Please for the love of God can someone tell me the solution to this ““““beginner”””” puzzle before I go insane with frustration: Easy Capture 150/0 on Tsumego Hero
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Tell the solution? The crosscut. You can ladder to the side.
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Even after playing it our correctly I still feel baffled. How does anyone ever learn this game?
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Don’t ask me. I suck at it. How I got this problem: Pattern recognition. Solve enough problems and the solutions will start to jump in your face.
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I really recommend the app WeiqiHub for these types of problems: the app categorizes problems by difficulty and also by tesuji type (ladder, net, squeeze, snap back, etc etc).
I’d consider the posted problem to be an example of a Net + Squeeze combo. You can use the app to focus on dozens of simple Net or Squeeze puzzles to develop an ability to instantly recognize the pattern.
WeiqiHub is free, works offline, and runs on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.
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Didn’t know about it. I’ll check it out, thank you.
I also wouldn’t really call that problem a beginner problem or “easy capture”.
Given that the solution is maybe about 10 moves long. I would bet some more advanced players around 15kyu wouldn’t think of it in a game unless you told them to look for a way to capture the stones.
I think sometimes problems are called “easy” for the wrong reasons. If there’s one more or less forced solution no matter how long it is it might be called easy, but that doesn’t mean that the first, third or fifth move is necessarily easy to find, unless you’re used to it.
Many things are easy when you’re used to it, but it doesn’t make it easy inherently.
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I think for many people that are really good at their field it’s tough to understand what is hard for the average person. That’s why imho it’s often a bad idea to let these people teach, especially beginner.
I studied math and was mediocre. That’s when I noticed it the first time and the most distinct. Professors often just could not understand why average students could not get what they were teaching, because to them it was this trivial.
Looking at go collections I often get the feeling that many of them are compiled by player that just don’t get why this problem could be other catigorized than trivial, because they don’t get that this move could be not obvious to someone.
So essentially what shinuito wrote from a different perspective.
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I think the puzzles do have a rank, that puzzle (#150) seems to be
While the one just before it (#149) is 17kyu
So maybe that can give a sense to the difference in difficulty in the puzzles.
But that doesn’t explain why it’s in say “easy capture”, having puzzles side by side that are more than ten ranks apart
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These are just collections that are mostly topical, but also give a hint about the AVERAGE difficulty in the name. This is not even the hardest tsumego in that collection. But most are indeed easy.
And btw: You can access tsumegos by difficulty and also by tags there for example ‘10k snap back’ problems.
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By experience, step by step. Be with problems or be with playing. It’s quicker when you play with players who have contact with players with go theory, which is usually the case luckily. And it’s quicker if you don’t hurry but push yourself a little bit to find better moves.
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Play Go at online-go.com! | OGS Turns out I am also too dumb to do number 9 of these allegedly completely introductory “puzzles”