A Zen way to Joseki

 

Once upon a time, a great Zen Master was asked to tell his experiences on the path to enlightenment. He said: "When I was young and I didn't know what Zen was, the mountains were mountains, rivers were rivers and clouds clouds. Then I started to practice Zen, and after some time of hard study the mountains weren't mountains any more, rivers were not rivers, and the clouds were not clouds. Now I am enlightened, and mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers and clouds clouds."

So it goes with joseki.

When you start to play Go you have no idea of what a joseki is. At the beginning of the game, you play first in the corners, because you were told that that's the way it should. But you play with an attitude of freedom. Not knowing anything, you play moves that you like, relying on the little you know, on your still limited ability to read sequences ahead, on what you want to do and how to reach your goal. Very often you get crushed by stronger opponents.

Disappointed, you start studying, and discover that there are set corner sequences called Joseki which the professionals say give equal result to both players.

Set sequences??!? If they are set they can be categorised, studied and memorised!!! Such an approach appeals very much to the rational western mind: categorise, memorise and fish the right one out when you need a specific something. So you go and seek the ultimate Joseki book, repository, database or whatever, hoping to find a way to have a perfect joseki for all seasons.

I think that's a thoroughly wrong approach.

First of all, joseki are not set. They are a living organism, they change, they adapt, they are improved, they become obsolete. A professional works out a new move that gives an advantage: no joseki anymore. Another professional finds a countermeasure: a new joseki is born! In this way literally thousands of joseki are constantly created, transformed and abandoned. How could we, weak amateur, even think of memorise all possible variations? And don't forget that the fifty-fifty share is true only on the local scale: what is equal here could be a total loss on the strategic scale.

The supreme difficulty of joseki is in fact to choose that variation that fits with the strategic, global position on the go-ban.

Second: very often a certain move is not considered joseki just because it entails a loss of, say, two points. That's enormous for pro standards, but should we, weak amateurs, be bothered, when a few moves later we are likely to play a strategic mistake (for instance a wrong direction of play) that could costs us some thirty points?

Third. What happens if our opponent won't play as we expect him to do? Amateurs more often than not deviate from the so-called set sequence. Pro's do the same but for a very different reason, striving for that one-point advantage, and with very different results.

As we have read somewhere that a deviation from Joseki should be punished, we look for a way to kill our opponent's group that didn't agree to follow the "set" sequence. Of course in oh so many instances we fail to do that and we get frustrated. So frustrated that we could lose the game! To punish a deviating move we should first have thoroughly understood the real meaning of each and every move in the sequence. Most of the times we do not realise that the possible punishment is just the infliction of that two-point loss.

So hopefully after some struggle you will understand that joseki are not that important after all, at least until you reach, say, 2-3 dan amateur. If you think that Go is only about fighting power and tactical combat, think twice, or else move to chess (no offence intended, chess is a thoroughly enjoyable intellectual game). To me, Go is about strategy. Of course fighting power is important, and what happens in internet Go and in the fashionable styles prevailing these days in the international professional arena stand there to demonstrate it, but I happen to believe that Go is more than mere tactics and more than an intellectual game.

In the end you may realise that we should play having in mind a strategic goal and that we should play freely in the corners to reach that goal, relying on our ability to read ahead. I believe that we should play moves that we like, a style we enjoy. Takemya and Go Seigen apparently agree with me on that…

I also believe that we shouldn't mind losing a lot of games, provided we learn something. The circle has been closed, but we are more aware.

If you want to improve, I believe you'd better study first the strategic concepts, the direction of play, the positional judgement, how to use thickness. Play along pro games, study tesuji and life and death to improve your reading ability.

Deviate from Joseki as much as possible, but do that with awareness: try to reach your strategic goal regardless, or to stop your opponent from reaching his/her goal. Read ahead!

Play simple joseki with weaker players and difficult ones with stronger players. Enjoy the complexity of joseki such as Nadare, Taisha, Muramasa's Magic Sword, but not for the sake of mastering variations: do that for the sake of entering deep, unknown and dark waters and learn to swim better and better.

Meanwhile, study the Endgame: it is an invaluable source of tesuji, and it teaches you the patience of counting…If you do that proficiently, you may find yourself a 3 dan. Only then is it about time to start a serious study of joseki: now you may have the tools needed to understand what it is that pro's call joseki. Again, not to memorise a thousand variations, but to be able to adapt your corner play to your strategic plan!

Why am I not even a shodan, you may ask? Weeeeeeell…

(These ideas were posted some time ago, with small variations, on the Sensei's Library)

The beauty of Go

Go is a game of strategy where two players take turns in placing their pieces (called “stones” – ishi, in Japanese – all of the same value) on the intersections of a 19×19 grid, in order to control its space. The grid is drawn on a wooden board (called goban in Japanese).

Once played on one of the 361 intersection points, the stones are not moved anymore, except in case of capture, when they are removed from the board.
The players start therefore with the empty goban and add stones in order to map out “territories” (i.e. areas of empty intersections delimited by one’s own stones). One point is counted for each empty intersection inside the territory plus one point for each stone captured from your opponent.
The final winner is the player with the larger territory.

The game therefore proceeds from Kaos (the empty goban at the beginning, when everything is still possible) to Kosmos (the spatial structure perfectly defined at the end of the game, when all territories have been claimed and delimited, and no further gains are possible: the entropic death?).
Meanwhile, you will witness invasions, attacks, defences, captures – but in the end only one more point is enough to win the game.

