
Defensive Tesujis In a Nutshell
This course will teach you a few basic general principles of making an efficient shape. Alexey prepared three short lessons with interesting examples to demonstrate the value of protective moves and keeping all the stones nicely connected.
A small set of useful examples on some simple tesujis will allow you to learn a couple of valuable tricks to master the art of making a solid shape.
This is an experimental mini-course made in the form of a screencast. We’ve added a bit of magic to it and we hope you like it. Enjoy!
Suitable for: 15–5 kyu
Course Contents
Teacher
Alexey Nechaev 4d
Physicist-turned-Go master and author exploring the game as both art and science.

Course Includes
Reviews

I‘ve started this course for the second time and will just stop because I‘m not learning anything from it. I thought maybe now that I‘m a bit stronger I might understand, but this is either too hard for me or rather not explained well enough. Example positions for which you just have to guess the right next move - no explanation. You can do better than that!
From my perspective the course was really helpful. The concept of giving in a little bit or to increase the sacrifice to gain more power was well explained and demonstrated with good examples.
Thanks for the help, but I'm afraid that I still hate tesujis. They still just seem like trick plays that only work in very specific contexts and and therefore must be memorized or studied in painful detail. For me, that's when the game stops being enjoyable. I suppose that once I get destroyed by tricks in enough games I will begin to remember them through sheer trauma.
Gotta say that I really disliked this course. My emotions about it are really 1 star. But I'm aware that's probably just because I'm a weak player. I really enjoyed the change of pace to have a teacher other than Vadim who covers all the intro material. But I felt like the concepts were very poorly explained. What actually is a tesuji? Never explained. How do we find the patterns? Just guess.
nice
I learned a lot in this course about things I didn't know. The idea behind sacrificing some stones to get a better position, as others have said it is quite advanced, but it really helps improve your reading skills. As for reading subtitles while trying to follow the stones isn't that easy and the dubbing isn't that great.
The content was very helpful, and well explained: I would have loved the course to be longer, as this is an important topic. I found the dubbing a problem (sometimes with long pauses, at other moments at higher speed): I would prefer subtitles. The final exercises don't seem to allign very well with the course, as they are a lot more difficult than the course material.
👍
Lovely course but a bit over my level. I would recomend level 3 not 2 and 3.
Great information about shapes. Found the pacing a little fast, but this will be a good course for me to revisit in the future. Quizzes definitely pushed me to read beyond my current level.
I learnt a lot about how to give up the right amount of territory or stones to maintain a good shape
Excellent course very nice
Very nice. A lot of useful tricks to keep in mind.
It was great to invite Alexey for a course. It's really helpful to have a different approach. I enjoyed the course. However, the final quiz was hard. By the way, I couldn't find "Concepts of Go: The Path from Beginner to Master" that he authored. Thanks.
OOF! Most difficult course yet. I enjoyed the concepts, however the actual problems were above my level. I will definitely go through it again in the future. As for captions - watching the lessons on a computer is best, as you are able to relocate the captions to a part of the screen nearer to the stones, so it is easier to follow along.
Course is very short but so interesting. I would like to see more tesuji commentaries
Final problems required to complete the course are too long and too difficult forcing repeating them over and over. The course is also a bit too short and it's annoying that the lecturer doesn't speak English. I know that there is also dubbed version but still it's not the same with sync issues. I guess it's dedicated more to lvl 3 players than lvl 2.
The lectures are very good. The examples are well thought out and thoroughly explained. And the quizzes will test you, especially the final advanced quiz. Thanks Alex, for a very helpful course. 🙂
good course but feels a little bit like a short random collection of problems
Its Cool specifically by Russian Player because Language better than Dubbed And its was very low Expline im not know why and you not talk principle or idea to understand i play and i dont know why