Demo: Joseki needed to reach shodan

@Fairgo, OGS 2d, moderator, and all around cool guy, has provided the following demo on the basic joseki you need to know in order to reach shodan. Enjoy!

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Good list. It’s a bit dated though. I feel it’s important to distinguish knowledge and practice here. All dan players should know these variations, but the likelihood you need to follow them as prescribed is pretty slim if you ask me. (I only play the first one nowadays.)

Great, many thanks for sharing !

I must admit that I’m a bit surprised that reaching shodan does not require to know a lot more josekis : is it that joseki studying is only really useful at dan levels ?

this is really great :slight_smile:

I have yet to hit OGS sdk, so I’m not really qualified to talk, but it seems like the number of joseki shown is a bit low. Nick Sibicky’s Must Know Joseki series covered more and it was more focussed on breaking into sdk if I recall correctly.

Haha, I just noticed this thread. So, let me try to explain best I can:

If you’re talking about play among pros, then yes it is a bit dated. However I’ve seen all these variations played rather frequently at some point in my matches on OGS/KGS/IGS. I also play most of these josekis in my games myself.

Studying joseki can be useful at all levels. What I was trying to get at is the fact that you don’t need to know a dictionary worth of joseki in order to reach shodan. Just 4-5 joseki that occur frequently + punishments. For reference, until 3k or so I only knew 1 3-4 joseki and 2 4-4 joseki. After that I spent a lot of time learning various obscure joseki (mostly for fun), but that rarely showed up in my games or were that useful. It’s important to note that most games among amateurs weaker than 5d are decided in the mid-game. Doing tsumego, improving positional judgement, and learning tesujis are in my experience more helpful.

I hope this answered your questions. :slight_smile:

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Fair enough, but as you said, learning joseki can be fun. :slight_smile: Recently I opened up the can of 3-5 joseki and have been having a blast with early fighting. I think it’s hurting my game a little, but that just shows an area in which I can improve.

3-5 josekis were really fun to learn…especially the various taisha variations. :wink:

It takes some getting used to, but if you become proficient in them then the double 5-3 opening can make for some interesting games! :slight_smile:

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Yep, I’ve started playing some games with only 3-5 points. It was actually people talking about Jabberwocks in the Hurt/Heal thread that got me interested in 3-5 points, though I’ve been curious about taisha for a while now.

It did, thanks ! That’s exactly what I was aiming at : focusing on tsumego and middle game is more useful. I’ll definitely look into the josekis you’ve listed though ! Thanks again

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