How to Improve Our Go Skills
All Go players want to get stronger, to evolve in the understanding of this wonderful game.
Here are my ideas on how to improve at Go:
- Play a lot of games.
- Apply newly learned concepts in one's games.
- Theoretical knowledge should be put into practice.
- It is best to apply new knowledge in our games as soon as possible, while it is still fresh in our mind.
- Do not be afraid to just try things out.
- Study professional games.
- Have one's games commented by a stronger player.
- In general, it is a very good idea to have a teacher - ideally, a professional Go player.
- Study Go problems ("tsumego").
- Solving a Go problem means to be 100% sure about the response we found: try not to look at the answers before that.
- Focus on solving many easy problems fast - better than working on very difficult ones. Most mistakes occur in simple situations during real games.
Study material
Hajin Lee has a wonderful youtube channel with many videos one can learn from.
American Go Association has a lot of game commentary videos - I highly recommend the ones by Myungwan Kim 9 dan pro.
I wrote a while ago some Go lessons which I hope readers will find useful.
Also, I reviewed various study resources I came across, to help one choose between different options: