Graded Go Problems for Beginners: Volume Four. Advanced Problems

This is the fourth and final volume of the series Graded Go Problems for Beginners and is aimed at players 10-kyu or stronger. The problems here are more difficult than the ones in Volume Three and, if your are able to solve problems of the same difficulty during your own games, your strength would be close to 1-kyu.

The answers to many of these problems are a bit terse, but we are assuming that many of the elementary tactics covered in the first three volumes have been mastered by the reader. One reason for the brevity of the answers is to encourage the readers to think out all of the other possible variations and to assure themselves that the solutions presented do lead to the desired result. The reader should attempt to ‘refute’ the correct answer until he knows beyond a doubt that the correct answer does in fact work. By pondering each problem in this way, the reader will develop an instinct for finding the winning move in his games.

 

Kano Yoshinori was born on April 14, 1928 in Kyoto and died on May 2, 1999. He came to Tokyo at the age of nine and became a disciple of Suzuki Hideko 5-dan. He became 1-dan in 1943 and in 1968 he attained the top rank of 9-dan. In 1948 he won the Young Professional's Championship, in 1955 he won the top section of the Oteai, and in 1961 he won the 5th Prime Minister's Cup. He played in the 14th, 20th, 25th, and 26th Honinbo leagues. In 1975 he went to Austria and Russia, then in 1979 he led a team of high school go players to China for a goodwill match. He graduated from the Japanese Literature Department of Japan University, making him one of the few professional go players to have graduated from university.

Richard Bozulich is the president of Kiseido Publishing Company. He learned how to play go in 1958 while a studying mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He came to Japan in 1967 to study go and founded The Ishi Press for the purpose of publishing go books in English. In 1982, he founded Kiseido.