I don’t know what is the initial position since you didn’t provide a link but at this point you can capture the four stones D17. Can you see how?
(Note: you are in rating mode. I was suggesting instead to go through collections of easy problems.)
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Right, but I don’t want to come here every time I have a question. I prefer sites that provide hints.
Go through the beginner collections first, they’re much easier
You can sort by difficulty
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It’s quite difficult to see that with the sacifice of one stone you catch 4 after . No worry, do easier problems first.
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My own opinion is to pay some experienced coach. There are quite some good ones, not that expensive.
Clossius is a great one, as well as this Canadian kid below:
What if I don’t know what to do? The site provides no help at all. Why is it “good”?
Again, if I don’t know what to do, what then? You wouldn’t want me bombarding the forum with dozens of questions.
No problem if you ask many questions on the forum (say 1 question/day).
I’ve seen on OGS that you (or another user with the same exact username) are 13kyu and based on your games you have at least somewhat of a grasp on life and death problems, so I find it hard to believe you have trouble with the easier tsumego-hero collections. Hopefully you’re not pretending to be confused to troll us or something like that.
If you’re genuine in your confusion, htrobert1, I think you might be trying to skip steps. You might be skipping some of the resources that we linked to you that are dedicated to beginners because you think they’re too easy for you, and when you jump to the harder ones, you can’t make heads or tails of it. I’ve been there, and I think the only solution (if you want to learn on your own) is to have a little patience with the resources that look too easy. At 13kyu, it can be difficult to find tsumegos that feel “the right level of difficulty” for you.
Another possibility is that you’ve formulated your own idea about what the best way to do tsumego is, and it just doesn’t fit with the tsumego resources you’ve tried, in which case I think it’d be good to talk about that specifically. There are a few different points of view about the best way to approach tsumego, and they can sound counterintuitive to a beginner, especially since many people believe the student shouldn’t see the solution to a tsumego until they solve it autonomously (I’m not saying I disagree with it, but I think it’s complicated).
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I think it’d be fine if he asked 10 questions per day, as long as they are under one thread, say “htrobert’s tsumego questions”.
Here is a much better site with lots of explanations about the moves. Every tsumego contains a study and comments section. The downside is, it is in chinese but it is easy enough to navigate via a localizer.
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Yes, I know what liberties are, but I don’t understand the tsumego problems. Need something in-between.
I am out of hearts on that site. It told me to come back tomorrow. I’ve waited a day and it still says the same thing. What then?
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The point of tsumegos is not to get answers but to practice reading. If you can get at least 50% correct answers in a tsumego set then the difficulty level is right. You can come back a few months later to solve the rest once your reading ability improves.
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It might have something to do with your timezone, but in general you should be able to use an incognito/private browsing window, that way the website won’t remember what you did previously. If you close the window and open a new private/incognito one, you can actually circumvent the daily limit entirely by doing it multiple times (assuming they don’t use browser fingerprinting on top of cookies).
Anyway, I think I see the symptoms of a “hyper-cerebral” Go student here (mostly because I am one myself): sometimes if you want to improve in Go you have to accept that what you need is not an explicit explanation or a rational understanding of what’s happening, but you just need practice to let your instinct hone itself to Go patterns that are unfamiliar to you; this will eventually enable you to “unlock” concepts that were previously inaccessible.
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I love those books, I have some doubts though if they are in-between. They explain a lot, but they also ignore many many variants, because the reader is supposed to work them out alone.
Hello there htrobert1
I wish you luck on your journey as you wrap your mind around tsumego, and I’m glad that lots of people have pointed you towards good resources.
I guess I just wanted to share an opinion because this is something that comes up for me when I see beginners try to learn more about the game, and focus on tsumego exclusively.
If I may make an analogy - [learning to solve tsumego] as a subset of [learning everything about playing Go] is somewhat analogous to [learning to parallel park] as a subset of [learning everything about driving a car]
Yes, studying tsumego problems can help you develop your reading skills. However, those reading skills are most useful
- in the endgame stage of a game where there is a close capturing race, or
- in a fight-heavy 9x9 game where there are lots of groups that are at risk
There are lots of situation in the Opening and Midgame stage that also require reading skills, but solving tsumego won’t do a very good job of preparing for those situations.
In order to prepare for all those other situations, I would supplement your study of tsumego with some time to study the following:
- sente and gote
- settling your stones
- how to play a balanced opening (what parts of the board are most valuable)
- how to manage direction of play
- the transition between opening priorities and midgame priorities
- how to utilize shape in both attack and defense
So just like in my analogy, learning to parallel park really well as the first thing you learn might give you something concrete to focus on, and have a nice set of progress bars from beginner to intermediate - but it’s important to remember that there are LOTS of other skills you’ll need to learn to drive a car besides learning to parallel park, and the specialized skills you’re learning won’t necessarily generalize to all the other things you’ll need to learn.
Good luck!
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tsumego is usually about destroying group of opponent or defending your group
if you don’t understand answer, just continue battle of black vs white by adding next moves yourself until capture or 2 eyes happen
tsumego is not necessary, you can replace it by 9x9 games, it would be less lonely
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