How to Not Play Go

by Yuan Zhou

This book will have a revolutionary impact on any kyu player who reads it. Zhou clarifies the common kyu level misunderstandings of how to play which hold kyu players back from reaching dan level. He explains that the skills needed to reach shodan are not things like a thorough knowledge of josekis or an ability to read out long sequences, but rather the elimination of some common confusions about how the game should be approached. The principles involved are not difficult to understand and Zhou clarifies them by giving detailed analyses of how they are being ignored in three different games between kyu level players.

Genres: Go, Nonfiction

32 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Sebastian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye-opening work!

One could argue that it is more important to understand how to do something than to know what are the things to avoid. However, when talking about go it is actually much more beneficial to figure out what typical mistakes are at your playing level and how to correct these. In this vein, Zhou delivers a helpful work, aimed mostly at players in the 15-5 kyu range.

The author starts by pointing out what are the common misunderstandings in kyu level play and then shows us three games in which the players progressively get stronger. In each game, we get to see the problems mentioned by the author in the introduction, such as following the opponent, not paying attention to the whole board, making slow plays, suffering from red-eye, etc. Zhou not only shows these problems, he also points out what the reasoning should have been in order to avoid them. Once you walk through these explanations you realize that there is not complex reading involved. It is an issue of understanding the basics that can put you pretty high among kyu level players and on your way to shodan.

I have to say that this book has helped my play tremendously, and even when I find myself in a game and making mistakes because I disregarded the advice presented here, I can quickly figure out what I did wrong. I cannot recommend this work high enough!

[Tran · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started to play Go and got to 20kyu in 2016, at this moment I'm around 10-5kyu. I didn't make any further progress since then because of the lack of practice (in the past 6 months I only played 6 games and didn't review any). Getting to know this book is a kind of blessing as I can start to recognise critical beginner mistakes in thinking. Mindset is something very difficult to change, but once we manage to change it we can break the ceiling and enter a new level easily.

[Marks54 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book for Go players with limited experience. The intuition is for the author to review games by low rated players and point out, move by move, what mistakes were being made and how the games could be improved. The idea is that more skilled players look at the game (and their game strategies) differently from less skilled players. It is a useful book.

[Aleksey Trufanov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book of exceptional worth for Go players of any non-pro level

[Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short but effective work that teaches while board thinking.

[Azalea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just the right book for me who is a double-digit kyu player. I played Go exactly like ‘How not to play Go’ describes.
Two of the most important things I learned from the book:
1. Always think of the entire board.
Choose the move with the most value.
Do not focus on a local area narrow-sightedly.
2. Take sentei seriously.
Do not follow the opponent blindly.
“Like ending with gote, following your opponent is giving up your freedom. You should resist doing that.”
After a brief introduction of the principles, the book analyzed three games in detail between kyu players, which was very fun and informative.

[Malcolm Bastien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very short book. It starts off with a page overviewing a set of common problems players have and describes why they are problems before examining three different games.

Sometimes it seems to focus too much on the one problem of not having "whole board thinking" but does still includes examples of the other common mistakes.

Starting off with low ranked games to higher ranked games feels like it helped show how avoiding those problems really does make for more interesting games. It's hard to tie the good moves vs mistake moves to winning games though. Maybe there just weren't enough example games.

[Benjamin Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This proved to be a very helpful overview of several mistakes commonly made by beginners (like me). I learned a great deal, and I can now appreciate with a little more clarity the kind of innovations in "whole board" thinking that men like Go Seigen contributed so powerfully to the theory of the game. I only wish that the annotations of the games in the book were more abundant and a little more patiently detailed. I am certain that there are many other common mistakes that could have been illustrated.

[Surattikorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

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