Hello, Ms. Osawa. At present, I am a 1-dan on PandaNet and to achieve my target of making 3-dan this year I am studying life-and-death problems and playing and reviewing games every day. In particular, I’m concentrating on life-and-death problems; I don’t look at the answer until I have completely read out the problem and I try to look at the variations I can. It’s certainly true that by studying this way I have got better at reading, but even so my progress is too slow. I’ve already spent a year on the book I am studying now (Akinobu Tozawa’s ‘Life-and-Death Problems for 9-kyu to 1-kyu’), and it looks like taking me another year to finish, making two years in all. I can’t help worrying whether I should continue studying this way. How do professionals study life and death? Consultation One: Mr. Tasawa Thank you for your question. I can see that you are a very enthusiastic student. It takes a lot of perseverance to spend a year on the same collection of problems without looking at the answers. I think that your present study method is OK, but if you find it tiring another way of studying is to do a lot of simple life-and-death problems. By looking at a large number of problems, you get to understand the shapes and techniques for solving them in actual games. The way I study myself is to occasionally study a difficult problem spending a lot of time on it, but I recommend mastering the basics by enjoying simple problems. With your diligence, I’m sure you’ll improve rapidly in the future. Best of luck.