Archive for the ‘beginner’ Category

From Novice to Expert

Friday, February 16th, 2007

Novice: Hey dude, so what’s better here, A or B?

Expert: Hm,…, er,… C.

Novice: What? Why???

Expert: Trust me.

Novice: Year, right…

What is this all about? It is about the Dreyfus Model, which lists stages in skills acquisition that apply to most domains - including Go, I believe. It explains, among other things, why professionals don’t seem able to explain to us the reason behind their moves, and why we shouldn’t be frustrated with this. I wrote an article on this.

Posted in ama vs pro, article, beginner, dreyfus model, professional | 1 Comment »

Learned the rules - where next?

Friday, February 2nd, 2007

I got a request from someone on godiscussions.com to have a look at a game he played and comment on it - which I did. The game is between 2 players who recently learned Go.

That inspired me to write some steps that people who are just starting Go should follow in the beginning to speedup their learning process and to make sure they are moving in the right direction. I posted them in the end of my “What is Go?” page, and I’m reproducing them here:

If you just learned the rules of Go, you may wonder what are the next steps in your Go career. Here is what I think you should do:

  1. Play something like 50-100 games with another beginner. Teach the rules to a friend, or a family member, or a coworker - and play a lot of games together, just concentrating on capturing stones. Whoever captures more stones wins. In case you cannot find someone to play with, see step 4 below: play on an online Go server instead.
  2. Read the “Lessons in the fundamentals of Go” book. It will not only mention the step 1 above, but it also provides a lot of very useful information about Go: fundamental concepts, how to study, and many interesting things about the professional Go world.
  3. Read the Graded Go problems for beginners book. This will teach you about basic Go tactics.
  4. Play a lot of games online. Try to apply what you read from books in your games. Register with some online Go server (there are links to several of them here) and get to play with various opponents of different levels - it is important to get exposed to various playing styles.
  5. Follow my “how to improve” list
  6. Check the list of books I recommend - some of which I consider “must reads”.

Posted in 361points, beginner, study | No Comments »