What a find for us weak/middle kyu players! If you are weaker than 9 kyu and you play in a club dominated by strong kyu players and dan-level players, you probably spend most of your time playing handicap games. If this is so, this book will be very useful for you. Although it is called a "Dictionary" it does not provide simply brief catalogue of handicap joseki and tesuji like many of the other dictionaries - it actually explains fundamental principles of handicap play in terms that weaker players can understand. The book is written from Black's perspective. Each handicap level - from nine stones down to two is covered. Most diagrams have only seven or eight moves. Each diagram has comments on the key concepts illustrated. The nice thing is that one can actually develop an instinct for the shape of the stones and how they move. The book is designed for you to see what moves are possible and the reasons for their choice - with a consistent strategy in mind. It not only shows the 'good' variations, it also shows some 'weaker' variations and explains the difference. I suspect that the book is written for players in the 15-10k AGA range. I am sure that study and application of the principles within the book, (with the view of understanding rather than memorization) will result in you becoming a stronger player.

This is the entry on handicap go in the Nihon Ki-in Handbook series. It has a somewhat hard-to-classify style: it's like a dictionary in that its contents are structured taxonomically (in this case by the number of handicap stones and, within each number, by the initial patterns of stones that are played); but it's not nearly as comprehensive as a dictionary would be. Like a dictionary, the text consists entirely of examples; but the examples play out much longer than examples in a dictionary would.

Given its style, the book seems well done. It seems to me to have done a decent job of picking important representative patterns for each number of stones. The discussion of each sample pattern plays out for long enough that you can get a pretty good feel for the key ideas that are important when playing according to that pattern, and the key pitfalls that you can go into. (The games typically go up to the very beginning of the middle game.) And I found the discussion to be easy to read.

This style of book isn't for everybody, of course: if you want to see overarching theory look elsewhere. And, while my eyes didn't glaze over nearly as fast while reading this as they do while reading a dictionary, I did start to skim the book when I reached the second half. I expect that weakish players (double-digit kyu or upper single-digit kyu, say) would find it tough going; but of course those are the players who are also most likely to find themselves playing high-handicap games. (Though the book does go all the way down to three-stone handicaps.) But if the style doesn't sound offputting and you want to see many examples of how handicap games could start, give it a look.