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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 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!

The title holder, Cho Chikun, continued the pressure on the challenger Yamashita Keigo (the Kisei title holder) in the Judan title and won the second game after another spectacular fight.

I wrote a few thoughts on this second game.

Here is the position after move 76, and a nice whole board problem: Black to play next and do something about White’s moyo on the right side.

Update: see this very nice article on the second game, by Pieter Mioch.

Taiwan is catching up with the top 3 Go super-powers: Zhou Junxun 9p of Taiwan just won the 11th LG Cup international tournament. He defeated in the final match Hu Yaoyu 8p of China, 2-1.

While several Taiwanese born players moved to Japan as kids, became insei and then became top professionals in Japan, this is the first time that a Taiwanese trained professional had such a great success in an international title. There is an old article about Zhou Junxun’s earlier Go career at Mindzine.

The first game of the final match is commented at gogameworld.com - it is one of the several free sample commented games.

After Zhou Junxun won the first game by resign, the next 2 games were very close: both were half-pointers.

Here is a diagram from the last game:

Black (Zhou Junxun) ended up sente in the complicated joseki in the lower left, so he invaded the upper-left corner in sente, and then played tengen to reduce White’s central influence. A fight started as White invaded Black’s moyo on the right soon after this.

There is a new Women’s Meijin, since Kato Keiko won the title from the previous title holder, Aoki Kikuyo.

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.