Get Strong at Tesuji
By Richard Bozulich
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Details show/hide
| Title | Get Strong at Tesuji |
|---|---|
| Author | Richard Bozulich |
| Publisher | Kiseido |
| Code | k56 |
| Date | 1996 |
| ISBN | 4-906574-056-4 |
| Pages | 180 |
| Dimensions | 8 1/4. x 5 3/4. - 210mm x 147mm |
| Series Info | Get Strong at Go, Volume VI |
| Publisher's URL | http://kiseido.com/Strong.htm#K56 |
Blurb show/hide
This book is part 6 of the Get Strong at Go Series
All professionals agree! The fastest was to becoming strong at go is to consistently study tesuji and life and death problems. But they also advise you not to study difficult problems. EAsy problems, they say, are the most beneficial, even for dan level players. In other words, quantity of problems studied rather than difficulty is the key to becoming a strong player. In this way, you will familiarize yourself with the key moves in all kinds of patterns, thereby developing your tesuji intuition and zeroing in on the vital points in your own games.
Now the perfect book for studying tesuji is available. Aimed at the player who has just learned the rules and played a few games, Get Strong at Tesuji contains 534 basic problems and is guaranteed to develop your tesuji intuition to the level of a dan player. The problems are divided into three levels of difficulties: easy (25- to 10-kyu), Intermediate (10- to 5-kyu), and advanced (5- to 1-kyu). There are also a few dan level problems toward the end of the book so that you can judge your progress after tackling al the other problems.
Contents show/hide
| Preface | ...iv |
| Some Important Terms and Concepts | ...v |
| Tesuji Problems | ...1 |
Reviews show/hide
Review by David Goldberg (AGA) show/hide 23/04/2001
| Review Author | David Goldberg (AGA) | Reviewer Strength | 7k |
The next best thing to having a personal teacher is a problem book. After I try a problem, I can flip to the answer and get immediate feedback. As a relative beginner there are a couple "theory" books that have helped my game (Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go, Opening Theory Made Easy), but it is mainly the drill of problem books that have raised the level of my play.
"Graded Go Problems for Beginners" were my favorite problem books when I first started playing. I could find a volume that was hard enough so that I learned something, but not so hard as to be frustrating. If, like me, you found those books useful, I strongly recommend "Get Strong at Tesuji". Similar to the Graded series, it's simply a list of 534 problems and their solutions. If you are comfortable with problems at the level of Graded Volume III then you should find Get Strong at Tesuji useful, too.
Unlike Graded, it has some problems that simply ask for the best move, and don't tell you what you're supposed to do (kill stones, live, connect two groups, etc). I found this to be an especially nice feature. It also rates the difficulty of each problem, although I didn't make much use of the ratings. If you like drilling yourself with problems, I highly recommend Get Strong at Tesuji.
Review by David Carlton show/hide
| Review Author | David Carlton | Reviewer Strength | 1 kyu |
| Author's Email | carlton@bactrian.org | website | http://www.bactrian.org/~carlton/ |
This book consists of 524 tesuji problems taken from Tesuji Kyoka Sho, by the Nihon Kiin. They're divided into four levels of difficulty (25-10 kyu, 10-5 kyu, 5-1 kyu, and dan-level); however, the problems in the fourth level only show up in the last hundred problems, and I think that there are only about 10 of them even there, so essentially all of the problems in the book are kyu-level.
I just finished reading this book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm a 2 kyu, and as far as I could tell the claimed difficulty levels were accurate (though of course we each have kinds of problems that we're better at and kinds that we're worse at); even the dan-level problems weren't real killers. (Mind you, I got lots of them (and lots of the other problems) wrong, but there wasn't anything that I felt to be unreasonably difficult.) The problems were quite varied as to difficulty, so if you'd just worked through a page that seemed particularly hard, chances were that the problems on the next page would give you more of a break. And they weren't organized by theme: while similar problems would frequently appear near each other, there would also be lots of problems on different themes near them as well, so you didn't get bored by seeing the same tesuji over and over again.
Reading this book taught me about some of my weak spots that I wasn't aware of, and it was good practice at reading without being too strenuous. (It claims on the back that professionals say that what's important is the quantity of problems that you study, not the difficulty.) I'd recommend it to anybody who as at least a 10 kyu - once you're at that level, most of the problems should be suitable for you.
If you're looking for a life-and-death book along the same vein, try One Thousand and One Life-and-Death Problems .