Living Go: Kajiwara’s Philosophy on Direction of Play

[@plrc4593]

Direction of play is one of the most interesting, yet mistified and obscure go concepts.

[@Arsa-m4s]

No one ever talks about this although it's one of the most important concepts to Go mastery. Keep it up,Go magic,Good job !

[@tottyamadeus591]

I want more like this please !! !

[@BenMojo.]

Amazing. What a beautiful game. Thank you for the insights. The fuseki is my favorite part of the game.

[@anuzis]

Another Matthew video? I know I can click Like in the first 3 seconds and it will ring true throughout!

[@Verdurapp]

me encanto el video

[@seventus]

In the Edo period, players were always trying to find stronger practical moves and evolve their Go. I feel like the shin fuseki and the second half of the 20th century brought with it a lot of airy-fairy theory that while undoubtedly artful, neglected the practical aspects of Go and caused Japan to become weaker and eventually lose out to the more practical styles of Korea and China. I prefer Fujisawa's approach in general. He would still stubbornly insist on "the only move" and have strong opinions, but he would also praise his students for coming up with novel plans even if they did not work out; in other words, the act of coming up with a coherent, creative plan was more important than to play what orthodoxy claims is the correct move. Fujisawa was on to something, and had a close relationship with Korean and Chinese players, who evidently absorbed some of this spirit. My experience with Edo period Go is extensive, and I do not believe that Kajiwara's philosophy was their philosophy; rather, I think it's a product of post shin-fuseki Japan. It's an interesting thing to look into, and sometimes sensible (and definitely useful for kyu players), but it fails in numerous ways and is incongruous with both Edo period play and modern post-AI play (in my opinion).

[@plrc4593]

Excellent video. I longed for something like this. There aren't a lot of videos explaining strategy in go.

[@tuerda]

The majority of the content of this video (and of about 80% of what is in the "direction of play" book) is something I was always somewhat suspicious of. Eventually it was almost completely refuted by AI. The stuff he says is "bad" is often shown not only to be perfectly fine, but often marginally better than the moves he recommends. This does not necessarily mean that what he recommends or that his system leads to bad moves. The moves he recommends are fine of course, but the ones he rallies against are also perfectly fine. IMO this kind of rigid opening thought pattern is reasonably thought of as "_one way_ to find good moves" which shows a little more respect to moves which violate the principles as well.