HJJ GO Pros and Cons

Go Resources
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Hi. I am a roughly 9 Kyu player with a great passion for Go that has spanned many years but very little actual ability although I study a lot and have piles of books! Recently I saw HJJ GO reviewed by Mike Chen in some depth and it is also a sponsor of KaninGo which presumably endorses it.

What immediately appealed to me was the promise that I would be evaluated by AI? Provided with excellent lectures and then systematically fed materials at around my level. By constantly following their suggested practice which includes games tumego, fuseki and endgame puzzles I would slowly , steadily, and -in their words- smoothly - improve if I worked consistently on their highly organized materials.

Aside from the lectures basically a boot camp for really dedicated learners (that’s me) to solve and repeat puzzles over and over again while beating AI opponents which play according to your level. When I say hard work, I mean hard work! It is in fact, a beautiful website. It is quite expensive but seems to be worth the money at least in terms of the content they offer.

I found the lectures by HJJ a little strange in terms of content and sequencing at first, but concluded that this was a factor of a high level pro thinking about what someone like me really needs and the influence of AI which has changed the game so much since I first started learning all that old fashioned stuff fifteen years ago so I’m going with it.

It has certainly cured my main weakness: if you want to move to the next level you need to get things right and you can only do that by slowly thinking through everything you play before you play it. That was a hard lesson for me for which I will always be grateful. I actually blame Hikaru no Go for all the high speed crappy Go I see and did myself :slight_smile:

However, I have to say that now I feel demoralized and depressed by the course.I am not that bad a player and I usually beat other players around my level on endgame. However, as some of you will know from my posting in another forum, I am occasionally completely stumped by the long and complex endgame problems which, in my opinion, do not match the level of the other aspects of the course in spite of what the makers claim . Thus, I may try such a gremlin 40 or 50 times and still not get what the AI is looking for. It’s really that bad.

I asked the owners to provide feedback and they basically(very politely and perhaps not unreasonably) told me I did not know enough and I should stop where I am and take another course to get the necessary knowledge.

Frankly speaking I think this is one of the worst possible bits of advice for an adult learner. Not just because they are asking me to spend more money but because what I was telling them when I contacted them was that there is no learning process without feedback (I have a number of MAs in learning, psychology and so on so I am only mildly stupid in this area…).

This is the true weak point of this course. Without feedback after a reasonable amount of effort A student will learn nothing. Further, there is no feedback on the tumego either. It is just marked wrong and immediately disappears form the screen. Indeed, I have already met the words =I am learning nothing= from one of the respondents on KaninGO concerning this site.

I personally do not believe this site can achieve the popularity or truly wide usage it deserves unless it seriously reconsiders its learning process because, as I said earlier I am completely fed up at being blocked by just one puzzle when I am seriously determined to move on and really improve my playing. I wonder what other people experiences are with this site?

Warmest regards,
Buri

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Your text is missing paragraphs, cut it in pieces so I can read it (when you separate, leave an empty line between)

When editing you get a button at bottom right looking like a computer screen. This is a toggle to check the result before saving your modifications.

Happy formatting!

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I haven’t come across HJJ before, but your description puzzles me. The type of precise endgame analysis you’ve raised in the other thread is something you wouldn’t normally start studying before about 5k level in my opinion. And as you can see from the most recent discussion, I haven’t entirely mastered it as a 3 dan! It’s good to know the basics of endgame move values, sente and gote. But there’s no point spending a major effort trying to squeeze the last point out of a late endgame position if you’re still making 15-point middlegame mistakes. Tsumego and some strategic concepts will make much more difference at this stage.

(Also I don’t think you get much value out of detailed fuseki study at kyu level. AI has already shown us that half of what we used to teach in fuseki was wrong, and the other half only makes something like a 2-point difference most of the time, maybe 5 points for “really bad mistakes”, again small fry compared to the middlegame for anyone below pro level. Sometimes it feels good to be able to name some of the patterns and recognise familiar things, so fuseki study can be a good motivator, but “feel good” doesn’t translate well into improved results!)

