Five Hundred and One Opening Problems

Along with playing games, practice is essential for mastering the opening; namely, familiarizing yourself with standard positions and knowing which principles to use for deciding your moves. However, the practice players get from their games is limited, whereas problem books, such as this one, can give amateur go players a vast variety of positions that might arise in their games. Practice also keeps the mind sharp and in top form. This is the reason professionals are always solving problems and often spend considerable time composing them.

Practice must also include repetition if it is to be effective. If you have to find the same kind of move in similar patterns over and over again, spotting that move in a problem or in a game will become second nature.

This book provides a vast number and a large variety of opening problems for the inexperienced player. Explanations are brief, with emphasis being placed on principles to give the reader a feeling of what a good opening move is. To this end, each problem is presented by stating an opening principle that can be used to solve the problem. By seeing how these opening principles are used in games, your intuition in the opening will become highly developed.

Richard Bozulich was born in Los Angeles in 1936. From the age of four until 17 he studied to become a concert pianist. He then studied Mathematical Logic at UCLA from 1953 to 1956 under Richard Montague. He transferred to UC Berkeley and graduated in mathematics in 1966. In 1967 he went to Japan to study go. In 1968 he founded Ishi Press Inc. in Japan and published more than 45 books on go. In 1982 he founded Kiseido Publishing Company and has published more than 60 books on go with that company. Along with John Power, he started publishing the go magazine, Go World, in 1977. 129 issues were published until he stopped publishing it in 2013. He is said to be the most prolific writer of English-language go books, having written or translated almost 50 books on the game. He lives in Chigasaki, Japan and is the president of Kiseido Publishing Company.