Life In 19x19

John Fairbairn wrote:none of the western books explain the fuseki well

For dan level opening understanding, I agree that there is still a big gap in Western literature.

John Fairbairn wrote:I did offer to do a book based on this series to a publisher, but as next to nobody buys go books nowadays it was stillborn.

Did you ever considered trying to publicly fund those book projects? Websites like kickstarter.com seem to have the finger on the pulse. If your start-up capital is not reached you only lose the time, that went into presenting your idea.


post scriptum: Sorry, for derailing this thread again :O Tami sure does promote discussions =D

SoDesuNe wrote:If your start-up capital is not reached

Go books publication does not need start-up capital any longer in the age of digital printing. Capital is useful to slightly reduce average printing cost though.

Go books publication needs contents and at least one kind of distribution.

I am no professional so giving my perspective on fusiki is somewhat uncomfortable.

as i mentioned before, fuseki is the hardest subject to master.
IMO, you are strong as your reading. (correctly analyzing which board position is better is a part of reading)
Fuseki will test your intuition and experience.
If you can not decide which board position is better, then you are lost.
therfore you need to have experience to have intutition so you can analyze the position correctly.

my suggestion to Tami is...do what i did as a SDK.
try to imitate professionals by playing their game and reading their review.(reading their thoughtprocess is a goldmine.)
after many games of imitating you will feel why that move was a good move and you will improve 1 stone. (and your opponent will fill that pressure too)
example: when i was SDK, i imitated takemiya's 4 starpoint fuseki. Now i rarely play that opening but it was good experience (i apply his idea of thick influencal moyo game on many handycap game and results are phenomenal)

another suggestion which will contridict above suggestion. (in some perspective they are actually same..)
free your reading from textbook and try new ideas and positions that you feel is a good move.

P.S.
Robert please do not create any rebuttle on my thread for i dont wish to read my thread quotted by you.

RobertJasiek wrote:

SoDesuNe wrote:If your start-up capital is not reached

Go books publication does not need start-up capital any longer in the age of digital printing. Capital is useful to slightly reduce average printing cost though.

I could imagine, Go-book authors like some compensation for their time devoted to write books. That's how it generally works, if you have a publisher (as far as I know). If the actual sell is not as good, you at least got something.

SoDesuNe wrote:

John Fairbairn wrote:I did offer to do a book based on this series to a publisher, but as next to nobody buys go books nowadays it was stillborn.

Did you ever considered trying to publicly fund those book projects? Websites like kickstarter.com seem to have the finger on the pulse. If your start-up capital is not reached you only lose the time, that went into presenting your idea.

I would immediately pre-order. How many orders would you need to make it viable?

I would immediately pre-order. How many orders would you need to make it viable?

Replies like this, and also suggestions to use SmartGo, kickstart, and the other ideas miss the point, and after a while it becomes depressing.

I know I can speak for at least some of the other regular go authors and publishers when I say that it is not a question of funding or making pots of money. All of us can afford to fund the odd book or two, and we don't need the money. But we do like to see a financial return for what I suppose you can call psychological reasons. None of us likes being taken for granted or being ripped off, for example, and the money is some sort of token that that is not happening unduly. (I don't want to get into a debate about the psychology BTW)

The real problem, and the reason for collaboration with a publisher, is that producing a go book is tedious work. It helps enormously if someone will share the work. If someone helps with the collection of the source material, making the diagrams, doing the proof-reading and dealing with distribution, the actual work of writing/translating becomes just about bearable. With my Slate & Shell books I had the benefit of Bill Cobb doing the diagrams and distribution, while T Mark helped with sources, lunches, the psychiatrist's couch and proof-reading. For the Shuei books I took on the extra burden of the diagrams but I still had T Mark for the other burdens. Struggling through each hoop just seems to make the next hoop seem smaller, and so I'm less and less inclined to do anything new.

As someone said, this is way off topic, and if anyone wants to continue on this theme a new thread shoudl be started. But, important issue though it is, I don't intend to contribute there. I've said my piece often enough.

However, so that people know what I'm talking about, I may well make a post here later with an illustration of the Igo Kansai series mentioned above.

MagicWand said

Fuseki will test your intuition and experience.
If you can not decide which board position is better, then you are lost.
therfore you need to have experience to have intutition so you can analyze the position correctly.

This is not only quite right, but also more important than most weaker players realise, I think.

In my experience, weaker players tend not to know what the fuseki is. They think it is the opening. But in Japanese the opening is "joban".

Fuseki is the "distribution" or "spreading out" of stones (or groups). It is all about, and only about, finding the big points all across the board. As mentioned in a previous post, "big point" is a little bit of a misnomer that has stuck with us for historical reasons, and it really refers to big areas where there is at least one but often several strategically important moves. Being good at fuseki means being able to identify these strategically good moves. Being very good at fuseki means being able to evaluate these good moves and to choose the best ones.

Tactics (i.e. josekis) can play a part in the fuseki but only through the prism of fuseki and only in a supporting role. For example, if you identify what you think is a big point (a "hot" area strategically) on the side, you can evaluate it by assessing what joseki is likely to be played in a nearby corner. If the likeliest joseki is one that leaves you with an open skirt, your move on the side is rather unlikely to be a good one after all. Note that this is how josekis are best evaluated - not as locally equal results, but as practical fighting shapes in a given overall position. A book about fuseki is essentially a description of the various ways to play big-point moves. Tami's list in orders 0 to 5 provides a fairly comprehensive and reliable list.

