This attached picture is from Neil Moffat’s excellent book “Go By Example - Correcting common mistakes in double-digit kyu play.”
My question is why white would defend where shown in the book (see my red line) rather than atari at the spot right above it.
Atari is definitely possible. In fact white should atari and play elsewhere if there are other big moves still available. Still a better result for black then just making an eye.
The reasoning of the book is strange: Black is aready alive so doesn’t need to add a move. But perhaps Black is a weak player so may want to add a move in sente to make sure. And Black knows that the move is sente because Black can read that the new position is already alive… However I don’t see why the new position is easier to read than the old one.
Not sure I’d call this book excellent, as black is already alive the best lesson would be to tenuki. “Instead of playing this bad unnecessary gote move, play this less bad unnecessary gote move”.
To be fair, he does say that Black does not need to play, but that if he does not trust his judgement, he can do it more efficiently with 6-3 than with 8-1.
But gote? Could it not be sente if this position arose toward the end of the game? And at DDK your opponent quite likely does answer earlier, so in a way it is. Of course we want them to read better, but at least it illustrates the important idea of defending in sente. If an AI played a threat you could not read, maybe you would make an unnecessary move too.
But of course he should have chosen a sounder example, also dealing with @jlt’s good point that the new position is no easier to read — especially if you have to visualise the two moves!
Of course, this is all subjective, but I have found his entire series (“Go by Example”) to be extremely useful. I like his move-by-move diagrams and explanations, and his ability to communicate to the reader in an easy-to-understand manner. And I like the way he organizes the material in his books.
Ok, that’s fair. Perhaps they are good for taking you from say 20k to 10k, but they might teach you bad habits or wrong things that are then hard to unlearn to progress further. This can also be true for other books which also make simplifications for the sake of teaching, but my worry is it is true to a greater extent for his books (I’ve briefly checked another of his at a go book stall). Having a stronger player check the books for correctness of go content which he could then correct, whilst maintaining his digestible style, would have been good IMO. For example that bottom right diagram looks like a classic kyu mistake being taught as good play, from what I can tell from the clipped text.
Yeah, the author doesn’t seem strong. Good for learning how to be solid? But there are better examples and books. Taking this far would lead to playing a lot of forcing moves you really dont need and unnecessarily strengthening your opponent. I also agree with everyone above - its simply better to not fix at all and just tenuki. By tenuking more often, you learn when you need to fix rather than wasting moves to always fix
Neil’s books were all corrected and revised by dans players.
Well, they didn’t do a very good job of it then.
Writing a full book is quite a task. To ask a review on it by dans amateurs is maybe not enough, a review by real strong pros might be advised in that case.
I haven’t read that book and I can understand it to be well addressed for DDK public. Sometimes things you teach may prove wrong later, but helpful at this level. For exemple you say a tiger mouth is a way to connect until you got trapped in a snapback.
I guess that we could modify the diagram so that white must save his stone. For exemple if the center road is closed, and there is a way to kill. In that case Atari would become a useless crude move.
I just had a look at the amazon sample for another of his books, a section about the importance of reading. It contained classic kyu reading mistakes in the lesson of correct play, such as playing a move you think is sente (unnecessary atari squeeze) before playing the important move, assuming the opponent answers your fake sente, when in fact they should ignore it and play the important move before you. Not following the 123 principle.
And the example on the back cover also suggests playing a bad move with the reason of being good shape (it’s not) and aiming at another bad move which indicates a poor grasp of killing techniques of corner groups.
P. S I know the 3d and 1d who are strongest player he thanks for checking his 2 books I looked at.
I don’t think the point is to make the readers dan players. Just like you don’t need to teach a 15k the nasty variations of an avalanche, you don’t need to teach them the perfect plays in all situations either. The aim of this book is clear from the get-go : help the ddks reach 10k. In that view, the simple explanations he gives about positions are good enough, and even appropriate, as he keeps well in mind the targeted audience. When debating the pros and cons of a book (not just Go, but all books), you really need to take the context into account. Yes, he’s not the strongest, yes, the book contains explanations that could be revised by stronger players. But that doesn’t make it less helpful or interesting in any way. Just like a 9p would be able to revise some our strong 6d amateurs go books, which are yet fairly interesting and helpful at our level.
