Life, like go, presents many opportunities for success, yet all too often our eyes fail to see the gold. In "Golden Opportunities," Rin Kaiho, 9 dan and raconteur, serves up a fascinating stew of go tactics and historical anecdotes. Rin doesn't lecture; he dramatizes in stories that provide a setting in which to envision go positions as theatre. The stories draw from both east and west. They aid the student's memory. A basic principle in each story foreshadows the correct go action. Aimed at the mid-kyu player in need of fresh perspective to advance but sure to be a joy for players of any strength, this book has great practical value. It mixes well with dry problem collections and joseki texts. It illustrates obvious moves that are really failed tries, develops the cognitive collisions that lead to enlightenment, and examines all the key variations. Get "Golden Opportunities" for fun and profit.

How does a strong professional play if given three, four or five stones by another pro and asked to demonstrate victory with clear, straightforward moves? How much could you learn given access to the pros' thoughts as their game unfolded?

Three complete and deeply annotated games are the heart of Pro-Pro Handicap Go. Eight additional games carry through to about move 50. The book is visually striking. The main diagrams take up most of the 7" by 8" pages, and no diagram gives more than a few moves.

If you're like me and take handis more often than you give them, or if you want to glimpse professional thinking on the white side - this text is great. Unless you're stronger than 9-dans like Ishida Yoshio, Takemiya Masaki and Cho Chikun, you'll learn something. The book has many bonuses. Try forecasting key moves. Learn skillful plays from the pros in sidebar diagrams. Enjoy photographs of 22 well-known professionals. Get stronger!

This book is about not missing big chances, about not playing for a few points when you have a much bigger move in the vicinity. It's divided into three parts: one on finesses, one on local fighting, and one on winning games; so the later parts involve more judgment and are on a larger scale than the earlier parts. In the second and third parts, there are brief historical interludes about famous events (often battles) which are supposed to be similar in some way to the situation that is about to be described. I don't know that the historical events have all that much to do with the board positions, but they're fun to read anyways.

This is a good book. It's a pretty amorphous topic: we'd all like to not miss golden opportunities, but there's no royal road to that. But as a collection of educational positions, it works well. The first part is a nice presentation of a few tesuji; the later sections do a good job about getting you to think about things that you might not think about otherwise.

The book almost never uses Japanese terminology; for example, the title of the first part uses the word 'finesse' instead of 'tesuji'. (The book does use words like 'ko', but it really tries not to use any other than the most basic.) I think that this works well; in some ways, I feel that this is one of the best-translated go books available in English. It contains a two- way vocabulary index, so you can tell what Japanese word a given English word is a translation of. There's also a historical index to help give some more context to the historical notes.