Life In 19x19

I bought this book some time ago and for various bad and uninteresting reasons, left it in a dark corner of my house... until now.

The eBay ad mentionned its level was "AGA 10k to dan level", so I figured I might be able to solve 1/4 to 1/2 of the problems easily and work hard on the others.

... and it just so happens that I'm barely able to solve any problem. Hmmm.

So my question is, if you bought and/or went through this book, what would you say is its real level ? I know I'm really, really bad at reading for my level, but either I'm even worse than I thought or this ad was misleading. I'll just leave it for the time being and come back to it later.

I don't know this book, but since it's a Tesuji book I thought I could tell you from experience that those are hard to measure in ranks.
I bought "Get Strong at Tesuji" a while ago and it is aimed at SDK and lower. In my first run I got at least 50% wrong simply because I was not used to search for moves, which give me superior shape, thickness, end in Sente, make bad shape for the opponent and so on. I had only done Tsumego so far and those Tesuji problems are extremely different.
Furthermore I hadn't read "Tesuji", yet, so I didn't know any special Tesuji moves.

So maybe it is the best to look at the answer, try to understand what the correct move accomplishes, go back to the problem and read/figure it out yourself again. This only works for Tesuji problems, because they often/always deal with a certain shape, which is important to remember.

SolarBear wrote: So my question is, if you bought and/or went through this book, what would you say is its real level ? I know I'm really, really bad at reading for my level, but either I'm even worse than I thought or this ad was misleading. I'll just leave it for the time being and come back to it later.

10 kyu is way off. I stopped looking at this book when I only got one problem right out of the first six. These are problems with lots of major branches which is why there are usually five or six answer/failure diagrams for each problem.

A wild guess as to the level would be 1 or 2 kyu to dans.

Can you post one or two of the problems?

daniel_the_smith wrote:Can you post one or two of the problems?

Sure. Here are three out of the first six problems in the book. I failed to solve all three of these.

The second problem in the book:



The fourth problem:



The sixth problem:

The first one seems easy (or I missed something), the second two seem like dan level. Haven't solved them yet.

daniel_the_smith wrote:The first one seems easy (or I missed something), the second two seem like dan level. Haven't solved them yet.

Maybe it's just too far past my bedtime, but I haven't found the first one yet - the usual tesuji for this sort of thing doesn't seem to work (white has a really good resistance that starts with a hane underneath.)

Nice problems! At least single-digit kyu level for sure, probably more like 3-5 dan.

Since the blurb says the book is arranged in sections by type of problem, I'm guessing they're not really arranged in difficulty order. So it's quite possible that there are 10k level problems in the book, but these three certainly aren't.

Hm...the first one seems mid-kyu level, and the other two seem maybe low-kyu or low-dan. I got the first and third ones right pretty quickly, the second one after a little bit of thought...is the answer to the second one a ko by any chance?

odnihs wrote:Hm...the first one seems mid-kyu level, and the other two seem maybe low-kyu or low-dan. I got the first and third ones right pretty quickly, the second one after a little bit of thought...is the answer to the second one a ko by any chance?

Ko is the best I could get last night for the second one - I just got the first one after looking at it again (wow, that was a bad blind spot. Now I think 3k or so.)

From the book, the solution to problem 2:



The solution to problem 4:



The solution to problem 6:

Ah, now that it's out on a board it looks so much clearer. xD Guess I didn't go ahead far enough on the second(4th) problem to see that it wasn't ko.

The A/B marks were confusing to me - I thought it meant black had to choose from between those for the first move. Should have realized it was "how to accomplish both at once?"

Looks like tesuji problems are needed in my study plan!