38 Basic Josekis

In the game of go, the opening moves focus on the corners of the board. Over the thousands of years of go playing, this aspect of the game has been intensively studied and a large number of opening formulas, or josekis, have been discovered and refined. Every go player needs to have a working knowledge of the basic ones.

38 Basic Joseki cuts incisively through the labyrinth of joseki to give the reader a solid grounding in the subject.
Working steadily out from the 3-3 point to the 4-5 point, it surveys the principal variations of the 38 most common corner patterns, pointing out the key ideas in each and showing the reader how to choose and use josekis in relation to other stones on the board.

Kiyoshi Kosugi was born in 1939 in Tokyo into a large, go-playing family. His parents and all six of his brothers and sisters know how to play go, and three of them---his father, mother, and younger brother---are professional go players. Under his father's tutelage, he became a professional shodan in 1957, reached 2-dan the next year, and 3-dan the year after that. In 1967 he took second place in the second division of the Oteai tournament, which determines a professional player's rank, and was promoted to 5-dan. In 1979 he came in second in the 23rd Prime Minister's Cup. He became 8-dan in 1991. Besides go, he likes to read and play mah jong. He lives with his wife and family in Chiba Prefecture. James Davies was born in 1945 in Philadelphia. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1967 and entered graduate school at the University of Washington, only to have a mathematics professor interest him in the game of go. In 1970 he came to Japan, where his go playing has advanced to the amateur 6-dan level.

In the game of go, the opening moves focus on the corners of the board. Over the thousands of years of go playing, this aspect of the game has been intensively studied and a large number of opening formulas, or josekis, have been discovered and refined. Every go player needs to have a working knowledge of the basic ones. 38 Basic Joseki cuts incisively through the labyrinth of joseki to give the reader a solid grounding in the subject. Working steadily out from the 3-3 point to the 4-5 point, it surveys the principal variations of the 38 most common corner patterns, pointing out the key ideas in each and showing the reader how to choose and use josekis in relation to other stones on the board.

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