This question is so basic... but I can't help but to ask it.
How do you practice Life & Death, which is supposed to be the muscle of go.

So far, I'm focusing on books and try to do a few problems a day through deep reading.
I tried to work through Life & Death from James Davies but the problems soon became difficult for me and I feel quite frustrated after each chapter because the knowledge given doesn't seem to rub in.
Damezumari are a nightmare for me (I hardly can see them coming) and I seem to be quickly reaching my maximum reading skill (maybe 3 to 5 moves deep).
I usually solve problems while commuting by train. Sometimes it's frustrating not to be able to play the sequence (I only have the book with me) to fully understand why the variation you imagined is not working.

I guess in my question there are multiple elements:
* How do you physically practice L&D? With a book, computer or goban (or a combination of those)? If computerized, which software do you use? Do you take notes while solving problems? Do you keep track of the problems you missed? How frequently would you re-read a problem book? Maybe a more detailed question would be : "how did you manage to absorb the knowledge of a book like Life & Death?
* What is the pace / way you practice tsumegos: quick and dirty or slow and detailed? How much time can you spend on a problem? How many problems do you do a day? How much time does it take you?

Any recommendations for those of you who managed to breakthrough from mid-SDK to dan level would be appreciated.

There are lots of good things about the Elementary Go Series, but one bad thing is that the books vary wildly in their difficulty (sometimes from chapter to chapter) and it's not always clear when this is. My Go career was really set back by repeatedly banging my head against Davies' Life and Death book, convinced that it was my own fault that I could not read out or retain this supposedly basic knowledge.

Here is what works well for me, though I still have a long way to reach 1 dan:

• Simple problems! It is not beneath a 6 kyu to spend time mastering Graded Go Problems for Beginners volume 2. You need to have all the simple stuff in your fingers before you can build on it. Spending 20 minutes staring at a problem that is over your head and that you could never solve in a game is just an exercise in frustration (unless, of course, you actually enjoy it!).
• GoChild is awesome. Again, start simple.
• The Essential Life & Death books (available from Yellow Mountain Imports in the US) are a great course in life and death, the best step-by-step instruction in the basics I have ever seen.

You need to look for shortage of liberties all the time! Killing basically consists only of 1) stealing eyes and 2) creating shortages of liberties.
GoChild I do on the computer, of course. Simpler problems I do from a book. Harder problems (like Maeda) I set up on a board or on the computer.
No.
No, but I am entering problems from Essential Life & Death into a spaced repetition system, which does keep track for me.
I have sometimes gone right back to the beginning after I finish.
I haven't dared to go back to Life and Death (the book). With Essential Life & Death, I'm absorbing it by putting it into a spaced repetition system. With GoChild, I absorb it just by doing thousands of problems.
I try to do mostly problems I can solve in under 15 seconds (to practice my seeing) and ones that take me more than a few minutes (to practice my reading). So both.
On a good day I might do a hundred simple GoChild problems and three Maedas.

Thanks a lot, Daniel for your complete answer. I must say I didn't know Go Child.
Your answer above makes me feel much better regarding L&D. Sometimes, you look at this "Elementary Book" and you feel really ashamed of yourself not absorbing this knowledge.

_________________
Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

dfan, What do you call a "spaced repetition system" ?
Are you talking about Go Grinder? Is there any alternative to this software?

Your method is valid, I think.

Some years ago a Korean 7d told me that a Life&Death-problem would be "mine" (probably you meant this with "hard-wired" in brain), if I had solved it three times in every orientation in every colour.

_________________
The really most difficult Go problem ever: https://igohatsuyoron120.de/index.htm
Igo Hatsuyōron #120 (really solved by KataGo)

I think it's best with a book and, if you have the time to, putting the problems on the goban from there. Don't tempt yourself into playing out variations on the board until you solved it in your head though. If you do problems on a computer, it can be even harder to resist clicking out variations on the problem. Furthermore, I think it's easier to keep yourself determined by feeling paper + stones rather than a mouse, similar to how some people use manual timers or a simple notepad rather than a computer or an iPhone app for keeping track of their productivity.

Also, it's about balance regarding the difficulty of the problems, and you should do simple as well as hard problems. I'd say ideally, 40% of the problems you're solving should be easy and take you less than 30 seconds to solve, 30% should be medium and take you 3-5 minutes to solve, and 30% should be hard but should not take you longer than 10 minutes (otherwise, just skip the problem and move on).

Here is the Wikipedia article. It's a flashcard-managing system that helps you to retain things in your long-term memory by giving them to you at increasingly large intervals (as long as you are still remembering them correctly). I use Mnemosyne.

It's a lot simpler for go problems, mostly because I don't bother keeping an external database of positions like I do with chess. This could probably become a problem if I used multiple sources for josekis or something, but it hasn't been an issue yet.

I just enter the problems (and solutions) in GoWrite and export to PNG.

You can also try Uligo, by the author of Kombilo: http://www.u-go.net/uligo/

I personally like it a bit better than GoGrinder, though they are pretty similar.

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

Maybe he read my article. I wrote it nine years ago.

Seriously though, that method has been proven to be valid by many people over the years. I have never had a single person tell me it was nonsense and just about everyone said it helped them a lot. I came up with the idea myself, but I am sure many others have also had the same idea.

_________________
Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Aaaaaooouuuhhhhhhh. Your question is of major relevance for me as well. I have exactly the same problems. I have finished the last 170 problems of "1001 L&D Problems" in the beginning of September and only got about 65% right (when I did the one/three move problems I solved 80-90%). And yes, it's frustrating. For that reason I haven't repeated the five-move problems as I had done with the three-/one-move problems. And I have exactly the same weakness as you: recognizing shortage of liberties. It's amazing that we have exactly the same problems at the same time (only a few days ago I wrote about exactly this on my little blog). My conclusion was to do easier L&D problems. Last weekend I tried out GoChild and immediately got addicted. From Friday to Sunday I have done more than 1500 problems. I recognized lots of patterns that I knew from "1001 L&D Problems", that's why I was able to go through the L&D problems quite quickly. I started with the "Intermediate" part. The "L&D Basic 600" was too easy, so I did just the first and the last one hundred. The "L&D 1000" was exactly the right level for me. The 200 opening problems are not too tough, but sometimes when I got the solution wrong I wished there were explanations why the correct solution is correct. The "Fixed Stones" (which turned out to be joseki problems) were the easiest. The toughest problems were the 200 endgame problems. After I have finished the intermediate problems, I will come back to the endgame problems and analyse (many problems are about getting one's group alive, but in the most effective way, and that's not always easy).

anytime I feel like it.

like tonight, ill be watching yankees baseball and studying some problems

_________________
si no puedes triunfar, muere gloriosamente

BTW, on my todo list for dailyjoseki.com (which is a SRS for josekis) is to allow users to upload their own sgfs. It should be much nicer than any non-go specific SRS.

_________________
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
--
My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com