'absorbed', whatever this means.
I don't think that 'memorization' is the right word - in the sense that I do not expect the beginner to rattle off all of the shapes and examples and problems with eyes closed after reading this book. But I would expect him/her to be able to not be completely uncomfortable and lost when confronted with any of the shapes in their games anymore.

With time, these shapes will get memorized. I would venture a guess that most SDK players (and all dan players) know these shapes very well. And they do not need to derive solutions from some scalable general rules - they just KNOW the answer. Do you need to THINK how to kill 5-point dumpling or you you just KNOW? Exactly.

What's more - the stronger you get the more such shapes you 'know'. L&D gets you started with the vocabulary you will develop - but its just a start.

Go is mainly about reading, and standard shapes provide reading shortcuts. The more shortcuts you have, the better you can read.

Sure - you also need scalable general rules, strategic principles, proverbs, and whatnot. But that comes later. If you don't have a database of basic shapes in your head - you will never get any good, I think. And generally - the more such shapes you know, the stronger you are. Although the shapes, of course, are not the ONLY thing responsible for your strength.

Strategy is also a tool to help you read ahead - so in the sense they are two sides of the same coin. Strategy helps you prune the tree while basic shapes increase reading depth.

As far as beginners are concerned, I think they should start with shapes as this is by far the more basic area of study.

PS>
I advocate to read the book from cover to cover, and not just use it as a lookup. Of course - later on, when you find you forgot stuff, looking it up is just fine. But the goal is to eventually be able to sell the book because its contents are deeply absorbed and there is no need for the book anymore.

[skydyr]

Each of the chapters is about a basic shape that comes up often, its status, and how to deal with it. The problems are all variations on the theme to force you to think about the shape, like "what if black has a hane here" or "is this still alive if white's connection isn't solid?". You don't need to memorize the shape's responses, etc, so long as you can recognize the shape when it comes up and can read out the responses knowing the status, which is what the problems kind of check.

Admittedly, you may not be at a level where this matters as much as yet, so you could also just go through it as a problem book where the theme is explained and you solve the variations.

[dfan]

I've said this before here, but I feel that one of the things that really hindered my progress (back in the 1990s) was owning the Elementary Go Series and feeling that as a 10k I should be able to read through Life & Death and internalize it. It's a good reference in an encyclopedia sort of way but not a good way for a beginner to gradually increase his/her life and death skills. Like a previous commenter I really like the Level Up Life & Death series for that purpose.