A Survey of the Basic Tesujis

by Richard Bozulich

Overview

In life-and-death situations and during the sharp skirmishes that arise in the middle game, brute-force analysis is usually required. However, intuition also plays a role in your ability to instantly find the key move that turns the position in your favor. Those key moves are called tesujis. There are about 45 different kinds of tesujis that a dan-ranked go player should be familiar with. If a player has solved many problems that involve a certain kind of tesuji, he or she will immediately recognize -- almost unconsciously -- positions in their games where that tesuji is applicable. This is called 'pattern recognition'. Of course, the player must confirm that it is indeed the required tesuji by the brute-force reading out of the continuation after the tesuji is played. This book presents more than 40 basic tesujis that arise in the game of go. Although there are only 38 sections, a number of different attachment tesuji are present in Section 4. After an example of a tesuji is presented and explained, three to 12 problems follow, showing the various ways that it can be applied. In all, there are 182 problems. Ifyouareahighkyu-levelplayer, yourgointuitionmaynotyetbewelldeveloped, so it will be hard to spot the correct tesuji, but you should not dwell too long on each problem. It is better to look at them as examples and make a best-guess move, then immediately look at the answer. In this way you can probably do 20 problems in an hour and get through the entire book in about a week. Your mind will no doubt be working full time, even while sleeping, to internalize the new knowledge that is being crammed into your brain. But the good news is that your intuition will be gradually developing. After finishing the entire book, go through it once more. Your mind will have already absorbed much of the new knowledge and you will recognize many patterns that keep recurring. After going through this book twice at high speed, you can then come back to it and look at the solutions in more detail and confirm the results. By developing your intuition in this way, you will be able to spot similar tesujis in your games. The aim of this book is to make the high kyu-level player aware of the various tesujis that can arise in their games. Once this awareness is achieved, the reader will want to test this newly acquired ability in a more practical setting. A good follow-up book is K54: 501 Tesuji Problems. The forty-five basic tesujis in this collection of problems are presented in random order multiple times, so it is similar to coming across them in games. Once the reader has mastered the problems in these two books, his or her ability at finding the winning tesujis in their games should be at the shodan level.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9784906574858
Publisher:	Kiseido
Publication date:	01/28/2016
Series:	Road Map to Shodan , #4
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.48(d)

About the Author

Richard Bozulich was born in Los Angeles in 1936.From the age of four until 17 he studied to become a concert pianist.He then studied Mathematical Logic at UCLA from 1953 to 1956 under Richard Montague.He transferred to UC Berkeley and graduated in mathematics in 1966.In 1967 he went to Japan to study go.In 1968 he founded Ishi Press Inc. in Japan and published more than 45 books on go.In 1982 he founded Kiseido Publishing Company and has published more than 60 book on go under that company.He started publishing a go magazine, Go World, in 1977. 129 issues were published until he stopped publishing it in 2013.He is said to be the most prolific writer of English-language go books, having written or translated almost 50 books on the game.He lives in Chigasaki, Japan and is the president of Kiseido Publishing Company.

Table of Contents

Preface .................................v
A Brief Glossary of Go Terms and Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi
1. The Hane ...............................1
2. The Placement ............................7
3. The Throw-in . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4. The Attachment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
5. The Wedge-in (Warikomi) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
6. Wedging in with a Hane (Hanekomi). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
7. The Atekomi Tesuji . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
8. The Cut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
9. The Descent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
10. The Peep. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
11. The One-Space Jump . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
12. The Shoulder Hit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
13. The Diagonal Move . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
14. The Diagonal Attachment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
15. Guzumi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
16. Atari . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
17. Capture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
18. Blocking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
19. Drawing Back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
20. Hekomi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
21. Bulging Out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
22. Solid Extension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
23. Pushing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
24. The Knight's Move . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
25. Narabi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
26. The Diagonal Connection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
27. The Solid Connection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
28. Bumping against the Enemy's Stone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
29. Pressing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
30. The Push-in Tesuji . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
31. The Push-in-and-Cut Tesuji . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
32. The Two-Step Hane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
33. Turning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
34. Crawling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
35. The Inside Hane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
36. Attach and Cut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
37. The Side Attachment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
38. The Underneath Attachment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208