Go Seigen on Fuseki

Sometimes Asian go literature other than modern game collections or tesuji books is offered. I have had luck to find the Chinese edition of Go Seigen on Fuseki from Peter Zandveld's book shop. It is an old book in a two volume edition and numbered B14 and B15. Unfortunately, this is the only hint that I can give, since I do not know Chinese. You will have great problems to buy the book.

Yutopian offers two other very good fuseki books: The Nihon Kiin dictionary (a large book that is systematically ordered by the first few moves and treats them and their probable consequences - about 30 to 50 moves - in case of conservative fuseki style) and Rin Kaiho's fuseki dictionary (2 volumes, almost 1000 games with roughly 70 moves, wide range of fusekis, systematical, ca. 10% commented). So why do I review another book that virtually cannot be purchased?

Go Seigen's book is not systematical (at least I have not discovered any system yet). It gives games with their first 50 or 90 moves. Each game has detailed commentaries (many diagrams). Every important move and the decisions for making it are illustrated. This demonstrates the purposes of the moves, the reasons for their directions of play, the meanings behind their shapes and their application, how to play strategically, how to use aji best, how to choose josekis. That's it. What, only this? To gain from the book you need to know that these points belong to the highly important fundamentals of the game. Once you want to know everything about them you will be delighted about the book. Read it carefully (study the diagrams slowly) and your insight in go theory will greatly increase. Few other books treat direction of play, strategy, shapes, aji at all. This one, however, presents them in a broad coverage on a level as if the author is teaching us personally. This makes the book one of the best go books I know.

To gain from the book dan players' knowledge is recommended. It is the ideal extension to Srategic Concepts of Go for dans. The broad and unsystematical coverage strongly encourages the reader to think about the presented themes.

The printing quality is high.


Robert Jasiek <jasiek@snafu.de>

Date: 1997/08/15