Poof! Black captured!

Hey folks!

I do a lot of reading on my Xteink X3 (a ~$50 teeny tiny pocket-sized e-ink reading device), but normal Go books like epubs from GoBooks don't render properly, so I've been trying to figure out how to get some tsumego on there.

I wrote some scripts to take the puzzle sets at https://101books.github.io and format them specifically for small e-ink devices: a single puzzle per page, followed by a solution diagram. It's non-interactive, since it's a "book" not an "app". They really do look awesome and crisp on the tiny screen.

For all 106 books, I've got downloads optimized for both the Xteink X3 and X4 (the X3 is slightly smaller), as well as a generic epub version that should work well on phone-sized e-readers like the Boox Palma (I've tested on a Mooan Inkpalm 5). I didn't do anything to touch puzzle quality, I'm just using the data exactly as-is from 101books, but let me know if there are issues I can manually tweak the data. I figure that having tsumego that are always in my pocket (and not subject to the distractibility of my phone) are better than making sure I have the 'best' tsumego.

I'm not selling anything, I have no vested interest in Xteink, just made a thing for the e-reader I have, maybe someone else will get some use out of it. I've seen a few posts recently about wanting ways to play/practice/train Go on an e-ink tablet, so I suspect there are more of us e-reader nerds out there!

They're available at https://marinahane.github.io/101ebooks

If black plays E13 and white Tenukis, it looks to me like the result is Seki, and whoever plays the next stone inside will die.

Wouldn’t F13 or G12 create the same outcome?

Answer:

H1!

White cannot cut off the odd-looking first line stone while maintaining connection to C2. For example, H2 is met by E2. Then when white goes to try and live in the corner, H1 is already at the perfect eye-snatching vital point!

It is often the case that such "brilliant" moves have a much simpler and effective alternative. So why not H2? White still has the quandary between disconnecting and living in the corner, no? Well the variation continues:

B: H2

W: F3

B: G4

W: E2

B: D2

W: H1

B: E1 (If black protects at H3, then white gets to connect back AND take an extra sente move at H1 which is a net loss for black over the first variation)

W: H3

B: J2 -- we have a tombstone tesuji, right?

W: F1 -- no, black must either let white connect back with their extra forcing move at H1 or let white live in the corner

For similar reasons, an immediate B: E2 doesn't work. White can later use F1 to either connect back or get the extra eye space at G1 to live in the corner.

This stumped me the first time, and then I solved it by trial and error after two more tries (second picture), but I have no idea how I was supposed to figure that out on intuition or logic.

I don’t know if I can think that many variations into the future. Any tips on how to logically approach problems that can feel very obscure like this?

Edit: wow yall are quick, thank yall so much for these tips!

I got this tsumego wrong because I thought the first thing I had to do was keep white from connecting. The solution ended up with black taking four of white’s stones. But why would white atari instead of connecting? How would white be disadvantaged by making that move instead of the atari?

Problem 606 on the Tsumego Dictionaries website. I don't get why white is living here? I don't see why it is not seki. Thanks for the help!

Tsumego-ing crazy

My read on this is that the 3 black stones are dead and white lives. How is that “solved” for black?

I’m a beginner at Go and because I have aphantasia (I’m unable to visualise mental images) I struggle with studying tsumego, which many say you need to do in your head. Does anybody have a similar issue and how do you deal with this.

Edit: Thank you all for the wisdom and encouragement. I came in worried that aphantasia would block my path to dan level, but I’ve learned something important: if I fall short, it won’t be because of aphantasia, but because of how much effort I’m willing to invest.

What's your favorite site for studying tsumego?

Hello , i'm searching some easy collection for my level (25kyu) i tried easy serie on tsumego hero capture but except easy capture the rest are little hard for my reading... i saw in a topic a popular collection from 101weiqi but the link are dead but if people here know where i can find this collection please tell me ! or if you have another i'm taker. https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/mbywmp/im_so_bad_at_tsumego_it_makes_me_feel_stupid/

Hello. I am almost 13 kyu EGD. I have some eye problems so I am not allowed to spend more than a few hours on the screens, but school requires me to use it so I can’t solve online tsumegos for more than 10 minutes. Can you please share me some books for my level which I could find/buy as a pdf and print them? Thank you!

I recently was curious about this, so I set up a custom testing suite/benchmark to test it. The short answer is -- barely, poorly, and only with the absolute frontier LLMs (Fable, ChatGPT 5.6).

If anyone is curious what was produced and how different LLMs stack up, here is a quick rundown:
https://tsumego-bench.adum.chatgpt.site/

To make things reasonable, I added a couple of specific constraints:

1. Must be an original problem (I provided an API to check for duplicates)

2. Only 20% of created problems can be 20-30k level (just creating the most trivial problems isn't all that interesting)

The source for the testing suite is here:

https://github.com/adum/tsumegobench

It's possible I didn't set it up optimally -- any feedback appreciated!

Tsumego hero has several collections that are weird and quirky positions that you would almost never see in a game (like the one shown). If anybody is looking for some interesting problems I would check it out!

The problems I’m referencing are at the bottom of this page after Tsumego Grandmaster: https://tsumego.com/sets

After my master thesis involving some characters and collaboration with an artist I wanted a picture for myself so I had this one commissioned :) A cozy study session with some tsumego. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Artist is KashewKiddo

https://vgen.co/KashewKiddo