Sorry to hear it’s making you depressed. I also learned this game as an adult, and rate it as one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. I hope you can find a path that works for you. Please keep posting here and updating us :slight_smile:

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I hadn’t heard of the HJJ website before, so I just tried some free content. It asked me to solve 20 life and death or tesuji puzzles, then evaluated my level at G8 (I don’t know how realistic that is, I didn’t try very hard to solve each problem and got many answers wrong). At each level, the website proposes to solve problems, buy courses and play against an AI. I can’t comment on courses since I didn’t try them but will give my impressions on the rest:

  • The AI plays in a… robotic way. It plays AI moves that look stronger than my level but also makes strange mistakes like not defending cutting stones or not defending a cutting point. So playing too much against that AI could give you bad habits (at least around G8 level).
  • You don’t need that website to solve puzzles, there are many resources for that. The fact that the website doesn’t explain why your solution is wrong is not bad in itself. Giving the solution won’t help you improve your reading. If you got a problem wrong, I’d suggest to set it up on a real board, try to understand why it was wrong and perhaps explore the position manually.
  • The website tries to automate teaching as much as possible. If you want interaction and are ready to pay, I’d suggest to take courses with a teacher who reviews your games.
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Thank you. I also feel that the game of Go is one of the most worthwhile things one can do. I do think the site has real potential to bring a large number of westerners who have never tried it to a higher and higher level through the current AI based approach combined with the knowledge of some great player /teachers.

My basic concern is that very little account has been taken of how people learn in a general sense. Adults especially need to know the how and why of their mistakes to benefit.

I am not sure the criteria they use for selecting puzzles is but the next two in the sequence I solved in about 40 seconds each. I noticed a tendency for this swing in difficulty in the Tsumego as well. Not sure if it intentional or not.

I agree about reviewing on a board. However the problem just disappears after failing you. This is more a tech than Igo problem which could surely be fixed easily?

Gonna get back to it now…:slight_smile:

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As someone in the Go community in Taiwan, I can share some insight. The online course of HJJ Go is meant to fill the last mile of traditional Go classes and Go schools. There are already many Go classes and schools here, but a teacher in class can only teach so many students, and most of these classes are too expensive for parents who aren’t sure which “after-school activities” they would send their kids to.

So the idea of HJJ Go online course is like a promotion, letting those who want to try to get a sense of what real Go classes and learning Go would be like, at the same time filling some extra hours after classes with practices for more flexible time management. It was not meant to be a standalone service. HJJ Go does have physical Go classes and cooperative Go schools (albeit all in Taiwan) for those who want to join and learn interactively with real teachers.

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That’s really interesting. It comes across as intended to be some kind of complete system as far as is humanly possible in Go :slight_smile:

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I have noticed the problem with AI. Sometimes it doesn’t play obvious moves to punish very clear errors. I am not sure what the difference between playing AI and the named opponents on the site is actually supposed to be.

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On the top of the page, after the front page, are the course list, notice for the parents (they are the real clients who paid), the physical Go classes location, and then the apps. So you can see how they prioritize and who are their real target audiences.

And to be honest it is more about building a brand and franchise (it is really about promoting and advertisement). I am actually quite surprised to find people outside of Taiwan to find it. I know they are trying to promote internationally nowadays, maybe in the near future, they will be expanding the franchise outside of Taiwan (they still need to build them locally first)

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I read what you sent, I’d love to play with you and I’ll try to help you a little, talk to me

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Thank you for your kind offer. I usually play on OGS.

Warmest regards,
Buri

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Greetings、

I guess the discussion has started to wind down. This is what I personally have concluded after reading the useful comments from everyone and my own experiences as a sloppy but dedicated 9kyuu ish player.

HJJ GO is a well organized set of supplementary materials with some nice but very brief lectures. It just feels like there are too many aspects to GO to leave the learning process to absorbtion through repetition. For me, it’s an elegant game of proverbs, strategy and fun learned by having one’s ideas examined and refined by a superior player. The nitty gritty is important but concert violinist’s don’t just play scales on stage.

I may be completely wrong about this, but I think that although the AI which is tweaked to play me at roughly my level often beats me, it is not a style of playing I would want to emulate particularly. It often seems to be crude and ridiculously aggressive, rarely plays classic (or AI versions of) joseki and makes excessive use of the second line early in the game. I am sure this is a bad habit to acquire. Some of the resultant shapes are really horrible. Also it plays mostly 3-3 in the fuseki with some really flat positions . This is not good classical GO by any standards.

On the whole, I regret getting so locked into this product. It takes a little extra effort but I can get Go problems from any number of sources, watch great lectures by Sibicky, Yoon et al., play on servers and have games reviewed by sympathetic humans. The AI review on OGS is also superior.

So I find myself asking ‘Why did I bother?’ I suppose the poor impulse control I have on the GO board was being reflected in real life, or vice versa. :slight_smile:

Many thanks to all,
Buri

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Nothing beat some quick reviews and discussion of your own game by a stronger human friend.

