Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Easy Go Problems

One recommended way of studying life and death is to work with problems that you can solve almost immediately. Up until now I was not able to find problems as easy as that. The closest thing I could find to that level were the first hundred problems in the book "One Thousand and One Life-and-Death Problems" from Volume 2 in the "Mastering the Basics" series from Kiseido.

Recently I came across the go problems at http://www.gobase.org The first set of The Korean Problem Academy series are just what I had been looking for. They are rated for 25k to 15k.

Doing these problems sometimes feels like nothing more than seeking the obvious vital point and clicking on it, which is something I'm told that you want to avoid in studying life and death. Upon closer reflection, however, I found that most of the problems were so easy, with sometimes only two or three places a stone could be placed, that I found myself seeing the vital point immediately, yet taking the time to look at the other points and see why they didn't work... all within the space of a few seconds.

It was empowering to rip through those problems and have such success. I'm working on the second set now rated for 15k to 5k. I'll undoubtedly be hitting a wall sometime soon.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

The "graded go problem" series of books have helped me a lot. I suggest getting the first book, working through it, then move upward - regardless of your level, you'll learn something; this is the most comprehensive set of problems I have ever seen.