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SmartGo
By James Kerwin, 1P
May 03, 2004
If you want to improve at go, a good editor is an
essential tool for efficient and effective study.
The most valuable thing you can do, other than
taking lessons, is review your own games. For this
purpose, Anders Kierulf's popular game editor
SmartGo is an outstanding program. I have used
various game editors for years to teach and study
and SmartGo has become my favorite game editor and
I now use it almost exclusively. While all game
editors are now powerful, SmartGo has features that
put it significantly ahead of the pack. Here are
three of my favorite features.
Once I have studied or commented a game, I often
jump through the game to quickly review it.
Sometimes I use the Find tool to jump from comment
to comment or variation to variation. While all
game editors have Find tools, SmartGo makes it
possible to mark a game position at a particular
move. There are a number of special-purpose markers
but mostly I use two general markers, the checkmark
and the hotspot. In SmartGo one can use the Find
tool to search for these position markers, which is
a fast and powerful way to quickly review games.
For example, in game commentaries I mark key
moments with the 'hotspot' marker. My student can
use the Find tool to find hotspot positions and
immediately find the most important points of the
game. Then he/she can go back and review all the
comments at leisure. Another powerful use of this
combination is marking a game position and a
superior variation position with a marker such as a
checkmark, which I often do in workshops. Using the
Find tool I can flip between the two positions. The
difference between the game result and the
variation result, and the improvement of the
variation really jumps out when shown this way.
Another feature I have come to love is the ability
to group games into collections. Instead of opening
one game at a time, one can open a collection
containing a number of games. For example, I create
a collection for each pro tournament, for each of
my students, and a collection of problems and
examples for each workshop I give. This is much
more convenient and efficient than managing
separate files. But more important, one can use the
Find tool to search the entire collection. One
could make a collection of all the games one played
at a workshop or tournament. After the first
review, one could search the collection for a
marker such as the 'hotspot' and quickly review the
key points of all the games in the collection. Or
one could quickly review all the example positions
and problem positions from a workshop.
SmartGo's editing is highly efficient, thanks to
context menus. With other programs one must move
the mouse pointer outside the board area to make a
menu choice, such as Add Variation or Add Letter.
Then one moves the mouse pointer back to the board
to add the variation or letter and then one must
move the pointer once again to choose a different
tool. In SmartGo these chores can be done without
ever moving the pointer off the board. Just put the
pointer on the place one wants to mark and
Right-Click. This brings up a context menu next to
the location and one can choose Add Variation, or
Add Letter, or whatever right there. Click on the
choice in the context menu and it's done. Although
there's only a small gain in time each time you use
this feature, when commenting a number of games
these gains add up significantly.
These are just a few of the many features in a game
editor, and depending on your intended use, another
editor may be better for you. We are fortunate
these days that there are now a number of excellent
game editors. If you are mostly interested in
playing, for example, you will probably be
satisfied with a free editor such as cgoban, the
client program for kgs. Many Faces is another I
have used which is quite good. A viewer-only
version of Smartgo is free, the editor is $29 and
the combined editor and player is $59. You can get
the program at http://www.smartgocom
(Kerwin is a professional 1-dan and longtime
American go instructor)
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