It is extremely difficult to convey in few words the fascination of a such a game, so simple and complex at the same time, or show the philosophy and, why not, the ritual with which Go is played in the Far East.

In Japan, as well in the rest of the world, Go is both seen as a pastime to be enjoyed in the free time or as an intellectual activity. For a (happy?) few persons, it is a profession.
But for many in all such categories, Go is an art, that often crosses the frontier to spirituality or to a way of life: a great player once said that it is not Go that mirrors life, but life that reflects go…

Here follows some essential characteristics you have to master in order to become a good player:

Flexibility
A good player is able to change her strategy midway, according to changes in the situation on the board. A technique exists called in Japanese yosu-miru, where I force my opponent to choose, among many others, a specific direction of play (thus abandoning other possibilities), in order to inform my future strategies

Intuition
In Go there are not set openings as in chess. Very much is left to the intuition of the players. Their analytical abilities are much more important in the middle game, with its infighting, and in the endgame, where it is possible to (you must) actually count the value in points of every move.

Balance
A good player has to balance attack and defense, temerity and steadiness. You do not have to crush your opponent, a one-point difference is enough to win. A poetic name of Go is "Hand talk", a beautiful game is one where the opponents collaborate to make a flowing and harmonious construction…

Lightness
Go shuns over-concentrated and “heavy”, or “bad”, shapes of stones (see below): they are inefficient (I played too many stones to map a small territory) and prone to be dangerously attacked.

Aestethics
In Go, we speak of good and even beautiful shapes (of stones) as the most efficient way of playing on the board.
Not only that, also the way you hold the stones and the traditional materials (slate and shell for the black and white stones, the thick board) are simple, beautiful and elegant…

On of the most fascinating aspects of Go is the need to maintain a global view over the construction one is creating: very often a correct tactical play in a local situation (e.g. one corner of the goban) can seriously damage another friendly group of stones in the opposite corner. The goban must be seen as a whole and not as a sum of many independent situations.

Such concept of wholeness is typical of every Oriental philosophy, in which all things and all events perceived by the senses are interconnected and unite: they are in other words different manifestations of a ultimate reality.

This may explain why it took so much time for Go to get a footing in the West, where, thanks to the Cartesian and Newtonian imprinting that permeates every aspect of our society, the world is seen as something built out of elemental and separate blocks: everything is fragmentary.

Consider for instance writing, which is a series of signs with no meaning on their own: the meaning is acquired only when the signs are assembled in a pre-established order. The Oriental sign, on the contrary, contains a whole image, a sensation, a concept.

Is this the reason why chess are played in the West and Go is played in the East? Is it just a chance that as of today no one has been able to write a software able to play better than an amateur beginner?

As you can practice Aikido, Kyudo, Bushido, so you can practice Kido, the Way of Go.

Such Art, as all the others, requires a constant perfectioning of the technique, but the real mastering is reached only when the technique is transcended and the Art becomes spontaneous, originating from the concentration that allows to be in harmony with the flow of things.

Crows and herons, the game of go

"Crows and herons", after the black and white colour of pieces (called "stones"), is just one of the many poetic names given by Japanese to the game of go.

Go is the japanese name (if you want to be fussy, i-go, 囲碁) of a very ancient game, born some thousands of years ago in China where is called Wei Qi (圍棋), brought to its technical heights in Japan and then in Korea (where it is called Baduk, 바둑). Today go is played all around the world. It combines very simple rules with complex tactics and profound strategy, which makes it unique in beauty and fascination.

The origins of go are hidden in the mist of legends: probably its playing materials (a wooden board, black and white stones) were used for some sort of divination. Later we found the game played at the Chinese imperial court and in the higher social classes. The games reaches Japan more or less in the VIII century, brough there by a legendary ambassador coming back from China. Also in Japan also the game spread among the military hierarchies and the higher classes.

Modern go starts in the XVI century, when three shoguns (Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu) fancied an interest in the tactical and strategical characteristics of the game. They took at their services as a teacher the strongest player of their time: Nikkai, who was a buddhist priest of the Nichiren sect, who would afterwards change his name to Sansa.

In 1612 Tokugawa recognised four schools, or Houses, of go, paying stipends to the best players, creating the office of godokoro (a sort of ministery for go) and establishing the ceremony of "o-shiro go", the games of the castle, where players of the highest rank (7 dan) played official games in the presence of the shogun.

An effective professional system was thus established, which brought forth an incredible development of the game. The four Houses were placed under the supervision of the jisha-bugyo, the Commissioner for Temples and Shrines, because they were structured as religious schools. Sansa founded the Honinbo House (after the name of a pagoda of Jakko-ji temple in Kyoto where he used to live). The other rival Houses were Inoue, Hayashi e Yasui.

Rivalry was fierce: players were competing for the honour of their Houses and for the post of godokoro, that gave money and power. The competition wasn't resolved only by playing, but also by means of political intrigues…

Such wonderful situation (for the technical evolution of the game) reached a sudden end with the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate and the Meiji restauration (1868). Funding of the Houses was abolished, and players who until that day were respected and renowned found themselves literally starving to death.

But little by little the remaining players managed to re-organise a professional system at the beginning of the XX century, thanks to mecenatism and to sponsorship from newspapers. Today there are hundreds of professionals in Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan who contend in rich tournaments sponsored by newspapers, TV networks, and companies such as Toyota, LG, ecc. Not to speak of dozens of millions amateurs all over the world.

You can find further reading in the sites linked on the right, and where you could even learn the basics of the game.

Until the next,

Yours,