In the game of go, the opening moves focus on the corners of the board. Over the thousands of years of go playing, this aspect of the game has been intensively studied and a large number of opening formulas, or josekis, have been discovered and refined. Every go player needs to have a working knowledge of the basic ones.

38 Basic Joseki cuts incisively through the labyrinth of joseki to give the reader a solid grounding in the subject.
Working steadily out from the 3–3 point to the 4–5 point, it surveys the principal variations of the 38 most common corner patterns, pointing out the key ideas in each and showing the reader how to choose and use josekis in relation to other stones on the board.