Why not tsumego: arguments against tsumego.
1. tsumego are too contrived and knowing their answers won't help your go
2 tsumego are too contrived and are not as good as problems found in your own games
3. I did the tsumego, I tried hard and did 1000's but I'm not getting any better
1. tsumego are too contrived and knowing their answers won't help your go
The point of a contrived problem is not that you will see it in your future games many times and there knowing the answer to this problem your go will be better. If that were the case I wouldn't ever suggest tsumego The good thing about tsumego is this. The more you do tsumego -- The better you will get at tsumego. genius huh? The more you solve these life or death problems the greater your ability to solve more tsumego (even if they are not similiar). Now here's the catch. you will run into tsumego (life and death problems) in your games that you have NEVER done before. This will happen all the time! this is why tsumego are so valuable, they teach you to find solutions to problems. AND as an added bonus these problem solving skills your learning are not limited to life and death problems! You can use your new found skills to determine all kinds of things. such as the biggest move, how to defend this area with the fewest stones, how to best invade the enemy camp etc.
2 tsumego are too contrived and are not as good as problems found in your own games
It is difficult for me to contradict this too much since I highly recommend playing games. But I will try to show you something. Most proffesional athletes do contrived exercises. That does not mean these exercises are not good things. For example a professional boxer might say, I don't want to do 200 pushups its not like that set of motions would ever occur in a title match. I would say to him. 'The point is not to be able to do pushups, the point is that it will make you stronger'. You might not have to do pushups in the title match but the contrived pushups will make you be able to do the things you need to do. Yes perhaps doing 50 wrestling matches might be more effective for your wrestling, But then again maybe not. I sugguest you do pushups and wrestle, do tsumego AND play games.
3. I did the tsumego, I tried hard and did 1000's but I'm not getting any better
As of this time I cannot give a comprehensive answer to this. I suspect these people generally solve these problems through critical thinking instead of visualization. Critical thinking may help you get to the answer quickly through logical deduction but visualization is the key component that tsumegos are meant to increase. If this is the case with you I would be interested to talk with you and figure out how you are solving the problems. Perhaps a good method for training your critical thinking is to increase your knowledge of go principles by reading certain go books. Who knows what we might learn from a study in this type of learner. I suggest this person try doing tsumego by visualizing the stones being placed.
This is mostly a hypothosis as of the moment based the on the model that different people use different methods of thinking i.e 'visual, aural, kinsthetic'. We all use all of these methods and each of us have a dominant one. We can all train in all of the thinking methods .
