Get Strong at Attacking, by Richard Bozulich. Kiseido K60; 2000.

This is, of course, a book on attacking in Kiseido's Get Strong at Go series. Like the rest of the series, it is a problem book. Specifically, it has 136 whole-board problems on attacking.

I'm honestly not sure what to make of this book. I think it's pretty good, and I'm glad I worked through it. It pointed out some holes in my game - for example, for some reason, I seem not to consider caps as often as I should.

But: I find books like this fairly tiring to work through. Not only are the problems whole-board problems, but they don't give you a choice of move to play from. Some of the problems direct you towards a certain area of the board; some of them don't. (They're all about attacking, though, so you at least know the kind of move that you're supposed to make in the situation.) So the upshot is that, on the one hand, they're certainly good practice, and I found them to be largely of a reasonably level for me (I'm currently an AGA 1 kyu), but on the other hand I'll inevitably get many of them wrong. The fact that there were up to 8 problems in a group didn't help, either: if I was taking the problems seriously, then I wasn't always able to get even a single group of problems done on my bus ride to/from work.

Anyways: pretty good book. Not one of my favorite ones in the series, and it will be a while before I go through it again, but I'm glad I went through it once.


david carlton <carlton@bactrian.org>

Last modified: Sun Aug 10 20:55:07 PDT 2003