361points.com/blog

A recent thread on rec.games.go caught my attention: someone is describing a particular sequence from their game where their opponent departed from the pattern that the poster was familiar with, and that resulted in his frustration: “I hate people who don’t play joseki.”.  Another attitude I heard in my old Go club is something like: “I love to play big central moyos, like Takemiya, but at this club it’s just impossible: people keep playing stupid little moves and keep entering my moyo from all directions!”. Both are understandable attitudes: one reads several Go books, spends many hours studying joseki, professional games, etc, just to find out that that knowledge can prove useless in some circumstances. Both attitudes suffer from the same problem: superficial understanding of Go, and “wishful thinking”, hoping the opponent to answer in a particular way. If they don’t, we are at a loss about how to continue… Joseki are in a sense like “cheating”: learning some patterns in advance, to gain time and to make sure we don’t make “too big a mistake” in the beginning of the game. That’s all there is to them. Also, to make things even more frustrating, they change all the time… Come middle game, similar situations occur, just like in the beginning: weak groups fighing each other for eye-space and thickness. But this time we have no joseki books to help us, we’re on our own. So it’s better to think we’re on our own from the very beginning of the game, and joseki are just there to help us in some cases. Don’t let the joseki be your master, but the other way around. My advice is to study joseki in order to understand the principles behind them: direction of play, tesuji, weak groups and strong groups. Just don’t get too attached to them.