Cho Hun-hyeon 9-Dan came to Japan to study Go at the age of ten. He won many tournaments with clean 3-0 sweeps, long dominating Korean Go. His lectures help the intermediate player to answer attacks by building secure shape and structure for the endgame. For example, the connection of two stones to form a "full" triangle after a hane is often seen in strong games. Cho shows us by example why this is essential to prevent problems later. When two stones touch on the third line, do you play up or down, extend or hane? Cho demonstrates the preferred sequence of moves that will stand to the endgame and shows why other results are inferior. The problem sets are, like joseki, fighting patterns analyzed to obtain a good result. The book format is brilliantly designed. Each topic comprises a set of clearly numbered diagrams to illustrate weak and strong play. Each diagram is supported by a caption and brief explanation. There is no other text to confuse the reader. The brief introductory chapter illustrates connects, cuts, shapes, and hanes in detail. Problem sets comprise the bulk of the book, each answering situations that arise in play. Each problem is set on a right-hand page with a handful of stones already in correct position. The possible solutions follow two per page, clearly captioned, to show good and bad responses for each side. The diagrams save 1000 words in illustrating correct stone placement relative to those already in position. What else is Go is about?

This book is ideal for players of 10-24 kyu. Strong players might review for fundamentals missing from their game. Writers, translators, and Go book editors would do well to study and utilize the clear format.

I like this book a lot. I think it is aimed at a weaker player than David is, which is why he finds much of it uninteresting. The expository section, while short, is very clear, and explains fundamentals in more detail than one often sees. The problems are simple but have detailed solutions (along with excellent explanations of why alternate moves that look good to a 10 kyu are mistakes), a combination that is unfortunately rather rare in other Go literature. Working through them, I never got the (common to me) feeling of 'I know my proposed answer must be wrong, but I have no idea why'. I find this an excellent book for reviewing fundamentals. I'd recommend it for 15k (for whom it will contain many revelations) all the way through 5k (for whom it will be a good review).

This is a book on techniques (surrounding, connecting, attaching, hanes, etc.). It has 30 pages of exposition and 186 pages of problems (comprising 45 problems, so the solutions have quite a lot of exposition themselves).

I don't like the expository portion very much. Basically, it's too short to do more than serve as a reminder to the topics contained therein. So it's probably best to think of this as a problem book, with a reminder section at the beginning.

As to the problems, they're okay. Each problem has three pages of explanation (comprising six diagrams), which is nice. They often turn out to be joseki problems, but presented from a "find the correct shape in this position" point of view rather than a "what's the next move in this joseki?" point of view, which is kind of interesting. Still, they didn't excite me too much.

The front cover says that this is volume one; nothing inside talks about what might be in future volumes. The author's name is perhaps more commonly spelled "Cho Hun-hyun".