You guys I’m trying but
I understand why my hasty R16 is wrong and S16 is right, but why would W respond with R16 and not R15? Just giving away more stones?
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Seems you understood the position. They just give the worst to show it doesn’t work. But yes w better let black connect.
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White wouldnt xD
Also note that w responding at R15 isnt very good for white if thats the position. I’ll let you figure out why ^^
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Go puzzles typically involve a set of unwritten assumptions. One of these is that the player will have a hard time finding the solution, and so you shouldn’t reveal the solution prematurely. So responses in Go puzzles are often not ideal on purpose, just so the player can prove they found the solution.
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I tried, I don’t see it. 
Maybe you overlooked tenuki. If Black plays S16, then White can tenuki once for free, and twice at the cost of three stones.
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Ugh I tried every combination where W could use an extra move to maybe kill in the corner, but just calling it and playing elsewhere I didn’t consider.
Tsumego confuses me. 
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Indeed, after black captures those 2 stones they are not threatening anything else, so whites responce at R15 is just a ko threat at that point. Its better not to waste until there is a ko!
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What do you mean? It looks like you found the solution.
You managed to almost fill white’s eye shape with a killing shape, and White’s group is isolated, hence White is dead. White could capture those five Black stones, but then Black would play at the vital point of the bulky five and White remains dead.
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Well, I posted the problem and the solution, because I couldn’t go from A to B, I didn’t solve it. 
Sometimes I see the solution and go “ah, that makes sense”.
Can’t W just escape at the bottom right if B spends that move on the vital point? Have I gone too far to the “think what else might be going on on the goban”?..
(maybe, probably )
P. S. Now that I think of it, it’s a death I’ve fallen to somewhat frequently. And… That makes sense.
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Are you sure that White can escape? Would White need some supporting stones to make that possible?
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The best way to practice tsumego is using flash card / book. Set your stone on the board, and do long thinking before making a move.
Book + real Go set = hand muscle memory + ability to remember the shape.
Using tsumego app is ok, but you will forget the solution & shape very soon.
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Hm, yep, probably not.
Is there a way to tell when the whole thing went wrong? What was the point that W missed and ended up like that? Or this question doesn’t make sense?
Well the point is that black can kill but if he doesn’t do it, then white can live too…
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I did a quick count, black played 20 stones, white only 12. So white shouldn’t have passed 8 times 
.
Honest answer: It’s hard to tell if anything went wrong without knowing the sequence, that led to this position, or at least knowing the whole board position. I’ve heard sometimes people take a bunch of stones, drop them on the board and create a tsumego based on that random position.
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There could be if it was a real game.
But it isn’t.
I often think that tsumego positions doesn’t look much as real board situations, but that isn’t their goal: they are just meant to train you to recognise weaknesses and vital points.
Then you’ll be able to exploit them in real games.
Trying to do some backwards analysis, something went wrong when white created that sort of a circle of stones with all those cuts.
There’s a similar shape I friendly call “the wristwatch of death”: it’s a 3x3 empty space, surrounded by four unconnected three-stones sticks, all surrounded by opponent’s stones.
In a real game I managed to lose them all, even with one more stone in the middle. That was painful.
Beware of cuts in the corners of your shape.
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I think you’re reading a bit too much into tsumego problems. They are mostly meant as reading practice. There is no implication that the situation arose from high level play that would be worthwile to know.
Maybe an analogy is practicing multiplication tables in primary school. It helps to make mental arithmetic faster and less error-prone. So it’s very useful, but there is not much else to it.
That is different from, for example, joseki and pro games, where there is a notion that all the moves are of good quality and worthwile to know/study.
Maybe an analogy is studying mathematical proofs, such as the proof that the square root of 2 is not a rational number. Such study might help to learn methods to produce mathematical proofs yourself.
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Sometimes, guidance of “not this way” is actually the way, thank you. 
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What you asked yourself is far away from being out of context. I mean this kind of but why is it working?
Here what makes it working is the atari on the first move. If you put away a black surrounding stone, like Q17 for example to give one more liberty then white don’t need to answer like in the problem and instead can avoid the bulky shape and play Q14 himself to stay alive.
Understanding the role of each stones in a problem can help to understand it (and solve it) but it’s a bit like a supra level of research which can become a bit too much
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