Making Good Shape by Rob van Zeijst and Richard Bozulich is an ( almost ) excellent book. After a short introduction there are 243 problems that remind me of my despair in my own games: I have to play somewhere there but I don't know exactly where. I feel they get gradually more difficult and somewhere after nr 100 I fail to solve them and after nr 150 even the solutions become difficult to grasp. I guess the book is very useful in the single digit kyu range. I think I found a minor error. ( see hidden section )

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Wc W to make sabaki in the upper right
$$ ----------------------+
$$ . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . X . . X X X . . . . |
$$ . , . . . O O X . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . X . . |
$$ . . . . . . . O O . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . X X . . |
$$ . . . . . . . O O . . |
$$ . , . . . X X X . . . |
$$ . . . . . O O X X . . |
$$ . . . . . O X O X . . |
$$ . . . . . . . O O . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . O . . O . . |
$$ . , . . . . X , X . . |
$$ . O . . O . . X . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ----------------------+[/go]

Honinbo Dosaku played white and found a brilliant sequence.

Hope I'm not derailing discussion too much, but I actually just "finished" the whole book (a lot of on-the-john training ). I noticed a marked improvement in my game using the techniques it explores (increase sacrifice size, driving tesuji, etc.)

As you say, the first 100 (+/- 30) should be manageable for SDKs as actual problems. By the end I'd say the problems become dan level, as a lot of the solutions feel almost random to me Especially the answers where you sacrifice stones on one end of the board by making an attachment on the other, and the players trade.

So beyond a certain point, instead of trying really hard to solve the problems, I just started memorizing solutions, and trying to convince myself why it was correct (find obvious counter moves and work out why they don't work). As the book says, the point of the problems isn't reading or L&D, so I think this approach, where you're really just training your intuition, makes the most sense.

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1k KGS

mw, I think you forgot to include the T18 stone, but the point remains unchanged.

Actually the point does change:

Aah, finally I get the point, hopefully. W1 in your diagram is wrong because the ko W gets is worse than in my final diagram.