You might think playing games is enough to learn how to read. It is possible if you play many games and learn from every game. But it will take a long time. Most of the time in a game, you are not reading anything. You are just deciding where to play and making judgments. With tsumego, you can practice just reading, cutting down the time it takes to improve immensely.
Where to do tsumego
I recommend doing tsumego on 101 Weiqi. This site has tons of Tsumego, most of which are high quality. This site also offers many helpful tools, such as creating tsumego sets by rank and type. It also keeps track of how many you have done and how long each takes you. 101 Weiqi is not 100% in English, but a lot of it is. If you use Chrome, there is a plugin that translates a lot more of it. 101weiqilocalizer
Book recommendations
I have a few suggestions if you want to learn from a book. You can get these on the GoBooks app. I recommend the book “Get Strong at Life and Death” by Richard Bozulich. This book will teach you the basics and provide plenty of tsumego for practice. Another would be “The Basics of Life and Death” by Rob van Zeijst and Richard Bozulich.
How I recommend doing tsumego
Set the tsumego on an actual board. It stops you from just clicking and rushing through the tsumego. If you don’t have a board, It’s okay to do Tsumego on your computer as well. Just try your best to resist the urge to start clicking.
I would alternate your sessions between doing easy tsumego and slightly difficult ones. The easy ones are to train your pattern recognition so that you can see them in a real game. In a real game, you are not in the mindset, “this is a tsumego, and it has an answer.” It is easy to miss stuff in games because of this. The slightly difficult ones should take you 2 minutes or less. These help you read more deeply and retain more information in your memory. Doing Tsumego that takes more than 2 minutes is a waste of time. As you improve, you will slowly climb the rank ladder, where eventually, almost everything will be quick or slightly difficult for you. These steps are essential.
Consistency
The most common thing I see is that a person will do many tsumego quickly and then take long breaks in between. It does not help you. Consistency is key! It is better to do 10 minutes per day than to do a bunch at once and stop for a long time. Once you decide how long you want to do tsumego per day, do not worry about how much tsumego you are doing. Over time, you will naturally do more the faster you get at tsumego. Just pick a time you know you can do consistently, even if it’s only 5 minutes.
Things that happen after you start
Most people who start doing tsumego become fighters once they start doing it consistently. This is because they are beginning to understand when a group is weak and want to try to punish it. It is a phase everyone needs to go through. You will learn many things from it. Try to get out of this phase as soon as possible. If you don’t, you will fight all the time and eventually hit a wall. To get past this wall, you need to learn when to fight and when not to.
I did not like doing tsumego initially because I wanted to play games. But once I started doing them, I became addicted and do them all the time. Do you do tsumego? And if not, will you attempt to start?
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