I’m hesitant to get into this topic to be honest, so I’ll just try be helpful.
I followed this by @aesalon and it was a good guide. I don’t use 101weiqi that often. I think it still has some potential usual issues with user submitted content like goproblems etc. In any case if you like timed puzzles or sets graded by rank, (which of course probably doesn’t correlate to any particular server or association) it’s fine. The comment about google translate well is true, with chrome translating the page works mostly fine, and you can get used to just what button does what without translating after a while.
Another option is apps:
- BadukPop has similarly timed puzzles, or puzzles adapted to you level (rating in app) etc.
- Tsumego pro has daily puzzles and sets you can pay for.
There’s always tsumego books too. I recently got Cho Chikun’s “all about life and death” and I have a bunch of others. Sometimes the books focus on more realistic (compared to actual games) puzzles, whereas sometimes puzzles on Blacktoplay or other sites/apps focus on making an unintuitive puzzle to make it hard (either a very arbitrary looking arrangement of stones, or forcefully making the 1-1 point the only right answer, or a sneaky throw-in etc – something to try catch people out.)
I think there’s an improvement paywall in most things if one wants to get strong in a reasonable time frame, if one isn’t already efficient with their learning. Even if it’s not like a pay-to-win video game, top professionals in a lot of sports will try to get the best coaches, equipment etc to help them gain an edge. Similarly players that want to become professional will invest lots of time and likely money (their own, their parents etc unless there’s some sponsorship/scholarship) to get to the goal.
In theory there’s no reason anyone can’t get to near professional strength by just playing against the strong bots like Katago or LeelaZero hosted on OGS for example and that wouldn’t cost anything extra than what you’re already paying to just be online (internet, electricity etc), on the forums etc. Similarly with all of the freely available apps, servers to play on, Go lectures, videos etc.
It’s just I think playing against such a strong player (bot/AI) is probably quite draining, and demoralising. It’d be hard to notice an improvement without mixing in games vs people, and people will play suboptimal moves and variations that Katago won’t, which one has to extrapolate the “lessons” from Katago themselves to deal with. I guess similarly one has to somehow know how to efficiently learn from others study material (lectures, reviews etc).
[As an aside, I feel this way with Tumbleweed at the moment. There’s not a lot of resources to learn from. There’s no theory books, or definite methods on how to improve. One has to either learn from stronger players, their games etc, or by playing oneself or against the bot and reviewing. It’s just a slow chug with not much indications of progress.]