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To the beginner, the game of go appears as a jungle of confusion, full of pitfalls past which only Providence could possibly guide him. As he gains experience, he may learn to sort out the events of the middle and end games, recognize patterns, and play rationally, but the opening is apt to remain a mystery to him. Indeed, it remains something of a mystery even to professional go players, and there are no tabulations of go openings comparable to the books on chess openings, which tell how to play from move one onwards.
There are, however, patterns which arise in parts of the board again and again during the opening. They occur in especially large numbers in the corners, where the initial fighting of the game generally takes place. These corner formulas, which have been discovered by trial and error, and worked out through centuries of go playing, and are still being added to and discarded, are called josekis.
This is intended as a first book on josekis, so it contains only the more common of them. In choosing our material, we have taken pains to avoid the kind of long, complicated sequences that one can spend hours learning, and then go for months without using. We have also decided not to spend time on doubtful or ‘trick’ moves, although occasionally a mistaken play is shown to explain the meaning of a good one. These commissions will limit this book’s usefulness as a reference work for advanced players, but they should be welcomed by readers at the sub-shodan (1-dan) level, for whom we are writing. There are no major gaps in our coverage of josekis, and we hope that our explanations are clear enough for even beginners to understand.
With the exception of Chapter Four, we have limited ourselves to those josekis in which one player plays a stone in the corner and, before he has a chance to reinforce it with a second stone, his opponent moves in after him. The first stone ordinarily goes on one of these five points:
the 3–3 point (san-san)
the 3–4 point (komoku)
the 4–4 point (hoshi)
the 3–5 point (mokuhazushi)
the 4–5 point (takamoku)
We shall take them in that order, starting with the 3–3 point and moving out toward the center. We shall stop at the 4–5 point because, although it is not necessarily bad to start farther out from the corner, it is rather unusual, so there are no josekis built specifically around such moves.
The reader of this, or any other joseki book, may be dismayed at the large number of variations it contains. Let him be reassured that he need not worry about forgetting them; in fact, it is a good idea to forget them. Too much dependence on rote learning of josekis stifles a player’s imagination, and blinds his overall vision of the board. It is best to remember pieces of josekis – shapes of stones, individual moves, and concepts that can be put to use in many situations. Joseki books, like other books, should be looked upon as sources of ideas, not as texts to be learned by heart.
Even professional players read joseki books at the apprentice stage of their development. Watching these student professionals, we can see them using and misusing josekis that they have picked up from their reading, but do not yet really understand. This gives their games an awkward appearance. A full-fledged professional, having read dozens of go books and played and watched thousands of games, no longer studies josekis much, but relies on his accumulated experience. He plays a joseki not from memory but from his general feeling for what moves are good in any given situation. He may not know when he plays a stone exactly what makes it a good move or what is going to follow it, but he is confident that the subsequent moves will bear out his judgment. He adapts his josekis to the surrounding positions and therefore regularly produces moves not found in, or even criticized in, joseki books. He may pull new surprise moves on his opponents and they are more likely to be thought up on the spur of the moment than to be the product of secret study the night before.
Amateurs must learn josekis in the same way, starting with sequences they remember from books or from stronger players’ games, testing them out in their own games, varying them, coming to understand them, and finally being able to play on their own with confidence. This book has been designed to encourage that development: rather than just compile long lists of josekis, we have taken a relatively few number of them and tried to explain them, and show how they should be altered to meet varied situations. We expect the reader to use his head a little, applying what appears in one place to positions arising in other places without having to be told and not taking what he reads to be blanket statements covering all situations.
Concerning the authorship of this book, most of the diagrams and ideas in it were supplied by Kosugi in a series of consultations stretching from April to October, 1972. The text was written by Davies, who also contributed what diagrams he could.
We are indebted to the Japanese Go Association for the use of their facilities and to Richard Bozulich for offering suggestions on parts of the manuscript.
Kiyoshi Kosugi
James Davies
Tokyo, Japan
October 1972
Buy the full book at gobooks.com
© 2017 by Kosugi Kiyoshi and James Davies (Revised Edition)
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by Kiyoshi Kosugi 8-dan & James Davies
Buy the full book at gobooks.com
In the game of go, the opening moves focus on the corners of the board. Over the thousands of years of go playing, this aspect of the game has been intensively studied, and a large number of opening formulas, or josekis, have been discovered and refined. Every go player needs to have a working knowledge of the basic ones.
38 Basic Josekis cuts incisively through the labyrinth of josekis to give the reader a solid grounding in the subject. Working steadily out from the 3–3 point to the 4–5 point, it surveys the principal variations of the 38 most common corner patterns, pointing out the key ideas in each and showing the reader how to choose and use josekis in relation to other stones on the board.
The authors, an 8-dan Japanese professional go player and a strong American amateur, write so as to systematically build the reader’s understanding and help him develop a flexible approach. In the pages of this book, the road to joseki is open to all.
This ePub reader does not support full scripting, so diagrams may not be interactive.
PK M1Nm OPS/ch1.xhtml3–3 Point Josekis
Generally speaking, the simplest josekis start with a stone on the 3–3 point, as in Dia. 1. This used to be considered a poor move, but that belief has been dispelled in the 20th century, when professional players have come to make frequent use of 3–3 point josekis.
The virtue of the stone in Dia. 1 is easy to understand: it denies Black access to the corner. If Black attacks, he will have to build his position in the center or along one side of the board, where it is harder to find security. The drawback of a move on the 3–3 point is that, tucked so far back in the corner, it does not give much help in developing into the center. The two sections of this chapter will show what happens when Black approaches the white stone in Dia. 1.
If Black does not get around to playing against White’s stone, then sooner or later White will want to enclose the corner by adding a stone at 1 or ‘a’ in Dia. 2. Such a move, reinforcing the corner, reaching out into the center, and preparing for wide extensions on both sides, is of great value.
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