Chinese Go Books

I had visitors, so couldn't be on line as much. Luckily I just got a shipment of go books from China. Thus I could put a problem book open on my lap while pretending to be socializing :-) I have worked through the first two volumes of this problem collection, and am really good at recognizing 'B to play' and 'W to play' in Chinese now. I can do one of those books per day, but I am sure my problem solving speed will slow down in the next few volumes.

I also worked through the first volume of Lee Changho's Life and Death Collection which took me a lot more time. It will be a while before I have done all those volumes.

Made a start in 800 Quick Tesuji Problems but I can tell already that this is going to take quite some time too. Great problems though.

Can you tell I am very happy with my new Chinese books?

Some one asked about the Korean Problem Academy books, wondering how useful they are because of not having answer diagrams. I have found that the problems do take longer because of not knowing the answers for sure. But I think that that is a good think. It forces me to really read out the problem, as opposed to dropping a stone at a vital looking point, hoping for the best, and checking the answers. Now I read out most variations, and I also read out a lot of other moves, to prove to myself that none of them works. Sometimes I find a second move which seems to work, and I have to look more into both 'correct' moves, to figure out which is the real correct one. The lack of answers forces me to read deeper and more carefully, which in my opinion is a good thing. I would recommend those books to any one.

Just out of curiosity, I used joncol to look at how many games I have played on KGS so far. I am up to 544 games now on my NannyOgg account, of which I have lost more than half. I seem to have a much easier time winning as W, my winning perc as B is only 40 %. Makes sense of course, I just thought it was interesting. I have played 248 different opponents, which is quite amazing. Just think back 10 or 15 years, and it would have been almost impossible to play that many opponents in less than a year. I play 1.37 games per day, but that's only counting KGS, the number would be higher if I included all my KGS accts and my dragon and little golem accounts.