Questions and Answers with Tei Meiko Sensei
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007I 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!