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They even provide a 1-month free trial for people to try first, so your opinions can help them improve in the future I think (If I can find someone in their team to check on your opinions)

I honestly don’t think they make much money on the online app, they really are just supplement materials/exercises after class (their unique rating system is actually a common practice in most Go schools here which all have their own internal ranking/rating to help split the classes and pair students for practices). And the “practice ladders” are there mostly as more practice to pass their exams (they sold those packages as well, and probably are more profitable). To get official diplomas, you will need to attend amateur tournaments in person, and sort fo have to climb up the ladder (from the DDK rank groups “E”(戊) all the way up to group “A”(甲) before even attempting to qualify for dan). These online tests probably won’t help you much, but the actual class will (and they have live zoom online classes from real classrooms, but all in Chinese, so I don’t know if they put them in the international version).

You really are not the intended target audience IMO, but parents who don’t want to spend extra money for 1-on-1 teaching, or dedicated reviews, and just want some extra practice (usually for practice games with partners here, you need to arrange schedules and classrooms, and there are a limited amount of them, they all cost extra, and online practices are generally not recognized by teachers as prove of students’ strength). This is just a proxy with some extra features.

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Greetings,
Just thought I’d throw in a quick update since it might be relevant for players of my level (around 9 Kyu) who are thinking of investing in this course.

One of the messages I received from the company in question said that the system is designed to guide you smoothly through progressively harder challenges to a presumably quite advanced level of play.

At least for me, this has not been the case, although the level I started at was not bad and I made some improvements in focus, reading and a little knowledge from the lectures which are quite useful, albeit short. (They don’t contain anything that cannot be found free of charge on the Internet.)

The so called smooth progression ended abruptly when I was asked to win a few games against the AI in order to finally get into the next level.which I assumed I had earned.

In fact the level the AI is -calibrated- ? is so high relative to my ability I simply get beaten to death in every game. I play reasonably well for my level in quite a lot of the games, but the AI unerringly out thinks and out counts me while demonstrating an infallible ability to play random looking moves with a directional sense that allows it to acquire huge areas of territory with a minimum number of stones.

In fact, I have lost 97 games against it so far :slight_smile: Since there is no access to new lectures and puzzles while one is working though a level there is essentially no smooth progression at all. I doubt if I am learning much although I am religiously playing through the rather limited review pointers which range from very useful to something the AI understand but I cannot fathom.

In order to reach the level where I can play this AI I would have to stop playing it for a few months and immerse myself in Internet lectures, GoMagic, books of problems and some lessons from an expert tutor.

That being the case, my tired brain is asking why one wouldn’t just do that anyway. It would be quite a bit cheaper and certainly more fun.

Although I don’t want to disrespect the work bearing the name of a superstar professional who has had such a positive influence on the Go world I think players of my level should know what they are getting into before they shell out that money thing we are all so short of these days.

In the same vein, I hope the wonderful streamers who have , with the best of intentions, promoted this material, explore a little more deeply before attaching there name to it, because lower level students of the game like me take their advice very seriously :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Buri

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Although I do value the pushing on working on your own, it seems you miss the link between what you play and what you are taught. You played this. Why? (…) Well not working or are you sure it’s good choice or you play against this fundamental etc …

Another thing is at this level some players (and maybe you) reach a plateau, hard to breakthrough (even for someone trying to help you.) Some general lecture or watching pro games or I dunno may offer you a new regard on what is a game how you play it. I mean like a rupture from one world to the next which has to come from yourself, in some unexpected way. Even a break could provoke it too.

I am curious how a 9k AI plays, in which way, because AI seemed to me to be too consistent during the whole game to get enough weak, approaching ddk world. I should try them but that’s not really an experience I am looking for.

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I am glad you got a reply from their team, maybe you can again ask for their advice instead of just blindly trying the “ladder” (I assume you are referring to one of the four methods in training ladder, against AI, tsumego, opening practice, and end-game practice), Normally you can find real teachers in their live stream (although, I am afraid it’s probably not easy for non-Chinese speakers to ask questions in their livestreams)

And are you in G15 or G16 range? (AI level 100~150 range or 150~200 range?) or even higher? If it is higher (G14 and above), then you are probably not in the right range.

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You can try it for free, you just need an email that can receive the verification link. Just finish the initial 20 questions and get the 1-month free trial (don’t even require credit card verification). I am sure you are stronger than 9k, and you can go back to try any lower-range AIs. (I would say DDK bots on them plays more like follow you around and atari everywhere, capture immediately types that rarely tenuki)

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Hi,
Thanks for your comment. I have worked my way through G15 which was very tough for me. It did help me quite a bit.

However, there seems to be no way to transition from G15 to G14 in my case. I play quite good games with relatively few mistakes . Some good josek, Tetsuji and so on. It’s just that the computer is operating at a higher level of understanding.

Cheers,
Buri

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What about the other 3 ladder practices? tsumego/positional judgments, opening moves (20 move scores), and end-game practices? How do you fair in those?

There is a graph in your strength dashboard showing all these 4 dimensions scores compared to a particular rank.