Life and Death
In a game of Go, stones may live or die in the heat of battle. However, often stones die when they should live, or vice-versa. This is because the players are not skilled in the art of life and death. On the other hand, players who do study life and death often reverse games, almost magically. If you want a little bit of that magic for your own games, read this book.
$17.99
Reviews
Book Description:
Following the general pattern of its predecessor ‘Tesuji’ this book organizes over two hundred life and death problems and examples into thirty six short chapters.
Noteworthy features include: The status approach, which takes the reader through the same analysis that he should perform in actual play. The grouping of the problems around common tesujis – throw-in, placement, etc – and standard shapes – the one, two and three space notchers on the sides, the corner L groups, etc. A logical, step by step development, which makes Life and Death first an excellent text to learn from, then an invaluable reference work to come back to.
This book is a part of the Elementary Go Series.
- Level:
- Intermediate
- Author:
- James Davies
- Publisher:
- Kiseido
- Series:
- Elementary Go Series
- Pages:
- 157
- ISBN10:
- 4-906574-13-0
- ISBN13:
- 978-4-906574-13-1
- Dimensions (mm):
- 181 x 128
- Dimensions (inches):
- 7.1 x 5
This little book is one of the most read books in the library of our go club. I even had to patch it up at one point because it was falling apart.
Of course it’s not surprising so many people read it: it’s a very good overview of living, almost living and dead shapes that regularly come back in games we play.
The problems are often not introduced with “Black to kill” or “White to live”, but with “What is the status of this group?”. It helps you to become faster in judging a position in one of the categories, alive, dead or undecided.
I really recommend this book.
In my 30 years of studying and playing Go, there is one thing that all pros and other strong players agree on: you have to study Life and Death! This is a fine book to start with.