Paperback. Green cover with black title.

We provide an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available

A FROST PAPERBACK is a loved book which a member of the Frost family has checked for condition, cleanliness, completeness and readability. When the buyer collects their book, the delivery charge of £3.00 is not made

Yoshio Ishida (born August 15, 1948) is a professional Go player and author of several books on Go.

Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players in which the aim is to fence off more territory than the opponent. The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day. A 2016 survey by the International Go Federation’s 75 member nations found that there are over 46 million people worldwide who know how to play Go, and over 20 million current players, the majority of whom live in East Asia.

The playing pieces are called stones. One player uses the white stones and the other black stones. The players take turns placing their stones on the vacant intersections (points) on the board. Once placed, stones may not be moved, but captured stones are immediately removed from the board. A single stone (or connected group of stones) is captured when surrounded by the opponent’s stones on all orthogonally adjacent points. The game proceeds until neither player wishes to make another move.

When a game concludes, the winner is determined by counting each player’s surrounded territory along with captured stones and komi (points added to the score of the player with the white stones as compensation for playing second). Games may also end by resignation.

The standard Go board has a 19×19 grid of lines, containing 361 points. Beginners often play on smaller 9×9 or 13×13 boards, and archaeological evidence shows that the game was played in earlier centuries on a board with a 17×17 grid. The 19×19 board had become standard by the time the game reached Korea in the 5th century CE and Japan in the 7th century CE.

Go was considered one of the four essential arts of the cultured aristocratic Chinese scholars in antiquity. The earliest written reference to the game is generally recognized as the historical annal Zuo Zhuan (c. 4th century BCE).

Despite its relatively simple rules, Go is extremely complex. Compared to chess, Go has a larger board with more scope for play, longer games, and, on average, many more alternatives to consider per move. The number of legal board positions in Go has been calculated to be approximately 2.1×10170, which is far greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe, which is estimated to be on the order of 1080.

In go and shōgi, a jōseki (kanji characters 定石 for go, 定跡 for shōgi) is the studied sequences of moves for which the result is considered balanced for both black and white sides.

Go jōseki – In go, because games typically start with plays in the corners, go jōseki are usually about corner play as the players try to gain local advantages there in order to obtain a better overall position. Though less common, there are also jōseki for the middle game. In Japanese, jō (定) means “fixed” or “set” and seki (石) means stones, giving the literal meaning “set stones”, as in “set pattern”. In Chinese, the term for joseki is dìngshì (定式).

The concept of “balance”, here, often refers to an equitable trade-off between securing territory in the corner versus making good thickness toward the sides and the center. In application, these concepts are very dynamic, and, often, deviations from a jōseki depend upon the needs of the situation and the available opportunities. While learning jōseki is a tool to defend against a local loss, players always seek to take advantage of weaknesses in the opponent’s shapes, often deviating from the jōseki.