Posts Tagged ‘professional’
Meijin Title : Cho U evens the score 1-1
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
Cho U, playing black, won by resignation in the second game of the Meijin Title, so the score is now 1-1.
There were two very interesting exchanges in the two corners on the lower side in the first 70 moves.
New lesson: “Learning from professional games”
Sunday, September 16th, 2007
I wrote a new lesson: “Learning from professional games (1)”.
This is based on first game from the current Meijin title in Japan.
This is not the first time I write something based on what I learn from replaying professional games – actually several of the professional titles I followed and wrote about contain such things – but I thought about writing separate articles instead of embedding the lessons within the actual tournament page.
For people who will read this a few months from now, following the tournament pages might not be attractive anymore (after all, there are a lot of tournaments, and mostly the new ones are followed).
Also, another news related to this latest lesson: I’m experimenting with adding Javascript to my pages. If you have Javascript enabled in your internet browser (most of the people do, especially those who use Gmail, Google maps, etc) the article will seem very short when you load (or reload) the page, and you’ll see a link at the bottom of the page along the lines of “Click here for the solution” – click there and the article will expand itself. (If you don’t have Javascript enabled, you’ll see all the article at once, same as before).
This is in order to avoid spoiling the problems by unintentionally showing the solution diagrams to those of my readers who like to really think hard about the problems before reading the solutions. Which I hope most of my readers do 
Let me know if this is a good idea or not – if it is annoying to most of you I’ll just think of something else.
Let me know if this is a good idea or not – if it is annoying to most of you I’ll just think of something else. Replay a random professional Go game
Sunday, August 26th, 2007
I added a (small) new feature on 361points.com: the possibility to replay a random professional Go game. While I like the idea of randomness, I am not so sure this is tremendously useful, after all there are many other ways to replay random pro games – honestly I did it more as a programming exercise.
The actual pool of game records is composed of relative recent games (year 2000 and newer) that are freely available on the internet – mostly from the great Go Topics website.
This feature is hosted on the main entry page for two reasons:
1. I don’t know where else to put it
2. For people new to Go that come to my site, it would be nice to actually see at a glance what a game looks like.
Let me know what you think.
2. For people new to Go that come to my site, it would be nice to actually see at a glance what a game looks like.
Let me know what you think. Takao Shinji defended the Honinbo title 4-1
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007
Takao Shinji defended the Honinbo title.
The challenger, Yoda Norimoto, only managed to win one out of 5 games.
Again, just like earlier this year in the Kisei title, the younger player defeated the more senior player.
All game records are on the Honinbo title page.
First game of Honinbo Title starts today
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007
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”
Questions and Answers with Tei Meiko Sensei
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007
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.
Judan title: Cho Chikun – Yamashita Keigo 2-0
Sunday, April 1st, 2007
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.
Zhou Junxun of Taiwan wins international LG Cup
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007
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:
Kato Keiko won in Women’s Meijin 2-1
Wednesday, March 7th, 2007
There is a new Women’s Meijin, since Kato Keiko won the title from the previous title holder, Aoki Kikuyo.
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.
