For this week’s Weekly go, they’d asked 130 Japanese professionals about the best tsumego; this research appears to have been conducted in a poll-like manner, giving the professionals a larger set of famous tsumego and then the pros picking their favorites. The ten most popular problems were then published in the newspaper, in an article named “Fundamentals are important”. The problems aren’t of exceptionally high level, but very important to know — which is why I’m posting them all here. I would imagine stronger kyu players can get most of them right even without initially knowing them, and dan players should know them all by heart — if not, here’s a chance to correct that!

As with tsumego normally, the objective is to find the best result for both sides. That’s why, this time around, I won’t be telling which side is to go first. In most problems, though, it’s still fairly obvious. All diagrams have again been made with jGoBoard.