"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool." Touchstone, As You Like It, Act 5, Scene 1.

In "Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go," Kageyama Toshiro advises us to practice the fundamentals if we want to get stronger. In the same way that ceaseless practice enables professional baseball players to field ground balls effortlessly, go players should practice Go fundamentals until it becomes second nature for them to spot certain key moves, punish their opponents' overplays, and instantly kill commonly occurring corner patterns. Practice, practice, and more practice. And in go, that means spending time doing mental gymnastics, working one's way through problem books of all descriptions.

For Kyu-level players like myself, Richard Bozulich's new series: "Mastering the Basics," is indispensable. The second book in the series: "Volume I: Five Hundred and One Opening Problems has just been published." (Volume II: One Thousand and One Life and Death Problems was released earlier this year and was reviewed in the August 19th issue of the E-Journal). The current book is designed to develop your intuition and feel for the opening, consisting of little more than page after page of opening problems. In a brief introduction, co-author Rob van Zeijst explains the importance of playing urgent moves before big moves. He also suggests how to properly evaluate opening moves that either strengthen your own stones or weaken your opponent's. These basic ideas are illustrated and reinforced over 250 pages of problems compiled by Richard Bozulich based on positions he's collected from professional and high-level amateur games.

The book's central thesis is that by correctly applying a rudimentary set of basic go principles one can fairly easily identify the most important point to play in the opening, which later will tilt the game in your favor once the serious fighting begins. Many players simply love to fight and the temptation for us is to launch full-steam ahead into premature invasions or other such maneuvers just to initiate confrontation. This superb book encourages us to practice careful consideration and calm, qualities that all strong players certainly possess.

Consistent with an emphasis on the simple and powerful, the book's layout is elegantly straightforward, with four new problems on each right-sided page and the solutions on the back of that page, which means you never have to go hunting in the back of the book for a solution. There's also a helpful hint beneath each problem; I suppose the authors must have grappled with where to place these hints - either underneath the problems or in the solutions. My personal preference would have been to have them under the solutions and my strong recommendation is that the reader cover up the hint when attempting a problem the first time.

None of the problems are devoted to the first dozen or so moves in the game, so if you're looking for basic opening lessons check out Janice Kim's books or "Get Strong at Go Volume 1: Get Strong At The Opening," before delving into this book.

While the positions that arise in my own games rarely resemble anything remotely like the positions that show up in professional games, this book does a terrific job of hammering away at some very fundamental concepts of opening strategy that will definitely serve kyu-level players well as they look for the right move in their own games. I am sure Kageyama Toshiro would approve.

This book contains 501 opening problems. Each page contains four problems; each problem gives a position in the opening, paired with a relevant proverb, such as "Expand your territory while attacking your opponent!". Each problem gets a single solution diagram.

The format of the problems worked remarkably well for me. Each problem is really two problems in one: if you're not very confident in your abilities in the opening, you can just read the hints for each problem. But if you want a more challenging test, you can cover up the hints, and do the problems that way. (Keep a piece of paper with the book to cover up the hints; your hand won't be good enough.) As an AGA 1 kyu who isn't very good at the opening, I adopted an intermediate approach: I tried to solve each problem without looking at the hint, but once I'd come up with what I thought was the solution, I looked at the hint. If the hint wasn't consistent with my solution, I tried to solve the problem a second time, keeping the hint in mind. Because of these hints, I suspect that this book would be valuable for a wide range of strengths, perhaps AGA 10k-5d.

But I found the hints valuable even aside from how they made the problems more accessible: their presence helped me characterize the situations mentally. After seeing several problems that give the hint "Invade your opponent's overextended position!", you start looking for that. Then, after doing still more problems where you look for that but where it turns out not to be the right answer, your feel for when a position is overextended approves. So, once I was partway through the book, I could look at a problem and say "Invade your opponent's overextended position!" might apply there, and "Rob your opponent's stones of their base! might apply there, but both of those are a little iffy, whereas it's a clear case of "Push back the border of your opponent's moyo while expanding your own!" So the small amount of theory provided by those hints made reading the book a much richer experience for me than a problem book without such systematic hints would have been.

I recommend this book highly.