81 Little Lions: An Introduction to the 9x9 Board for Advanced Beginners, by Immanuel Devillers — Revised Edition (2019)

[lucasfelix]

81 Little Lions: An Introduction to the 9x9 Board for Advanced Beginners, by Immanuel Devillers — Revised Edition (2019)

There are plenty of resources for the 19x19 board, but almost none on the 9x9. 81 Little Lions, intended as a first step to change that, is an introduction to the world of 9x9 play.

Originally published by Immanuel Devillers (a.k.a. @Françisa) back in 2015, the author has kindly given me permission to work on this revised edition before translating the book into Brazilian Portuguese.

The text has been entirely edited and revised, including changes to its structure, layout and formatting. The PDF was optimized for both digital reading and printing, and other formats are also available: AZW3 (for Kindle) and Epub (for Kobo and others).

This book is recommended for players ranked ~15-kyu and stronger. You should know the basic Go terms like atari and komi and be familiar with the concepts of sente and gote.

Although this is far from giving a complete overview or perfect information about the subject, countless hours of the author’s life went into finding and working on strategies and tactics for the smaller boards.

Hopefully you will have an enjoyable read and maybe even learn something new from this book.

Contents

    Welcome to 9x9
    About This Edition
    Short History
    1. The Basics
        1.1. Openings
        1.2. Influence Is Subtle, Control Is Everything
        1.3. A Mistake Is Always Lethal
        1.4. Instant Tsumego
        1.5. Komi Is a Bitch
        1.6. There Is Not Enough Space to Run
        1.7. Two Groups Are Enough
    2. Tsumego
        2.1. Example Tsumego
        2.2. Study Guide
        2.3. Where to Find Tsumego
    3. Learn Joseki
        3.1. My Favorite Joseki
    4. Furikawari
        4.1. The Chapel Technique
        4.2. The Attach-Crosscut Technique
    5. On Jumps
        5.1. Good
        5.2. Bad
        5.3. Depends
    6. Practical Trainer
        6.1. Training 1
        6.2. Training 2
        6.3. Training 3
    7. The End?
        7.1. Link List

Download

Here are the download options for the book:

        o All Formats — Single 7zip File

        o All Formats — Torrent ¹

        o All Formats — Dropbox

            - AZW3

            - EPUB ²

            - PDF

        o All Formats — Internet Archive

            - AZW3

            - EPUB ²

            - PDF

Notes

¹ Please help seed the torrent, ladies and gentlemen. :)

² Kobo owners can also download the book directly from the Kobo Store for free.

[_KoBa]

WOW AWESOME!

Thank you so much for this, i can’t wait to check out the new version!

[mivo]

Thank you! Looking forward to the revised edition.

[lucasfelix]

The links are up, everyone. @_KoBa, @mivo, thank you for the support. I hope you will like the book—and hopefully the edition.

EDIT: I had to make a small change to the files. If you downloaded something before 7 pm (UTC-5) today (01/09/19), please get the current version from the updated links. Thanks!

[Françisa]

Great work! Thank you very much!

[lucasfelix]

Thank you! It was a pleasure, @Françisa.

[mivo]

Thank you! I especially appreciate the epub version! Thank you both for the work that went into this.

[lucasfelix]

01/10/19 5:35 PM (EST): Fixed one line of code in both the AZW3 and EPUB files.

[yebellz]

This is a great book!

I think it should be emphasized that it contains some very good content/advice for all players, even if they have little interest in 9x9 or feel that they are not yet an “advanced” beginner.

Chapter 2 on “Tsumego” offers general advice about the value of doing tsumego and provides some tips about how to study them effectively. It begins by discussing a nice example tsumego that illustrates how doing tsumego can teach you something by surprising your intuition. Overall, the entire chapter is a nice lesson for even a complete beginner, and of course is not specific to the 9x9 game.

The advice about learning joseki at the beginning of chapter 3 (page 22) is another good example of general content good for all levels and interests. It is a good guide for how beginners should approach joseki, and makes a well stated rebuke against the commonly repeated misguidance that joseki should be avoided before reaching a certain rank.

Basically, I recommend that everyone, especially beginners at any level, takes a look at this book.

[anoek]

This is great

@lucasfelix - I’ve taken the liberty of mirroring the files on our CDN and linking to them on the resources page: https://online-go.com/docs/other-go-resources

Let me know when you have the translated versions up and I’ll happily do the same

[driph]

Thank you for putting in the work for the revised edition, @lucasfelix, and thanks again writing the book, @Françisa! It’s been my go-to referral for learning more about 9x9, so I’m thrilled to see an updated version available. :]

[lucasfelix]

01/13/19 2:20 PM (EST): This it. I have finished editing each file with every improvement or fix I could think about, the dame are filled in, the dead stones are accounted for and agreed upon: The links above point to the final version of this revised edition. I will further update this thread with a couple extra download options in the future, but that is most likely that. Thank you for the support.

[lucasfelix]

@driph, thank you very much!

@anoek, that is really kind of you and I will be sure to keep you updated. I have just edited the thread with the links to the final version for the edition. Can you please update the mirrors/links with those files?

EDIT: By the way, @anoek, I am currently unable to add extra download links to the thread (having reached the limit of 5). Is there anything you can do about this?

[lucasfelix]

Final update: The work is as completed as it will be. I still think about things I could change, but one ought to stop sometime, so this it. I've updated each format of the book, provided extra download options, made the last edition to the main post, and moved the thread to the Resources section. Everyone, thank you very much for the support.

Addendum: It seems... I really can't help myself. I've added an entry for 81 Little Lions to Sensei's Library. Figured it would be worth including in the main post because it contains a brief summary of each chapter. But now I'm really done. :)

[ThArGos]

Thanks a lot for this.

I will seed the torrent indefinitely. Hoping it will help.

[lucasfelix]

Thank you for the support, @ThArGos! Working on the Brazilian Portuguese translation, I realized there still were some useful improvements I could make to my edition, so there’s more to come up ahead. Stay tuned. :)

[BHydden]

Felt like it was time to poke the original of this again, and was pleasantly reminded that this updated version exists thanks for your hard work updating the English version @lucasfelix I’m sure the translation will be just as beneficial <3

[_KoBa]

Time for the annual bump, i assume?

[Gia]

I’m reading this now, and I had a weird feeling that I couldn’t place.
I got it now: We can mistake many things in life, but not a work of love.

[cixidetroy]

Hi! Awesome book! Are there any translation of the book? A’d if not, are we allowed to propose one ?