I liked the article very much.
- To recap, taking a punch as an example, the 'basics' would be the actual movement of punching, while the 'fundamentals' would be how to utilize this movement to actually hurt the other guy. Right? Because if all you know is the movement, you are more likely to break your own wrist than to make the other guy cry. I have seen it happen. So teaching should go in tandem - basics and fundamentals together.
In terms of Go - I have been thinking of a similar distinction for a long time, except I have been
calling it a *move* on one side and an *idea* on the other. So, a *move* would be a technique you can apply, like a geta or the already mentioned 'hane at the head of two stones' or the toothpaste technique. The *idea* would be what makes the move effective. Capturing stones in geta blindly is not effective and it will more likely do more harm than good in your game, even if you have the technique down to a perfection - if you don't know the wider idea behind it, in particular that some stones are worth capturing and some are not, and which, and why.
One example I run into recently was the concept of connecting.
- A beginner got fixated on making connecting moves, he got really good at it, so all his groups are nicely connected into one global blob... but he was still losing games terribly all the time. The problem was that even when all his groups were independently alive - he was still wasting many moves to connect them. The *move* or the technique was there, but the *idea* was missing. Nobody told him that there are groups worth connecting and ones which are not, and how to tell them apart. Eventually, he learned, but it was a long and thorny road, hard to watch.
The example of 'pull out of atari' vs 'don't save junk stones' of jts is a good one, i think.
- I often put myself in the shoes of the beginner, and can feel how exasperating this can be. You are told those two things, shown the moves, but never explained why or which stones are junk and which are not. In one game - this is the move, period. In another game - that is the move, period. What the heck?!? Learning these two seemingly contradictory things actually leads to more confusion than good.
Same can be said for most other 'techniques' we learn.
- Even a blind monkey can learn the most complex joseki if given enough bananas, but this does not mean it would ever beat a human player even if the human does not know that particular joseki. Because he monkey will never have the *idea* behind the joseki. And this, the *idea*, is where the real strength in Go lies. Of course, technique is important too, but I think secondary.
So - in general - I think that
an *idea* is much stronger than a *move*. Knowing a move and applying is without understanding makes you a very weak player, even if the move itself is perfect. Knowing an idea, even when you don't always find the best move to go with it, makes you a much stronger player - and much better equipped to go over your game afterwards and find a better move.
Its because Go is not really about moves themselves, but about sequences and shapes - so basically it is about how to make moves work together - which can never be taught just by showing 'a move', its the ideas that bind stones together.
This is one of the reasons I am basically against just teaching *moves* without the *ideas* behind them. I much rather teach ideas without the moves - if we have to leave some part for the student to discover independently, let them discover the moves which best fit into the ideas they know rather than the other way around. Also - ideas are much more general than moves, so it also makes for more efficient teaching and learning, and once you get the ideas down and assimilated, it is not really that hard to find good moves that match them.
PS>
Sorry of all this is a little chaotic... I am still on my first coffee.
prevents Black from making an eye at "a".
