Go Commentary: Huang Longshi & Influence

So yes. Professional games.

I want to improve at Go. Often, stronger players suggest reviewing games by professional or very strong amateur players. When I’ve tried to do this in the past, I’ve very often ended up feeling mostly confused and frustrated. My sense has been that I’m usually better off reading a book aimed at my level or doing problems.

Today, all that changed.

A few people on the OGS forums suggested the go lectures at Go Commentary, so I found myself at a page with commentary for a game between Huang Longshi and Jiang Tianyuan – game four in the site’s small but hopefully growing Greatest Games Ever Played series.

I clicked the first of the four videos and was instantly hooked. I don’t know who the commentator is – he seems to go by countsheep in the guest book comments – but I am officially now a fan.

Countsheep went through the entire game, step by step, and gave a very clear and thorough explanation of what was going on at each step. He explained the thinking behind the moves, and he also spent time showing what might look like ‘natural’ moves at each step and explaining why they weren’t played in this particular game.

The game itself was presented as an example of how to utilise influence in a game and, I must say, it is a perfect game to illustrate this concept. In the first third of the game, I couldn’t image how white was going to turn around and compensate for all the stones he (seemingly) sacrificed in building up his great white wall.

I reviewed the .sgf before reading the commentary and felt completely lost, but I had no trouble following the commentary. Somehow, countsheep managed to make most of the moves feel normal and natural. In the end, there were only three moves that seemed rather magical to me. I now understand why they work, but they were so far off my radar that I don’t know if I’d be able to find them again in a similar situation.

I’ve just started watching some of the other videos on the site. There are several short videos that are aimed at kyu-level players and are less than 10-minutes long. There are also a few more in-depth game analyses. Everything I’ve watched so far has been very helpful and interesting. Also, the website tagline, “Love Life, Love Go” immediately makes one feel welcome.

I particularly like learning a little bit about Go in China and about Chinese Go players. I hope that more classical games are discussed in the future.

Thank you, countsheep, for taking the time to make these excellent videos – I look forward to the next instalments!

PS Huang Longshi is my new hero.

Step Up to a Higher Level

In keeping with my developing habit of reading go books on the road, I brought Abe Yoshiteru’s Step Up to A Higher Level: Test for Intermediate Level with me on my recent cross-country extravaganza. It was lucky too; I travelled on a sleeper for the first time and learned first-hand how misleading the name ‘sleeper’ is when you’re in the open section with the reclining seats. I sat amidst some semi-professional football team that stayed up all night celebrating some recent victory and talking about girlfriends. No sleep was to be had, but there was ample time for go problems.

As a collection of problems, I think this book fills a nice niche. The problems are all clustered supposedly at the 8-7 kyu level, although I found most sections quite easy. I had the most difficulty with the opening section and found a few blind spots in the endgame chapter; the capturing, tesuji and life-and-death chapters seemed as if they were aimed at perhaps 10-9 kyu players. (Of course, maybe this reflects more about the imbalances in my own knowledge than the balancing of the book.)

My biggest reservation about this book was the language. I felt that the English translation was not always very clear and the sentences were often quite strange. I’m not sure if the translator was a non-native English speaker or was trying for some sort of literal translation; if the latter, my feeling is that the author would have been better served by a more natural, relaxed use of English.

I also prefer it when authors use Japenese/Korean/Chinese terms when appropriate if referring to a specific technical term. As far as I know, there are no universally agreed upon English terms for many go terms. “Net” and “ladder” and “knight’s move” are all clear to me as they couldn’t possibly mean anything else, but “skillful finesse” has confused me on a number of occasions, especially when I was a weaker player. I now assume “skillful finesse” means “tesuji”, but there have been occasions when I’ve thought that maybe it meant “sabaki” or something else that I could imagine having to do with skilfulness and finesse. Even if I have to look up what the words mean, I think it’s useful when non-English words are used as they clearly indicate that we’re talking about a specific concept rather than some wooly English something which may map to something one finds in non-English books or may just be an author’s way of phrasing his or her own thoughts. I’m sure this will become less of a problem as I grow in strength and am able to tell from the context what people are talking about, but for now, I find it easier to read and study when I can clearly map the words and phrases I encounter in a new book to the words and phrases I’ve already encountered.

There were a few occasions in Step Up when I felt that I had to battle with the English a bit and try to second-guess what the original Japanese word might have been. This translation already uses some common imported words (hane and atari, for example) and glosses nirensei and sanrensei in the editor’s notes (though I don’t remember them appearing in the text itself – certainly, they weren’t used frequently). Because of the slightly odd way in which some of the sentences were constructed, there were several occasions when I wasn’t sure whether the wording was just a bit strange or if the text was attempting to make reference to some specific concept.

So yes. In the final ‘Playing Strength Analysis’ ranking, I ended up with a score of 128 which put me in between the ’7 kyu’ and ‘Over 6 kyu’ category. Opening and endgame did me in. Otake Hideo, see you soon!

Test Your Go Strength

I seem to be much more efficient at reading go books when on holiday than in normal life. I suppose it’s because there are long stretches of time when I’m on a coach/train/aeroplane/metro with nothing to do but read things that won’t make me too motion-sick. Go problems are good for this as there is usually some looking-away-from-the-book-whilst-thinking moments to break up the reading.

On my most recent adventures, I read Test Your Go Strength by Naoki Miyamoto from cover to cover.

The format of the book is great for travelling. There are 50 problems in all, 20 fuseki, 20 middle-game and 10 endgame problems. In each case, a whole-board situation is presented along with 5 possible moves. The reader decides a move and then the next several pages discuss the benefits and problems with each possibility. A score is given for each move, so one can add up one’s score for each section and the entire book.

The scoring is extremely generous – I ended up with a 2-dan rank overall, and a 3-dan rank for the endgame section (even though I think I’m less strong in the endgame in general).

I enjoyed the problems, and not just because of the generous scoring. The solutions to the problems weren’t obvious to me, and I had to think quite a bit in several cases. In several of the whole-board situations, I wouldn’t have thought of any of the proposed moves – the move I would have played wasn’t included in the options. This made me think through each of the proposed moves and compare it to the moves I would have made, which was useful. It made me consider moves that I would not have imagined on my own.

The text helpfully comments on each of the 5 options presented. In several cases, some of the presented options are big moves locally or would, in general, be the correct solution, but because of the specific whole-board situation, aren’t the optimal move. I found this focus on whole-board thinking very useful, as the problems nudge one into thinking about the ramifications of a supposedly ‘local’ move on later parts of the game.

The commentaries are relatively brief, making this a good book for reading on-the-go when one might not have an extended amount of time to review a long sequence of moves.

In my version of the book, there was an extra stone in the diagram for Problem 49. The diagram printed on the page where the problem is introduced looks like this:

In all the solution diagrams, however, the bottom right-hand corner looks like this:

Based on the commentary, I believe this latter position is what was intended.