Tesujis are the tactics of short range combat in the game of go. This volume presents over three hundred examples and problems of them, aimed at training the reader to read and spot the right play in all sorts of tactical situations. It covers a wide range of material while concentrating on fundamentals; its problems manage to be both hard enough to challenge and easy enough to solve, and there are enough of them to keep the most avid busy.

005 1. Reading

014 2. Capture the Cutting Stones

030 3. Amputate the Cutting Stones

044 4. Ko

060 5. When Liberties Count

090 6. Linking Groups Together

104 7. Cutting Groups Apart

114 8. Into Enemy Territory

124 9. Escape

132 10. Sacrifice to Gain Tempo

140 11. Tesuji for Attack

154 12. How to Connect

164 13. Making Shape

182 14. Ignore the Atari

190 15. Double-Threat Tesuji

194 16. Challenge Problems

This book covers the elementary tactics of the game of go, apart from those of life and death and of the endgame which have been saved for other volumes. Problems, which the reader should try to solve as he reads along, fill about half the pages. Most of them will yield to a direct application of the ideas in the text, although in some of the problems at the ends of the chapters the reader will be on his own.

I am indebted to Richard Bozulich and James Kerwin for contributing problems and examples and for proofreading, and in particular to James Kerwin for making suggestions that led to the writing of chapter one and the organization of the book in its present form.

James Davies, Tokyo, January 1975, preface