Depends what you mean by “master”.

You can start using its ideas effectively almost from the time you start studying it. I know that even working with poor, incomplete translations, my life started changing for the better when started applying its basic ideas.

However, in another sense, you can no more master this competitive strategy than you can “master” physics. There is always more to learn, more to be discovered.

After translating, adapting, and analyzing its ideas for over thirty years, I am still finding major insights that I missed before. Some of these revelations are so major that they force me to go back and update a number of my books on Sun Tzu to incorporate them.

For example, the realization that competition, as taught by Sun Tzu, is nothing more than comparison. Though this idea is implicit in my earlier work, a couple years ago I discovered that many of his principles become clearer by making it explicit. All competitions are comparisons. All comparisons are forms of competition. All decisions arise from making choices based on the comparisons. Sun Tzu’s system is nothing more than a method of comparing competitive positions so as to make better competitive decisions.

More recently, I realized that diagrams of Sun Tzu’s ideas may be clearer if expressed in three dimensions. Traditional Chinese science and philosophy used diagrams, going back thousands of years to the ba-gua (the “eight-way”, see this article) compass. I have used these traditional diagramming methods in my books. However, though these diagrams covered the five basic elements and, less clearly, the nine basic formulas (as 8 + 1), they did not explain other relationships in his work such as the 3 dimensions of ground and the 6 benchmarks derived from them, the 9 common situations, and so on.

I recently found an uncommon 3D object that has five sides, six vertices, and 9 edges that may encapsulate all these relationships more clearly. However, it changes many of the basic definitions used in previous models, such as “methods” being the opposite of “command”. In the new model, methods, mission, and command are the central pillars of the system and extensions of each other. In this new 3D model, “heaven” (uncontrolled time and change) and “ground” (controllable stable resources) are the only true opposites among the five elements. However, a host of new relationships emerge, including 3 dimensions of ground (and heaven). It is too early to say whether or not this whole mapping system really works, but if it does, it could not be an accident, but something hidden it Sun Tzu’s work all along.