Given all the interest in sudden interest in go in this thread, anyone have a sure-fire method to improve at go from double-digit kyu to single-digit kyu and amateur dan level?
Handicap Go by Nagahara Yoshiaki helped me tremendously.
I started playing I believe in March of 2025. I had the very good luck that one of my high school best friends is a 4 dan EGF player, and was in the French team 20 years ago. We played constantly against each other with 9 stones handicap and him teaching me a lot.
But when I read that book, in a few weeks/months we went from 9 stones to only 3 stones by August 2025. and we have stayed at 3 stones since, playing very even games, with only a handful or couple of points differences. Only very recently did I win by 9.5 points. Which made me hope I had made new progress, but I had to resign in the very next game.
At double-digit kyu level, you should just play every day until you feel you are stuck.
After you get stuck, you should pick one thing at a time to focus on improving. But the one thing should probably be related to tesuji or life and death.
OGS (online-go.com) is the predominant server for players in the Western hemisphere, and provides a modern browser based UI. Fox has a larger player base, but that player base is almost entirely in Asian timezones. Fox requires downloading a not so modern client whose UI is lacking English translation. I get the feeling that Fox has a lot of bot players in the lower ranks.
It can take a few minutes to get a match on OGS. When that happens, I take the opportunity to warm up with a few tsumego drills on goproblems.com
Probably Fox would be the server with the most players but at DDK basically any would work and I think getting exposure to different playing styles would be worthwhile.
