The opening is theoretically the hardest part of the game of go. To professional players, it is the hardest part in practice, as well; in championship games that last two days, for instance, the first day is usually spent playing and thinking about the first 50 moves, and the second day is spent finishing all the rest. Such is the consistency of professional play in the middle game and endgame that if a player comes out of the opening with a bad position, it is almost impossible for him to catch up. Amateurs sometimes rush through their initial moves, saving their powers for the fighting...

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 Joseki cuts incisively through the labyrinth of joseki 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...

Tesujis are the tactics of short range combat in the game of go. This volume presents over three hundred examples and problems of them, aimed at training the reader to read and spot the right play in all sorts of tactical situations. It covers a wide range of material while concentrating on fundamentals; its problems manage to be both hard enough to challenge and easy enough to solve, and there are enough of them to keep the most avid busy.

This volume is a continuation of Graded Go Problems For Beginners, Volume 2 and is aimed at the 20-kyu to 15-kyu player.

The problems presented here will require a bit of thought, but none of them is so difficult that a player who understands the rules, has had some experience playing games, and has studied the first and second volumes would not be able to solve in less than a minute.

Since the main aim of this series is to present as many examples of go technique as possible, I have avoided giving a lot of different variations of possible answers. Furthermore,...

This is the first volume of a four-volume collection of problems and is intended for players who are learning the rules of go. The nearly1500 problems this set contains cover all phases of the game, from the opening to the endgame. It is assumed that the reader is studying a good and comprehensive beginner's book on go, such as Go: A Complete Introduction to the Game by Cho Chikun. For reference, however, we have included a brief summary of the rules.

The middle game of go often appears chaotic, but there is order in the chaos, as this book plainly reveals. The result of a joint effort by a tournament-winning Japanese professional player and an experienced American go writer, Attack and Defense lays down a few clear principles, then goes through a wealth of applications: examples, problems, and case studies from professional play. The reader emerges with a thorough grasp of how to choose strategy, how to execute dual-purpose attacks, how to defend with contact plays, how to force his opponent into submission or cooperation, how to...