Life In 19x19

I just got to a flaky 3k on kgs, and now I want to keep my progress going. I've been improving about a stone a month, and I'd really like to keep this trend going. My final goal is 1d this year (after that, I guess I'll need to set a higher target).

As a go player, I feel like my biggest strengths are more strategic than tactical. My games are rarely violent. I think I need to acquire a skill at violence to become a better go player. Because of this, I'm going to try a reading focused study plan.

The plan

• At least 20 minutes of life and death from the Lee Chang-ho life and death set.
• Spend at least 20 minutes trying a page (6 problems) from 501 Tesuji problems.
• At least 20 minutes doing problems from Vital Points and Skillful Finesse for Sabaki.
• Play at least one game a week on a korean server on wbaduk.

Other than that, I'll keep up with playing kgs/dgs/ogs games, and post any games I lose in this thread for review, even (especially) if they're due to embarrassing mistakes.

Redundant wrote:My games are rarely violent.

Play me and you'll see enough violence for a lifetime (on the other hand a lifetime is not very long in my games, one of us will die big)

Li Kao wrote:Play me and you'll see enough violence for a lifetime (on the other hand a lifetime is not very long in my games, one of us will die big)

Perhaps, then, you should learn to play solid and non-violent. You'll learn a lot, and you may eventually learn how to balance the two.

Li Kao wrote:Play me and you'll see enough violence for a lifetime (on the other hand a lifetime is not very long in my games, one of us will die big)

I'll definitely take you up on this.

I've been trying this "trick" joseki that shaddy taught me. It seems to start giant fights. Here's an example from a game today. This game was a giant fight.

A game of beauty

Today I got in some tsumego from the blue book of the lee chang-ho series. I did respectably well.

I also did some problems from VPaSFfS. Most of these I ended up just checking the answer to learn the technique. I will do the problems again once I've forgotten most of the details to see how much of it stuck.

if you ever forget, the difficulty is, easiest to hardest, green-blue-purple-brown-red-yellow. yellow caps out at around gengen gokyo difficulty = 1-2d or so.

Shaddy wrote:if you ever forget, the difficulty is, easiest to hardest, green-blue-purple-brown-red-yellow. yellow caps out at around gengen gokyo difficulty = 1-2d or so.

So the Yi Chang'ho-Series is useful for 5 Kyu KGS, at least counting the first books? I always wondered if I should buy these, but you'll find nowhere on which rank books aim.
How much of a problem is it to not understand korean? =D Are there are a lot of instructed problems?

To the game:
I don't understand Black B15. Why not give Atari from C14? A lot less problems, I think. Black C11 is family feud, giving White a strong outer wall, which threatens the three lonesome stones. Furthermore C11 remains weak at the same time.
Really good game for White, you surely took your profit all over the board =)

Yes, the series goes from 6k to 2d. They are in chinese, I don't think you lose much as long as you can read "W to play" and "B to play", but I may be wrong as I can't read chinese. I found them extremely good study tools, but I had no other source of tsumego when I got them.

Hm, my local Go-store lists the Yi Chang'ho series in Korean. You have a link to the Chinese translation?

Thank you!

But someone already explained me that I mixed up the Yi Chang'ho series. He has a complete problem set covering Joseki, Life-and-Death, Tesuji, Hamate, Haengma etc., too, and I thought you meant this.
His raw Life-and-Death- and Tesuji-sets seem to be great. I think, I have to register on eBay in the next month =D

SoDesuNe wrote:So the Yi Chang'ho-Series is useful for 5 Kyu KGS, at least counting the first books? I always wondered if I should buy these, but you'll find nowhere on which rank books aim.

The first two books (the green and the blue one) of the Yi Ch'ang-ho Life and Death series are very accessible. I took about a week to do both books, and this was when I checked the answers afterwards, so I know I got around 90-95% of them correct as a KGS 7k. I haven't gotten round to volumes 3-6 but the first two aren't very hard at all.

SoDesuNe wrote:How much of a problem is it to not understand korean? =D Are there are a lot of instructed problems?)

I have them in Chinese, and you really only need three characters ("black", "white", and "first") to solve them. I haven't got a clue about Korean though. But I always find the English hints in the Graded Go Problems for Beginners series very annoying, because it forces me to keep the book upside down as to not read the text.