When you analyze a game with AI, the only times it tells you that your move gained something is if its neural networks had a blind spot. Normally your move either have zero value or they lose winning percentage and points. In that sense, good moves don’t really exist on the Go board. Rather, whoever accumulates the most minus values loses.
So rather than actively trying to find good moves, the key to winning is to avoid bad moves, and be aware of what you should not do. This is what Sasaki Shuuma, a strong amateur player from Japan, argues in his book “囲碁 ほんとうに大事な７つの考え方” (“Seven really important ideas in Go”).
The book is divided into seven chapters:
- Chapter 1: Don’t create broken shape
- Chapter 2: Don’t allow the head of two stones
- Chapter 3: Don’t make futile atari
- Chapter 4: Don’t leave stones without eyes / Don’t play near stones that have
eyes - Chapter 5: Don’t surround territory
- Chapter 6: Don’t be jealous
- Chapter 7: Don’t fall for your opponent’s tactics
Interestingly the book’s chapter titles are all “don’t do this”, “don’t do that”. That is, true to the philosophy, it doesn’t tell you what to do, just what not to do.
The author says that Go is not a game of surrounding territory but of who arranges their stones more efficiently. (That much we know.) Then he says that territory is a numerical value that expresses how efficiently you have arranged your stones.
He explains that the way to efficiently place stones is shape. Good shape produces efficient stones, bad shape produces inefficient stones. He says that it’s difficult to put into words what good shape is, so rather than that he tells us what bad shape is and that you should absolutely never make it. The list of bad shape corresponds to the chapter titles above.
Avoiding these is sufficient to get strong.
The book is in Japanese, and while there are many diagrams, you need to be able to read the text to get the most out of the author’s explanations.
It is published by Mynavi in August 2025. You can see details on the book’s page. On that site you can also buy a PDF version. If you have the PDF version, you can select the text and have it machine-translated.
The author also has a YouTube channel