Caught in a cross-cut? Then extend! Or at least so goes the famous proverb. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), Go is rarely that simple. After studying a large number of next move problems, Richard Hunter observed that the extension was rarely the correct solution to a cross-cut problem. His suspicions were apparently confirmed by watching advice from two professionals on Japanese TV. Consequently he undertook an extensive study of situations in which cross-cuts arose in actual play. This research led Hunter to identify nine (yes nine) basic patterns that frequently arise from cross-cuts, depending on the presence or absence of other friendly or opposing stones in the vicinity.

The results of Hunter's study, which was first published in a series of articles in the British Go Journal has now been pulled together in the form of a slim book, entitled Cross-Cut Workshop, the latest offering from Slate and Shell Press. The material in the book contains the original articles plus a dozen new problems for additional practice. The depth of presentation is suitable for Kyu-level players, although low-level Dan-level players may wish to review it.

I recommend this book highly. Hunter's approach is wonderfully didactic: He presents the nine basic patterns in two parts. For each pattern, he shows you how to handle the cut correctly and what can happen if you play incorrectly. Problems are provided along the way to test your understanding of the material. And additional problems are included at the end to reinforce the lessons.

Apart from the immediate lesson of how to handle a cross-cut, the book shows Kyu-level players the importance of being able to look at a situation and mentally work through several different patterns. It is not enough to simply come up with your next move (i.e. extend -- more of the time wrong anyway). Hunter demonstrates how you must adjust your strategy to the presence of surrounding (friendly and opposing) stones and be able to work out an entire sequence of moves before playing the first stone. Learn that lesson, and the one afternoon that you spend reading this book will be repaid many times over.

This short (70 pages) book is all about the cross-cut. We all know the proverb: "after the cross-cut, extend"; the book is the result of the author's noticing that that didn't seem to be the case in many problems and games that he encountered, and his deciding to investigate further. The material was originally published in the British Go Journal.

The first chapter presents some somewhat more refined proverbs about extending and the cross-cut. But don't get too excited about these new proverbs: the last of the proverbs is "play atari if there are other stones around", and there are almost always other stones around. The author therefore breaks up typical responses to the cross-cut into nine basic patterns. He presents these in two chapters, with a chapter of review problems following each half and another chapter of review problems covering all nine patterns at the end.

When I first started doing the problems I was kind of disappointed. I'd read the appropriate chapter a couple of times, but the patterns still hadn't really stuck in my head. I therefore tried to do the problems by pattern-matching, looking for features in the surrounding stones in one of the basic patterns that matched the surrounding stones in the problem. Unfortunately, this didn't work very well. My initial reaction was to get annoyed at the book: it didn't tell me how to do the problems! But after thinking about it for a bit, I decided that this was more a reflection of the fact that go is hard: there may be some situations in the game where there are simple rules that lead you to play correctly, but when dealing with cross-cuts you (at least initially) just have to read things out after each possible continuation and use your judgment. And many of the continuations require a fair bit of reading to see what's ultimately going to happen.

So after I started using the book as a crutch less and reading out the continuations in the problems more, I got better at the problems and was less annoyed with them. (Which isn't to say that I had a particularly good track record at solving the problems: they're hard, and I didn't feel like spending ages on each one.) And having these patterns in my head when trying to read out cross-cuts is, I think, going to be pretty useful in my future games: some of them were continuations that I'd frequently considered before in the past, but others of them are continuations that I really didn't usually consider. So I expect that I'll start getting a bit better at reading out cross-cuts as I encounter them more in games after reading this book. (And I also expect that I'll start to get more of a subconscious feel as to when to use which pattern.)

The upshot is a book that's pretty good at what it does, I think. You certainly won't be a master of the cross-cut after reading it, but that's too much to expect from a go book and you'll probably read out some better continuations than you had been before. Whether or not you're interested in a book with such a narrow focus is another matter: there are, of course, a lot of more general go books to look at first! However, I for one am glad that this book exists, simply because it doesn't overlap other books available in English at all. The curse of reading lots of go books is that, nine times out of ten, new books fall into categories of which I already have other examples, but this book is a new category: positional discussion (like joseki books or tesuji books) rather than theoretical discussion, but discussion of positions that aren't covered in other books. My to-read stack currently has yet another joseki book on it; but why would I want to see a presentation of joseki that are slightly different from those in several other books that I own and most of which I'll never encounter in a game, when I could instead see a discussion of the cross-cut, which isn't covered in any other books and which I'll run into multiple times in every game I play? So there seems to be a real gap in the English-language literature on analysis of local positions that aren't joseki but that also aren't quite tesuji. (Or perhaps they are joseki in the sense of "fixed stones", but they might not be in corners and they might not occur in the opening, so aren't covered in traditional joseki books.) I'm glad that the small presses that are flourishing recently are devoting their time to books like this one.