All About Thickness: Understanding Moyo and Influence, Yoshio Ishida
A completely new kind of go book.
Two-color printing maked the advanced concepts of thickness and influence graphically clear – and instantly understandable.
Most go books are top-heavy with text and endless explanatory diagrams. Ishida’s approach in this book is the opposite – large diagrams, simple explanations, a minimum of mind-numbing text – yet this is the most successful attempt in the go literature to convey to go players of all levels the secrets of building thickness and making effective use of influence.
How do you build thickness? What areas of the board should you aim to control? In which direction do stones exert their force? How close should you approach a strong enemy position? How many points can you expect to convert a thick position into? The answers to these and many other questions will be apparent at a glance when you read this book.
All About Thickness, the first book of its kind, was a best-seller in Japan. Go players around the world should find the English version just as enlightening as Japanese go fans.
Comments & Reviews
Imagine Ishida-sensei with a whiteboard - Written by
ChiyoDad
Folks have told me that I’m a visually-oriented learner. That must be true because I really like this book. It’s as if someone gave Ishida a whiteboard and he’s drawing freehand diagrams to convey the concepts of moyo and influence to the reader. I imagine that this method may have different levels of effectiveness for different people.
With red highlights and greyscale shadings, Ishida points out to the reader how to visualize the effects of thickness throughout the board and which stones or positions are key. What might have been interpreted as a weak formation is graphically illustrated to expound its strengths. Directions of play become clearer. Relationships between stones appear more vividly. Walls cast shadows across the board.
Perhaps this is what Seigen meant when he said that Go is really a three-dimensional game.
ChiyoDad’s Interpretation of the Rating Scale 5 = Core library item 4 = Good study supplement 3 = Fair study supplement 2 = Interesting 1 = Buy it if you just collect Go books
Similar to "All About Thickness: Understanding Moyo and Influence"
Moyo Go Studio
Understanding How to Play Go
Improve Your Intuition, Volume 3: Intuition in the Middle game Part 2: How to Reduce a Moyo
Get Strong at Handicap Go, Get Strong at Go Series, Vol.9
Handicap Go: Elementary Go Series, Vol.7
