Tsumego for Beginners: Start with Capturing Problems

If you're new to Go (also called baduk or weiqi) and want to improve, the single most useful habit is reading — playing a sequence out in your head before you place a stone. Full life-and-death problems can feel intimidating at first, so the gentlest place to start is capturing problems: you're shown a small group of marked stones and must find the move that captures them. The answer is concrete — the stones come off the board — so you get clean feedback. Here's how to begin.

What a capturing problem is

You play (as Black) and must capture the marked enemy (White) stones by force. A stone or group is captured when you fill its last liberty — the empty points directly next to it. On a small board (7×7 or 9×9) with only a few stones, the reading is short and the goal is unmistakable, which is exactly what makes capturing problems the ideal first puzzles in Go.

Why start here — liberties and atari

Capturing teaches the two ideas everything else in Go is built on: liberties (the empty neighbours that keep a group alive) and atari (a group down to its last liberty, one move from capture). Learning to count liberties and spot ataris is the foundation for capturing races, life-and-death, and whole-board fighting. Get capturing solid first and the harder topics come much faster.

A few patterns you'll meet

Even simple captures hide neat tactics: the ladder (shicho), where you chase a stone in a zig-zag of ataris until it runs out of room; the net (geta), which traps a stone without a chase; and the snapback (uttegaeshi), where you give up one stone to capture several back. You don't need to study these formally yet — solving problems lets you discover and start to recognize them.

From capturing to life-and-death

Capturing is the on-ramp to full tsumego (life-and-death), where you make or destroy two eyes. The reading skill is identical — count, sequence, read to the end — just applied to eye-shape instead of liberties. Once captures feel easy, that's your cue to move on to eyes, seki, and ko.

How to start

Try a one-move capturing problem: Black to play, find the single move that captures the marked stones. Tap an empty point to place a stone. Every problem here is checked by a solver, so each has a sound, unique answer. Start on the 7×7 board, then move up to 9×9 and to multi-move captures as your reading sharpens.