The Great Joseki Debates, by Honda Kunihisa. Ishi G35; 1992.

This is a book about selecting the proper joseki to play in a certain situation. It contains 24 Debates; each Debate presents you with a full-board position in the opening, and gives you three different moves to chose your next move in a corner from. The goal is to teach you to take the entire board situation into account, rather than blindly playing whatever joseki you happen to know.

Despite the fact that the word `joseki' is in the title, this is a good book even if you know few or no joseki. If you don't know any joseki, you still have to play somewhere, and this book will help you figure out the right direction to play in; since it gives you moves to chose from, your choice is limited, so you can focus on the situation at hand. If you know a few joseki, you're probably hurting yourself by playing the ones you know even when they aren't appropriate, and this book should help you get out of that rut. If you know lots of joseki, you still have to chose between them, and this book will help teach you that.

A series with similar goals is the Whole Board Thinking in Joseki books by Yang and Straus. Look there for comparative comments.

When reading the book, you should keep a piece of paper to cover up the next page, since the answer to the Debate is sometimes on a facing page.

cover pic


david carlton <carlton@bactrian.org>

Last modified: Sun Aug 10 20:52:09 PDT 2003