There is one kind of kikashi about which there is no debate, and that is the "while it is still sente" kikashi. A prime example is the kikashi before living, where you make a play which threatens to live big, and when your opponent replies, you make smaller life. The point being that if you make smaller life first, your play that is now kikashi is no longer sente. Failure to play kikashi first means a definite loss of points, the difference between sente and gote.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

In the end asians really are naturally superior when it comes to Go. Not so much in terms of race but regarding their ability to read a language which does not confuse the aspiring Go player and teach him/her badly translated/defined concepts.

Learning an asian language gains two stones!

_________________
My "guide" to become stronger in Go

I just look at the pictures.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Ed Lee: to answer your initial question: I don't speak a word of Chinese and any confusion caused by the things I write is the result of my inability to clearly reproduce the words of Yan Laoshi, after our translator has given us the gist of what was said during a review. The discussion was actually about when something is a crude move (the "suu sou" pointed out by often, one of Yan Laoshi's favourite phrases) or when a similar exchange might be a good move. I wrote "forcing move" because I thought "good move" would be somewhat vague and unspecific. I'll try to remember the semantic sensibilities of the online go community in the future.
To the admins: Buudesuyo is my former room mate here. He's an American go player that is known for trolling on boards both go (2-2 point approach, anyone?) and messaging. I don't know if he'll behave (rather unlikely, in fact), but maybe don't slap him with the ban-stick right away. Let's just hope he steps on a lego (nothing personal) and that will be the end of it.

Two of our fellow students (including Buudesuyo) left yesterday, and with them the more laidback attitude has gone as well. We're back to early mornings and heaps of go problems. We're currently enjoying a week of home study (which is why we're able to play another round of teaching games with Yan Laoshi). The two students that left got surprised by a tradition at the Yan house: your last game versus your pro teacher you always play on even. The look on their faces when they first heard this (as in, 1 minute before playing), was quite amusing.

I didn't find the time to post this earlier, but our last day of school, I finally got to play Zao Zi Yi, the 10-year old 5-dan go problem prodigy. I played him on two stones. I was really, really intimidated when playing him. I played a horrible game, and lost in under 50 moves.



Losing is quite all right, that's what I came here for, but this loss somehow managed to sneak past the good intentions for improvement. I was pretty upset with myself for playing like a kitten in a tiger's cage, so I got my music and went for a walk in the neighbourhood outside school. After approximately 20 minutes of cooling off (if such a thing is possible in 35° Wuhan summer), I came back to find Zao Zi Yi without opponent. I immediately sat down in front of him, put down my two stones and we played again.



Zao Zi Yi still overplays quite a lot (all the younger kids around here do), but his diligence in doing doing problems sure is paying off. A good reminder I should do some more myself. I'll upload my game with Yan Laoshi later today.

Hey, congratulations! 2H against a 5d is huge : )

By the way, I know the situation in your first game. There is a fight, we both hop a bit and suddenly my shapes start to crumble ^^ There are so many subtleties between a Keima, One-Point-Jump or Kosumi... and when to play which...



Ha ha ha, Starcraft 2 BM? =D

_________________
My "guide" to become stronger in Go

While browsing through your second game, I often saw instances of fighting spirit. I think this may be the dominant mental driving factor behind progress.
I also often thought "I wouldn't fare any better", so whatever my current rank may be, you are already there and more's to come.

Yan Laoshi is not only a very strong go player, he's an even better teacher. He's very good at remembering your games, shapes you played in those games, and even remembers the go problems you are doing. During reviews, he'll always highlight the things you've been working with at that time, or something that's lacking in your play. And he does this for over a dozen students at any given time.

His system of working with teaching games is also quite interesting. The different types I've observed so far are the following:
- Seven stones: this is for double digit kyu's. In these games he focuses on some very basic joseki, the concept of miai (if I take something, you have to take something of equal value) and don't follow your opponent around, especially in the endgame. He doesn't press hard at all, and often doesn't play the most severe move. Last time I watched a seven stone game from Yan Laoshi, he won by 4 points. He actually wanted his opponent to win the game by a small margin, but judged she didn't understand the importance of not following your opponent around yet, and after giving her a lot of subtle, and sometimes less subtle ("have another look at this area") hints, he made it a very close loss. All this, with minimal thinking time, while playing three other games.

- Five stones: In these games, more emphasis is put on choosing the right star point joseki and correct direction of play in the opening and middle game. One of the main points being reiterated at this level is: a solid mid-game consists of attack and defense. You attack a group, you defend your position (preferably making territory in the process), you attack some more, you defend some more. This way you keep up the attack while staying solid yourself. Some reading is required, but it's more about joseki choice and direction of play.

- Four stones (hoshi): These are very similar to the five stone games, but white presses a little harder and plays a bit more severe. Better reading is required in both tesuji and life and death. Shape also becomes more important. The opening still emphasizes choosing the right star point joseki.

- Four stones (komoku): When students are making steady progress towards three stones, Yan Laoshi requires them to move their handicap stones to the 3-4 points (in rotational symmetry, see spoiler)
This is the time when the fundamentals like direction of play, attack and defense and basic good shape have become a part of the student's play. Yan Laoshi really ramps up the difficulty from this point on, purposefully choosing more difficult joseki variations to test the student (and overplaying to see if they know the correct refutations). Fights become a little bit more complicated, and slightly deeper reading is required.

- Three stones: This is for students who have reached the level of roughly EGF 1-dan. Fundamentals like direction of play and attack and defense should be understood even better, and these are complimented with extensive joseki knowledge. Yan Laoshi usually opens with 5-3 or 5-4 at this level, to also test these joseki. He presses harder in direction of play, mistakes like not defending or extending are immediately punished. Reading difficulty ramps up even further, but he never plays very tricky moves.

