After the first impression to have yet another ordinary commented game collection with standard statements like "This position is good!", "This position is bad!", "This move is biggest!" one is asking oneself for the book's intention. Just tiny anecdotes about the author and interesting appendices about go history in Korea can't be it. So what? 20 games are analysed with a short commentary on 10 pages each. Mistakes. The author remembers and describes his mistakes. The games start with his early ones, so there are even a lot of mistakes. How could a top professional player ever play so badly? Wait. He is describing his own humiliation. So what is he telling us after all? Mistakes by the professional - how encouraging! They are also humans then. But why has that particular player been so successful in international go? Because of his strategic and shape insight. Not much commentary is given, but the selection concentrates on major strategic decisions. Well, on some of these; others are omitted. Thereby the reader learns about the strategic flow of a game. Instead of being lost in endless details one is led directly to the core of global events. Almost directly, see above. Ignore some useless comments and enjoy the strategy!

This is a collection of games by Cho Hunhyun. It contains 12 games from his professional years in Japan (the games are from 1967-1971), and 8 games (mostly) from international tournaments (1988-1994). It also contains a brief afterword, a CV of Cho, and chapters on the history of go in Korea and on the genesis of the book in Japan.

It's a good book. Each game has ten pages of commentary, with nine figures, various comments, and supporting diagrams; so more commentary than, say, games in Go World, though less than that on the better-commented games in The 1971 Honinbo Tournament. The commentary is by Cho himself, so you get his own point of view and thoughts on his state of mind while playing the games; I like that aspect of it.

The choice of games is rather peculiar, doubtless caused by the fact that the book was originally written for a Japanese audience. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed reading through some of the games from when he was a 2 dan: the mistakes that he made were closer to the kinds of mistakes that I can imagine making but learning not to make! So, while I wouldn't recommend that all collections of pro games include games from such a level, I didn't mind their inclusion here. Some of the middle-dan games I could have done without, though; surely some more interesting games from Korea could have been found to take their place, if there weren't a desire to skew the contents towards Japanese games.

The material at the end is pleasant enough but unexciting.