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I was playing Go with my daughter, Alex, a couple of days ago (she is 6).

Normally we play capture-Go, but this time she decided to play “territory Go”.

We played on 13×13, and I tried to keep the game very close and let her win - she doesn’t like to lose, but somehow it turned out that I won by 1 point. I counted the score, and told her:

“So… I won by one point…”.

Alex (after thinking for a few moments):

“One point… that’s not too much!”

Me (relieved):

“No, it’s not much at all!”

Alex (explaining to me patiently):

“It is not much because 1 is only the second number - the first one is zero.”

Next time I’ll make sure we have a jigo.

After a spectacular start and some fighting in the first day of Honinbo game 1, the dust settled early in the second day of playing and the result was a very close game which Takao won by half a point.

Takao Shinji played 2 rare contact plays in the first 20 moves in day 1 of the first game.

See the following 2 diagrams for Takao’s moves 9 and 17.

Today is day 1 of the first game in Honinbo Title match.
Yoda Norimoto is challenging Takao Shinji.

It is interesting to see that the match is between the authors of last 2 Go books I read: Takao Shinji wrote “Pure and Simple: Takao’s Astute Use of Brute Force” and Yoda Norimoto wrote “Vital Points and Skillful Finesse for Sabaki”.

(I bought both books from slateandshell.com a couple of months ago, I finished Yoda’s book and I’m almost done with Takao’s book - both are wonderful books, I highly recommend them).

So let’s see what style is prevailing this year: “pure and simple” or “sabaki”

I already wrote an entry about Cho Seokbin’s visit to US.

Now I published an interview with Seokbin.

(You can read a brief report from Seokbin’s visit to Tacoma on the AGA webpage.)

I published an article based on a series of emails I recently exchanged with Tei Meiko 9 dan - one of the official instructors during the time I was an insei in Japan.

As he commented most of my insei games back then, Tei Sensei’s wisdom is behind most of the lessons that I published so far.

The questions are mostly around how to study Go. Here are the things that I found very interesting:

• memorizing pro games is a popular study method (I used to be under the impression that it’s only a minority of the studying Go players using it)
• professional players do study Go books (I used to think the only Go books they study are game collections and joseki dictionaries, and that the vast majority of the books are written for amateurs, but I was wrong)
• professionals don’t use any pattern-matching software for studying Go
• memorizing joseki doesn’t hurt (contrary to some popular opinion in the amateur’s world); in general, “don’t read this until you are that level” is bad advice
• making progress at Go is really easy - just “read and play”: learn something new, apply it in your games; repeat until 9 dan.

Thank you for the nice advices, Tei Sensei!