Golden Opportunities, by Rin Kaiho. Yutopian Y12; 1996.

This book is about not missing big chances, about not playing for a few points when you have a much bigger move in the vicinity. It's divided into three parts: one on finesses, one on local fighting, and one on winning games; so the later parts involve more judgment and are on a larger scale than the earlier parts. In the second and third parts, there are brief historical interludes about famous events (often battles) which are supposed to be similar in some way to the situation that is about to be described. I don't know that the historical events have all that much to do with the board positions, but they're fun to read anyways.

This is a good book. It's a pretty amorphous topic: we'd all like to not miss golden opportunities, but there's no royal road to that. But as a collection of educational positions, it works well. The first part is a nice presentation of a few tesuji; the later sections do a good job about getting you to think about things that you might not think about otherwise.

The book almost never uses Japanese terminology; for example, the title of the first part uses the word 'finesse' instead of 'tesuji'. (The book does use words like 'ko', but it really tries not to use any other than the most basic.) I think that this works well; in some ways, I feel that this is one of the best-translated go books available in English. It contains a two-way vocabulary index, so you can tell what Japanese word a given English word is a translation of. There's also a historical index to help give some more context to the historical notes.

Lukas Biewald (eggroll, 3k* IGS) says:

A horrible book. It treats a very small number of positions, that are way too hard to work out, and analyzes the various to death. Then it goes in to mistakes that professionals make. Maybe one day when I am 7 dan this book might be useful.

Click here to see Yutopian's blurb about the book.

david carlton <carlton@bactrian.org>

Last modified: Sun Aug 10 20:59:09 PDT 2003