Students need to win twice in a row to advance to the next level, but these are almost never wins gained in the endgame. If Yan Laoshi judges that you've played enough correct moves, he'll resign to reward you for your play.

My game from today. I won.


Afterwards, Yan Laoshi said that this one win was enough for me to move up to four stones. He feels like my opening and direction of play, as well as attack and defense in the mid-game are good (enough for my level), but my calculation skills are still lacking. The solution? More go problems. As far as joseki study is concerned: I'm done with all the star point joseki, I'll review them one more time before moving on to komoku joseki. It would be nice if I can make it to that level before I leave, because it would be good practice to start using those joseki in teaching games. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. For now, it's yet more go problems.

Hi Hushfield, Thanks for the updates. Of course, it's interesting to note
those are teaching game handi stones. If a pro plays
her true level, a DDK has no chance even with 9 stones.
7 stones are around 1k/1d level. 4 stones for around 3d/4d level.
But of course we know the purposes of a teaching game
are different from a non-teaching game.

We've been studying at home for the last couple of days. Two of the foreign students left, but immediately we were joined by two of Yan An's students that participated in the pro exam two weeks ago. They didn't manage to make pro, but as they're only just 13 and 14 years old, I suspect they'll get a few more shots. In the meantime they've been playing teaching games with Yan Laoshi (taking black with no komi) and correcting our life and death homework to see where we made mistakes. Their reading is incredibly fast and accurate. In the afternoon, while we are working on our problems, they like to play on the internet.

Below you can find my three latest teaching games with Yan Laoshi. Sorry for the late update, I couldn't log on to the forums for over 2 days.

Right after getting promoted to 4-stone teaching games I played pretty poor games. The prosecution presents exhibit A:



The second game was not much better. I resigned pretty early in this one.



I asked how Yan Laoshi would sum up what was wrong with my last two games, and he said the biggest problem was that I showed poor judgement of urgent points, defending the wrong groups. This should be my number one priority while playing for now.

I felt somewhat ashamed after playing two such poor games right after getting promoted (and was frankly a wee bit scared I'd be bumped back down to five stones), so I skipped afternoon basketball yesterday and went for some more joseki study and an extra helping of problems (50 difficult life and death, 70 tesuji, 40 capture problems). Most importantly, though, I noticed I had been playing too fast again the last two games. So I decided to take my time with today's game. You can find the result below.



Today's game was probably my last teaching game with Yan Laoshi, as we'll start going to the schools again on Thursday, and tomorrow is our day off.

Good work!

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Today was our day off. I spent the entire day finishing up an essay for university. It's ridiculous, but I feel pretty guilty for taking an entire day off go for doing other things. Guess I'll do a few problems and play a game before going to bed.

Below you can find some photographs from the temple next to our apartment building.

I misread the calendar, and it turns out we spent another day studying at home. Yan Laoshi's two students that recently took the pro exam have been coming over for almost an entire week now. This morning I finally got to play one of them. Spoiler alert. There was some fighting.



In the afternoon, the two kids continued their trolling spree on internet go servers. They are ridiculously strong in blitz games. They also played a few serious games on one of the kids' 9d account on Tygem. And if that was not enough, Yan Laoshi was intrigued enough to call dibs on the account and go head to head with another Tygem 9d. The game was a tesuji-fest and ended with the other 9d resigning in endgame.

Problems are going reasonably well, though they're getting a bit more difficult. I haven't been able to reach 100 problems a day for a while now. The last few days were more like 50-60 a day. I'm almost done with the 1200 problems in my life and death book. I'm combining this with a study of basic shapes in a life and death dictionary. When I'm done with the 1200 problems book, I'm reviewing the entire thing again, then I'll be moving on to a bit more difficult problems.

No, to say there was fighting didn't spoil the reading experience!

Well done for having the balls (I think you're male!) to go for a big kill against a stronger player.

Confidence and self-belief are important skills in Go* (but sometimes hard to distinguish from recklessness, delusion and bloody-mindedness )

*Recent Sakata quote here viewtopic.php?f=10&t=10632

I wonder how strong you'll be on kgs coming back from this.

Abyssinica: I wouldn't be too surprised if there's not a large difference with before. Most of the games I play here are without clock, and I've noticed a pretty big discrepancy in playing strength in timed games and games without time limit. On KGS, I might spot overplays or slow moves a bit faster, but I still have to read out the refutations, which I'm very slow at doing. It will probably take a while and a lot of games for me to improve in that setting.

Yan Laoshi made sure I knew what is what in yesterday's game.

I really admire your dedication , and wish I had the guts to do the same. Your visit to China, will soon become a reference of "how go should be studied".

It would be great, if you could continue your study at a decent level and frequency once you are back in Belgium. I assume that will be a big challenge. If there is anything I can do to help you with that, please let me know.

PS: I am glad that you confirmed the fact that studying joseki does help to improve. Because this is still often denied. "An inconvenient truth".

By the way, I see a lot of people are following you and sometimes formulate unrealistic expectations. Don't be too hard on yourself! I would be deeply impressed if you could get to a solid 1 dan level in about a month. And I am convinced that you have all it takes to reach even a 6 or 7 dan level some day.

Most importantly, enjoy the experience !
-
Bram Vdb. (member of the GGG)

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Enjoy LeeLaZero and KataGo from your webbrowser, without installing anything !
https://www.zbaduk.com

I would not say "denied" but that the When and How is discussed very often.

Hushfield has a really good book to study Joseki in my opinion. A book which shows under- and overplays and their refutation. I think you can learn the meaning of the correct moves much better by seeing how it turns out when you play differently. No Joseki book I know (and I just know Ishida and Takao) presents more than the correct move order, if I'm not mistaken.

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go