From Takemiya to Yi Se-tol

(Written on 9:54 PM 9/5/2006 GMT+7)

After a long pause of study, I’ll start to warm myself by memorizing pro games. In the past, I studied the cosmic games of Takemiya. However recently I became fond of severe attacking moves. That and influenced by the jaw-dropping violent games of sandan made me choose Yi Se-tol (sometimes written Lee Sedol) as the current player to study.

Yi Se-tol is a talented young player from Korea. Born in 1983, he is now a 9-dan professional and probably the second best player in the world (with number one being Yi Ch’ang-ho). His playing style is offensive, chaotic, and risk-taking.

For a start, I plan to memorize the first 50 moves from 5 of his games using Drago.

Drago can test how much we remember a game. To do it, load the game and then choose "Games"->"Session".

For the "Select game" option, choose "Loaded game" (other values are only relevant if the SGF file contains multiple games). For "Play with", choose "Both". For "Play…", you can either choose "Full game" or "Fuseki" (only the first couple of moves). If "Fuseki" chosen, the number of moves to test is determined by the number box.

After clicking "OK", you can start playing the moves by clicking on the corresponding point. If your move differs from the game, Drago will highlight the move with red and then correct it. In the end, your result is scored:

A pro advice on SL is to learn the kifu of players with natural moves such as Takemiya Masaki and Otake Hideo. Yi Se-tol’s chaotic moves are far from natural, so I’m actually going againts the advice here.