Books about the joban, however (they do exist, but maybe not in English), talk about different things. They will mention fuseki elements, of course, because the fuseki is part of the joban, but they will also talk about things like probes, reductions and what are misleadingly called middle-game josekis (e.g. the standard ways to play against a shimari enclosure or to answer an invasion on the side). These josekis are really part of the joban, though they do very often define how the middle game will begin and how it will develop.

Many western players look for these kinds of tactics in fuseki books and often don't find them. They are therefore dissatisfied with the books. But that is unfair. The Japanese approach is to learn the fuseki points and their evaluation first and only then graft on the "middle-game josekis" and so on. The best way to do the former is not by making lists but by garnering experience. Obviously, in the game as a whole reading strength will tend to be decisive, but if you consistently get the fuseki wrong, you will always be walking up a down escalator with your tactics (which includes joban tactics, of course). Tactics work better if they are going in the right direction.

John Fairbairn wrote:

daal wrote:I would immediately pre-order. How many orders would you need to make it viable?

Replies like this, and also suggestions to use SmartGo, kickstart, and the other ideas miss the point, and after a while it becomes depressing.

Depressing? Sorry. I wanted to be encouraging. I was trying to indicate that I assume that besides myself, many many people would be interested in such a book. Like a psychological boost in advance. I understand that you don't see much value in squeezing through tiny hoops to write more books, but it's not like nobody would appreciate it if you did.

Depressing? Sorry. I wanted to be encouraging. I was trying to indicate that I assume that besides myself, many many people would be interested in such a book. Like a psychological boost in advance. I understand that you don't see much value in squeezing through tiny hoops to write more books, but it's not like nobody would appreciate it if you did.

I realised you were being supportive, and I appreciate it. But overall the support is not there. The fact is go books currently attract not much more than 100 people (though books for beginners can do better), and journals (or their readers) make no effort to do book reviews. I find it reprehensible in those circumstances that people here chide Robert, for example, for trying to promote his own books. He could arguably do it in a more affable way, but I'm right with him on the fundamental principle of self-promotion. But then I'm one of those old fogies who still thinks books matter to go players.

Sorry for continuing the thread-busting, but I didn't want to leave daal thinking he had misspoken.

John Fairbairn wrote:The fact is go books currently attract not much more than 100 people

Rather books of different contents generate pretty different sales.

This is an example of the Igo Kansai way of handling "How good is your go?" It's a monthly series and respondents accumulate points over the year with a view to earning a diploma. There are 100 points available each month. The allocation of points can vary over the years, but the type of fuseki problem shown below is generally considered to have the highest value and scores 20 points here. The other type of fuseki problem (where you just choose one of five marked options) scored just 15 points, and other problems cover the middle game, endgame and life and death.

In the position below, it is Black to play where? (Although it's not required for the answer, you can make it more stimulating by working out point scores for all the sensible moves. Over 60 are given.)

This series was set by Tafu Kae 3-dan.



The answer is hidden below.



It will not be apparent from this single example, but as I mentioned earlier, the same sorts of comments are made month after month so that eventually it is dinned into you by sheer repetition what is the right assessment (and score) for each type of move. You don't have to understand the best moves; you just need to reproduce them.

The standard is high, incidentally, even though diploma sales drive this exercise. To get a 7-dan diploma you have to score an average of at least 90 points over two separate half-year series (and be 6-dan already). 1-dan requires an average of 63% and the lowest grade acknowledged is 4-kyu, at 57%. A 1-dan diploma cost 30,000 yen in 2005 - not cheap!

In the month from which this was taken, no-one scored 100, and only one chap scored 99. The number of responses is not given but is clearly at least in the high hundreds, because about 300 scored 90% or higher and got the honour of having their names printed.

The difficult part about using "experience and intuition" in the fuseki - or in general - is that your evaluation's correctness cannot be proven. This can be contrasted to localized life and death patterns in which every branch can be enumerated for correctness, and a result can be proven to be true.

This is particularly unsettling to me, because I can never be certain with the correctness of my play (due to lack of proof), and as a result, will always doubt myself in global situations, starting with the fuseki.

Emperically, it is clear that experience and intuition do lead to good resulta, but perhaps this lack of certainty in the early and middle stages of the game leave me less inclined to even try to read globally - there's no way I'll be sure it's correct anyway, so why bother?

This is probably a bad attitude, but one that I for sure adopt. I don't do "global reading" for this reason.

Kirby wrote:The difficult part about using "experience and intuition" in the fuseki - or in general - is that your evaluation's correctness cannot be proven. This can be contrasted to localized life and death patterns in which every branch can be enumerated for correctness, and a result can be proven to be true.

Isn't that a good thing about go? If the fuseki algorithm was 'proven', would we all just have virtually the same games over and over?

oren wrote:

Kirby wrote:The difficult part about using "experience and intuition" in the fuseki - or in general - is that your evaluation's correctness cannot be proven. This can be contrasted to localized life and death patterns in which every branch can be enumerated for correctness, and a result can be proven to be true.

Isn't that a good thing about go? If the fuseki algorithm was 'proven', would we all just have virtually the same games over and over?

I guess so. It doesn't stop me from playing nim, though