Bruce Wilcox’s Go Dojo : Contact Fights
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Contact happens often
throughout a game and most players screw it up royally. One
sees dan players making mistakes with rules a 20 kyu could
master. Obviously there is a need for a thorough training on
the subject - this is it! The Dojo is a computerized
interactive tutorial targeting four groups of students:
Squirm
with the Abysmals (to 20 kyu) as you realize fundamentals
you’ve never grasped
Commit with the Acolytes (to 10
kyu) to acquire the rules of good play
Study with the
Ascendents (to 1 dan) to hone the skills you need to
progress
Marvel with the Adepts (to professional) at the
advanced thinking of master strategists
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This
screenshot is of the version suitable for smaller monitors with
the text window shrunk.
The board size
is adjustable. Fonts and font sizing are completely customizable.
Each level covers how to
see the board and what rules to follow. There are interactive
tests to confirm you understand the rules and a printable crib
sheet to glance at as you take ‘live action testing’of
your understanding in whole board games. You play along with the
original players - guessing the correct move for your level of
understanding and seeing where the original players got it right
or so very wrong. Should you get it wrong, Dojo reminds you which
rule you’re breaking and lets you try again until you get
it right.
"What is this product
about?" The product is two things. First, Bruce Wilcox's Go
Dojo is a Windows compatible software program (also works under
WINE in LINUX) used to display teaching material that includes
text, go diagrams, quizzes, etc with an interface designed to
support large amounts of text. (For those of you familiar with
SGF annotated games, think of Dojo as the next-generation SGF
viewer. SGF was designed to display positions, text and
annotation, but has no hyper-text linking capabilities, no
testing support, etc, and most games with SGF commentary actually
say very little at a node. Dojo goes way beyond all this.)
Then there is the specific
chapter of teaching about Contact Fights. When enemy stones come
into contact, there are several different kinds of behavior
(areas of Go knowledge) that can come into play. One is "Life
and Death:, where you try to kill or live. Two is string capture
and connectivity (areas where "Tesuji" come into play).
The third is "Contact Fights", where players struggle
to build walls, influence, and avoid having their contacting
stones fall into one of the other two areas of behavior. Proverbs
like "Play hane at the head of two stones" or "When
crosscut play extend" come from contact fights. The Contact
Fights chapter is broken into 4 levels of study (from beginner
through dan level). Each has teaching, rules to learn, quizzes to
test your understanding of the rules in board situations, and
whole games at a variety of levels wherein you get tested
continually on the application of a range of rules and see
commentary of play and misplay involving those rules. Contact
Fights is 1400 pages.
At the adept level, deep
game commentary about contact fighting illuminates the
sophisticated rules governing play. At last you can grasp why
stronger players make those enigmatic moves and why some people
stay weak for so long.
Also included is Kogo's
Joseki Dictionary (http://waterfire.us/joseki.html) for studying
joseki.
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Wilcox’s
Go Dojo: Contact Fights (Windows/WINE only) is available via email
To order use www.PayPal.com
(click Send Money) of $25 or 20 British pounds, or 25 Euros to email:
gowilcox@gmail.com
Quotes from
users:
"Went through the beginner contact
lesson three times and finally think I am getting a little of it.
today played my first two games and it seemed a revelation to watch
stable and unstable stones appear before my eyes. I also felt I was
on the lookout for weak opponent stones, I thought I knew about
contact by reading your books but this really clarified the basic
principles" CZ (4 kyu)
"You've send me dojo ten days ago and
since then I'm using it daily. It's fascinating to see how the
filters allready start to work and alter my perception. Dojo keeps
what EZ-GO had promised. Congretulations!" PH
"I love the program and the contact
fights material! It's so precise it almost feels like these were
rules for a game engine retrofitted for human consumption... It's
interesting to see how often I would choose make a dangerous hane or
keep pushing even after 'super stable'; such simple rules can make me
think twice. Thanks for putting this together!" AF (9k)
"For me, it really is a far better
learning tool than the vast majority of go books I've read so far.
For $25 I would say it is an amazing deal...It has really transformed
the way I think about the stones on the board and is exactly the kind
of information I needed. I wish I'd had this program three years ago,
but tough. My game has always been of the whole-board, no-read
variety, with the technical aspects of contact fighting very
mysterious to me, even though I have carefully studied such books as
Davies' Life & Death and Tesuji. So suddenly getting a
theoretical backbone kind of clue to what's going on with contact on
the board is a revelation for me." BH (2k)
"There is certainly a lot of
teaching material in this program. A typical page repays a couple of
minutes' consideration, and there are almost 1400 pages, so I reckon
it would take about 48 hours to give it the attention that it merits.
This compares well with most Go books, making it well worth the
price." NW (1dan)
“I
just wanted to heap some praise on you for Go Dojo. I've read
books and solved Go problems, but I felt like there was some
underlying comprehension that I was lacking. My game was
stagnant and I was no longer improving. So I started looking
for Go software that would teach me a deeper understanding of the
game, so I could improve as a player. I figured that in this
day and age there would be plenty of software choices out there.
To my surprise a search of the internet was not turning up anything.
Finally I came across your Go Dojo software and it seemed to be along
the lines of what I was looking for. At first I was a little
skeptical, your website was really basic, no shopping cart or instant
download, and the screenshot showed some pretty basic graphics.
Now I know that graphics aren't an indicator of the material that's
being presented, but that was just my initial feeling. I
decided to get Contact Fights from you, and figured worst case I'd
lose $25. I've been studying the material over the last few
days, and I cannot believe how much it has changed my view of the
game. Seems like all the material I've seen before this,
whether it be books, puzzles, or online tutorials, has all been about
memorizing patterns or sequences or openings, and none of it really
dealt with the underlying principles that determined why any given
move was played. Go Dojo has totally unlocked that secret.
I've never had any source of information about Go completely change
my perception of the game the way that this has. And that's
based on going through roughly half of the material presented in
Contact Fights. Here I am back again, eagerly ordering Sector
Fights. Since going over some of the material I've played some
games on KGS where I'm ranked 12kyu, and almost instantly I felt my
game was improved, the board looked totally different to me. I
did find myself relapsing into some old habits at times, but I know
that further study will lead to my game vastly improving.
Can't
thank you enough, this is a really great product, hugely valuable.”
J.C. (12 kyu)