I notice that there are a very large number of books and websites about weiqi… whether you’re overseas buying books, importing books, or buying English language books (for those of us in English based countries, anyway) they are available on a variety of topics and abilities. But what’s the best source of go information? There really isn’t one “best” place to go — a lot of sites have good problems geared toward middle ranks, other sites have good game collections but little to no problem sets! What I really want is a complete collection of information starting at the 30-kyu level and heading to the Dan ranks.
I know I’m in the Single Digit Kyu ranks now, but I still want the weak problems - not only for my own practice (30 to 10 kyu problems are great for warm-up), but my (in the 4-5 years from now time frame) children too. I definitely want them to learn go - partially because of Milton Bradley’s articles on the subject, but also because I want to be able to play with them.
Therefore, my eventual goals on this matter are:
Firstly, to begin collecting problems ordered by skill — thousands and thousands of problems! I assume these will come from many different sources (perhaps even creating some myself). This will require some trial and error to learn to tell the exact problem strengths, but I have books to go off of (Graded Go Problems - which I should maybe revisit myself!).
Secondly, I must begin collecting problems and information based on topic. A number of the books I already have will go a long way toward this! It’s quite possible that I will need to rewrite some of this for children as the writing can sometimes be geared toward adults.
Finally, I must reach 5-7 dan within the next 5 years (or so)! This is the perfect vantage point to really be able to instruct my children (who may be about 3-4 years old in 5 years). Much weaker than this and I might run the risk that my children will outclass me too quickly! I’m hoping they do eventually…
The real problem, when teaching something like this to children, is to keep their focus (which is also something that Go helps with in the long run). Go must be kept interesting! This can be hard as kids are easily discouraged - this is also the reason for my final point… I currently will destroy a 20-kyu player simply because I can’t play teaching games down to that level… hopefully high strength will help me calculate my underplays better.