Life and Death

After the first 20 pages, I was making 20-point plays in games that I would never have seen before this book. Whole categories of life and death problems can be reduced to simple questions about the shape of their potential eyespace. Having this in your favor is something that every player needs to know. Some of the problems are fairly tricky at the 10kyu level.

If you are a Go beginner, I recommend studying (as I did) the book of Go problems for 30-25 Kyu before this one. But after that and Richard Bozulich's book, this is certainly the next book to turn to. I'm currently studying this book, "Life and Death," and another book in this series by the same author, "Tesuji." "Life and Death" is a step easier than "Tesuji," although counter-intuitively they are volumes 4 and 3 in the series. Although the techniques used to kill or save groups come from "Tesuji," the positions in "Life and Death" are simpler, more basic and far, far more common. The problems are a bit easier. So I recommend studying this one first.

Having recently read a few books that tried to answer the question, "What is Life?" I was glad to find this one! The answer is simple. Life is two eyes! If you have only one eye, you are dead. That is why the door group is as dead as a, um, doornail. It only produces one eye. You can't enjoy a game of go unless you have a pretty good idea if your groups are dead or alive. And this book is good at teaching you to see which shapes can form two eyes and which shapes can not. The chapters and quizzes in this book are excellent training. If you can answer the "status?" questions correctly, you are well on your way towards doing some serious damage to many of your opponent's more dubious formations. Once you have learned the elements of go and have played some games, what comes next? Well, you need to learn a little about fuseki and joseki. And tesuji (or you won't be able to understand this book). But the first topic you need to learn really well is this one. And that's where this book comes in handy.

One of the first mountains a beginning Go player has to climb is deciding when a group of pieces has a living shape and what do to get a group into shape. Until this is mastered one is playing 'accidental' Go. In other words, lacking a tactical target, issues of life and death are settled without a clear picture of the desired effect. Which is why early play at the Go board often feels like someone just pulled the rug out from under you.No surprise then that there are many books on tactical play and analysis. James Davies' "Life and Death" is a very neat volume that organizes itself around shape and provides the basic proverbs that will help a player get a good start. Only experience will completely demystify life and death, but this book provides the kind of lessons that help a players bootstrap themselves up to a respectable game.Each chapter is short and to the point, with several examples and a number of carefully thought out problems and status analyses. Since the focus of the book is not to test the player's IQ but to provide information in digestible pieces the material is easily accessible, which is not always the case with Go books. Lots of additional review problems are also provided.The advantage to this entire series is not only the transparency of the lessons, but the author's careful adherence to a size and format that makes this a truly portable book. Go, especially in it's most minimalist form (a small magnetic set, for example) is every bit as backpack friendly as checkers and is much more fascinating. "Life and Death" is an excellent companion for the serendipitous traveler.