Tesuji
Go is both a tactical and strategic game. The tactical moves in Go are called tesuji. If you imagine Go as a mental martial art, tesuji are the fundamental moves of close fighting. Reading this book is your first step towards becoming a black belt.
$17.99
Reviews
Book Description:
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.
This book is a part of the Elementary Go Series.
- Level:
- Intermediate
- Author:
- James Davies
- Publisher:
- Kiseido
- Series:
- Elementary Go Series
- Pages:
- 198
- ISBN10:
- 4-906574-12-2
- ISBN13:
- 978-4-906574-12-4
- Dimensions (mm):
- 181 x 128
- Dimensions (inches):
- 7.1 x 5
This is the bread-and-butter. The cake filling. The tools of the trade. You will get nowhere in Go without three (related) things: deep and good reading, life and death knowledge and tesuji knowledge. This book will train two of these: reading (by doing a lot of problems, also has a chapter on it at the beginning) and tesuji (by showing a great deal of them).
Tesuji, which are also funnily translated as “skillful finesse” are those brilliant moves hidden in a position. There are a huge number of tesuji: tesuji for connection, for cutting, to remove liberties from groups… This book covers many of them (except for a deep section in endgame tesuji, which can be found in The Endgame), giving some examples and then training you with several problems.
The book is aimed at anywhere between double-digit kyus (which should learn all these techniques) to single digit kyu (which should have a good knowledge of them). This book is bound to make you a better player, since getting a good reading combined with good tesuji skills will make you a fearsome opponent.
Looks like all my reviews are positive, but after all, I’m reviewing the books I enjoyed, and this is one of them. It can be boring at times, so many problems, failing some of them and feeling discouraged. But when you are in the middle of the game and think “This shape looks funny, can’t I cut there” and then “cut there, white, black, white, black yes!”, leaving your opponent split and thorn is priceless.