I’ve been playing for 3 weeks, read 60 pages of a beginner book and watched some 4-6 hours of YouTube on how to play go. I plan on finishing the beginner guide to go. Any tips on what books would be helpful in getting better? One thing that comes to mind is a problem solving book.
At your level, honestly whatever you find enjoyable. Most people would say you should focus on just playing games, but as long as you enjoy the study content, it’s fine. The content and medium is largely irrelevant.
4 Likes
There are numerous books on each aspect of Go: Life&Death, Common Sequences, Opening Theory, Shape Moves, Tricky Plays, Endgame, etc. As long as you study something, you’ll learn.
If you just want a generic book, the best I know of is Kageyama’s “Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go”, but it’s not really written for beginners, more like for those 15k+ who are lost in what and how to study. But it does give good guidance on pretty much every aspect and it gets you in the right mindset to study.
Otherwise, try “Elementary Series” for a more traditional, comprehensive study. These also aren’t that “elementary” unfortunately, but they’re quite good.
2 Likes
I am 1800 in chess so there is a lot of transfer over such as the terms strategy and tactics. I understand that this is a whole different beast as well.
This website has a bunch of info and reviews about various go books. I’ve found it useful.
In particular, they have a book list organized by difficulty, which may be helpful:
https://www.gobooks.info/bib-difficulty.html
Sensei’s Library is a wiki for go and a great resource:
https://senseis.xmp.net/?PagesForBeginners
Solving puzzles is always helpful for getting stronger. You’ve probably already found the puzzles part of this site:
1 Like
Graded Go Problems for Beginners, Vols. 1 & 2, hands down the best problem books for beginners. Must have.
5 Likes
Also the beginner series by Janice Kim was useful — it’s like 5 books, so I’m not sure if the investment is worth the return, but they were definitely useful for a beginner. They are instructional books, not problem books, just fyi.
I printed out the elementary/intermediate booklets from https://tsumego.tasuki.org/ when I first started. It will take a while to get through them but they are good ones to study.
There aren’t a lot of easy problems in English books. Luckily, you don’t need to be able to read the language for tsumego. The site https://www.101weiqi.com/book/ has some excellent beginner problem books.
1 Like
+1 These helped me out tremendously
1 Like
Totally agree.
BTW these are the printing errors I’m aware of in volume 1 to help avoid confusion:
- p.61: Problem 150 should read,“What move does Black make to kill the White stones?” not “What move does White make to kill the White stones?”!
- p.78: Problem 195 is identical to Problem 180. Does this mean I missed out on one?
- p93: Answer to Problem 3 should read,“Black captures the corner stone with 1.”
1 Like
That question must be referring to some of my games 
I do remember coming across a few errors while going through vol. 1 as well. Now I wish I had documented them to add to your list
1 Like
@swarminglocusts, Don’t be put off by our mentioning of printing errors (very few).
They are excellent books with an instructive progression of the ideas behind the problems.
1 Like
Ah, I was just reminded of this thread.
Yesterday, I made a small introduction to 101weiqi.com that will quickly get you to two modes of solving problems. 45 second time trials and unlimited time (and two attempts) problems around your rank.
2 Likes