~In progress~
Here I will relay what I learned and personally think about studying Baduk from the very first steps to the last ounces of strength required to try yourself in the world against professional Baduk players.
1. Entering the world of Baduk.
The first steps in a new Baduk players life are the most exciting but also most difficult days he will experience. The normal board seems vastly endless and the player does not know what do to do at all. So all beginners should be advised to start rooting themselves in smaller board sizes first to get a firm grip on capturing and defending stones. I am assuming that every player will have read the rules before at least. Once you have done that by for example beating the beginners programm Igowin at least evenly you are ready to step into the world of the 19x19 board. Here however the player must be careful to not despair in the first weeks of playing as he probably will lose the largest amount of games he plays. I am speaking of up to 90% of the played games on the 19x19 board. Like Toshiro Kageyama 7dan in his book "Lessons in the fundamentals of Go" says that one must be prepared to lose his first 100 battles. In my opinion this is probably very true as it basically was how my first games went until one kind soul pointed me to a extremely useful activity which was solving Baduk problems of all kinds and mostly life and death. There is plenty of websites and books which have lots of problems especially for beginners and if you keep solving a few dozen every day fast progress will be made into the higher double digit kyu ranks.
Good sources for problems to solve:
- Graded Go problems for beginners vol.1
- GoChild
- goproblems.com
One of my most exciting experiences was the transition from 30kyu on KGS to 29kyu after playing randomly for a week. Yes I thought now I will conquer this server in just half a year I thought! But oh how wrong I was nearly 5 years later still not at the top of KGS' food chain but that is another topic.
