Go is a drawn-out game. Opportunities to create some sort of ascendancy appear scores of times, and even opportunities significant enough to determine the outcome of the game are sure to occur several times in a single game.

Perhaps there are people who are thinking, "How can you be sure of winning by giving up such a large group to white?" but this can be thought of as the payment of $15,000,000 America made for the purchase of Louisiana. If anything, the compensation of nine stones is perhaps on the small side!

The sort of skill needed to see [tesuji] is generally thought to result from differences in reading ability, but in fact this is not so. It is something quite separate.
It is the kind of sensitivity known as intuition, and not just pros but even many amateurs have acquired such skill. The point is, anybody can do it with due diligence. And it does not require as much effort as is normally thought.
So how do we learn to grasp the vital points and vantage points intuitively?
For that it is necessary to encounter such shapes as much as possible. Omitting the reason why this is the vital point and so on, one simply learns by heart the fact that in such and such a shape it is the vital point.
When I say learn by heart, I mean nothing more onerous than looking repeatedly at diagrams until the answer appears instantaneously. It is by no means a difficult thing to do.
...
At any rate, go is the sort of game where we can say that learning from shapes is the fastest way to improve. In that sense then, this book will offer problems that, above all, develop your intuition.
...
Problem 1: There is only one vital point to rescue the five black stones. Once you have discovered it, the solution comes out easily.

I got a little bit of positive feedback about this, so I'm going to go ahead and try it out. The first chapter is about tesuji, which John Fairbairn translates as "finesse". I'm going to post an excerpt from the text, some problems, and then my questions, so that hopefully we can get some study discussion going.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B Problem 1
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . .
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . .
$$ | . . . O . . O . X . . . .
$$ | . . . O . . . . . . . . .
$$ | . . . O X . . . X , . . .
$$ | . O O B O O . . . . O . .
$$ | . O B B B . . . O . . . .
$$ | . B . . . . . . . . . . .
$$ --------------------------[/go]

Ok, my questions for the group:
1) The implication of this problem is that there's a particular vital point for each, and if you know it the problem is easy. So how many people knew the tesuji? If your first guess wasn't correct, what was your first guess?

2) Basically Rin Kaiho suggests that the fastest way to improve is to memorize solutions, without necessarily reading them each time, just to learn vital points. Do you agree? It actually seems quite different from the "never look at the answer" school of tsumego.

After this are 4 more "intuition problems", of the sort that are supposed to be easy if your intuition is good. I'll add those after a few people respond to this

The implication of this problem is that there's a particular vital point for each, and if you know it the problem is easy. So how many people knew the tesuji? If your first guess wasn't correct, what was your first guess?

Basically Rin Kaiho suggests that the fastest way to improve is to memorize solutions, without necessarily reading them each time, just to learn vital points. Do you agree? It actually seems quite different from the "never look at the answer" school of tsumego.

1) The implication of this problem is that there's a particular vital point for each, and if you know it the problem is easy. So how many people knew the tesuji? If your first guess wasn't correct, what was your first guess?

2) Basically Rin Kaiho suggests that the fastest way to improve is to memorize solutions, without necessarily reading them each time, just to learn vital points. Do you agree? It actually seems quite different from the "never look at the answer" school of tsumego.