While this book looks dreadful, Uberdude, there are also pros or top-level amateurs who offer “lessons” and “reviews” to very weak players who pay for these lessons for years without improving. At a certain point you have to accept that there is some kind of infotainment “aesthetic feeling of learning” as opposed to actually getting better that some people not only enjoy, but are actually willing to pay for.
Interesting comments here. I didn’t intend to subject the author to such criticism, but points are well taken. I’m not trying to compare Mr. Moffat’s books to well-known “classics” such as the Kiseido Elementary Go Series, Get Strong At…, and others.
From what I read, Mr. Moffat was a KGS 2-kyu at the time of authorship. What sort of seems strange to me is that he also has another book in this series aimed at single-digit kyu players. It just seems strange that a non-dan player would be writing a book about improving single-digit kyu play. And I believe his book on fully commented games even contains comments on some dan-player games. That also seems odd.
It would be wrong to claim that a 1-kyu can’t teach a 15-kyu some beneficial things, but I understand that there’s also a big difference between a 1-kyu player and a 5-dan amateur, and that many of the books in the Elementary Go series were actually written by strong amateur dan players (some in collaboration with professionals).
It’s also sometimes better to judge the things said by people on their merit than on some rank they have.
A 1kyu can teach another 1 kyu things, joseki they happen to have studied more than the other player, or a 1kyu could teach a 2 Dan some Tsumego they haven’t seen before.
I don’t think your rank says how good you are at explaining things, or in absolute terms what you do or don’t know or should be trusted with explaining.
The rank says how good you can play the game competitively at all aspects within a single game. You can be very good at Tsumego but your whole board judgment or joseki choices might lead you to lose games, or you could be good at fighting and terrible at endgame and that’s why your rank isn’t improving. You could also just be really bad at clock management 
It doesn’t mean that you don’t have useful information to pass onto others.
1 Dan and SDK are also pretty arbitrary barriers to set for expectations on who can teach who.
A 1 Dan now isn’t necessarily the same as 1 Dan 30-40 years ago, when some of the older books were being written. So the notion of a “dan” probably has changed, though being a high Dan like 4-5+ Dan probably hasn’t changed that much.
I think the main problem is that with go books specifically, they are written with the intent of the information being correct unless otherwise stated. Rank is also important - I would not trust a 15k to write a book for Dan level players. Why do so many people trust katago and other strong AIs? They have mistakes too and pros abuse them. But overall, the AIs are so much stronger, which is why we study from them. Similarly, a high dan is more trustworthy than a low dan, than a SDK on average. I would not read a go book and assume the information in it isn’t mastered by the author unless otherwise stated somewhere. It is quite disruptive too - I dont think it is ill intended by the author but it can seen that way.
There is a difference between simplifying moves and ideas to make it easier to understand vs accidentally (hopefully) giving readers incorrect information.
Plus, the book title is “Correcting mistakes…”. Would you correct mistakes with another mistake when teaching? And it is unclear if the correction is better in some cases. For these kinds of sequences/moves, you need to be exact.
There are books for that, this shouldn’t be one of them. If you read the title itself, infotainment shouldn’t come from a book titled “Correcting Mistakes…”. I do think that sharing go knowledge no matter the rank is important, but you shouldn’t claim to know things that are better when it is not. Its would (in my opinion) be so much more welcomed by strong players if it was phrased differently, like “here is what I learned/know” and “these could be possible other moves/ideas”.
If it sounds like an objective claim shown as true, it should be treated as such and if shown to be false (as mentioned by other people here), then integrity of the book is questioned along with the author.
