I've been a long-time lurker on this forum, but finally decided to sign up so I could create a study journal here. I'm hoping to have a New Year's resolution to be more diligent in my go studies, and this seemed the best way to keep myself honest about that goal, regardless of whether the resolution happens or sticks. (I thought about doing this as a blog, but it seemed that this way I'd have a better chance at feedback.)

Who am I?
Since I'm new to the forum, an introduction is probably in order. I started playing go in high school, and since then have mostly played online. In the past year, however, I've been fortunate enough to find a good local go club where I've enjoyed playing, as time permits.

I've developed a very territorial style of play, and have to resist the temptation to always take a few extra points when it means giving my opponent too much thickness.

Right now, my strength is generally as follows:

• AGA - weak 4d / strong 3d - In casual games, I usually play as a 4d, but my official AGA rating is still 3d
• KGS - weak 3d / strong 2d - My various accounts are either 2d or 3d, but even then I find myself losing to kyus sometimes.
• Tygem - weak 5d / strong 4d - My account tends to move back and forth between the two.

The problem
I've made it to my current level mostly by playing lots of games and watching stronger players play. Only recently have I started paying attention to more lectures and purchased a few books. The result is that I play mostly by intuition, and I feel that I make a lot of mistakes that are more characteristic of weaker ranked players. My hope is that by filling in the gaps in my knowledge, I can reduce the number/severity of those mistakes, and improve my play.

The goal
My goal is to pick up 1.5-2 stones in strength in the course of 2015. In other words, I'd like to make it to a solid AGA 5d / KGS 4d / Tygem 6d during next year.

The plan
I'm going to try to resist the temptation to always just play games, and instead use some of the time I devote to this hobby to studying instead. Whether it's doing tsumego, analyzing pro games, watching lectures, or reading go books, I'm hoping this will help fill in the gaps that I probably don't even know are there. I realize I should probably be more concrete, but I expect my free time during the year will vary considerably, so I would either significantly over- or under-promise with anything more specific. In any case, I'm hoping to record what I study here, both for feedback and in case it's useful to anyone else.

Thanks for following along. Any constructive feedback is greatly appreciated.

One of the areas of my game where I feel I can improve is life&death. With enough time, I can usually read out all but the most complicated of problems, but "enough time" isn't always available. If I can analyze some of the more common shapes in advance, I can save this reading time during the game for other important things. Here is some basic work I did on the small-L group.

(Edited Dec. 17, 2014 to incorporate response to illluck's helpful comment.)

The basic shape is probably the first major life&death shape I remember learning as a kyu. The discussion below may seem rather elementary, but I think it's worth covering even these things as I work on making more of my intuitive knowledge explicit.

The basic shape is dead
As I remember learning back as a kyu, the basic shape is dead.


It is worth noting that White does have 3 ko threats here. That leads to an important corrollary: if White already has 1 or 2 in place, the shape becomes unsettled. That is, if White plays first, the group becomes alive, but Black can kill the group if he plays first, as shown above.

Touching the edge (part 1)
What if White's extra move is not inside the shape, but rather is a descent to the edge?


Here, White's shape is unsettled. As shown above, White can live. However, with extra black stones on the outside, the situation can become more complicated, as we'll examine below.

When attempting to kill this shape, Black must be careful.


Touching the edge (part 2)
What if White's descent is on the other side?


Again, White's shape is unsettled, and White can live if she plays here first. If Black plays here first, he can of course kill.



Supporting stones outside
One important comment should be made about the fact that, when White touches the edge, the shapes become unsettled. This means that, if White had supporting stones nearby, she could use the threat of connecting with them to make the basic shape live.



When liberties matter
Finally, we should look at the situation when White has descended on both sides. Here, White is unconditionally alive provided she has enough liberties.


When White has exactly one liberty the result is a ko, because White can no longer squeeze the black stones:



When Black has removed all of White's outside liberties, he can kill White.



Black's killing technique here should also reveal why the outside liberties mattered in previous examples of unsettled shapes.

I plan to explore related shapes, such as those with one extra white stone on the second line, later. But for now, hopefully I won't have to spend as much time thinking about this shape's variations in games.

Nice and thorough analysis of that shape. Just wondering, for the last corner situation where liberties matter, did you forget to include what happens when white has exactly 1 liberty?

Ah! This is such an important version of the shape. I can't believe I forgot to include it. Thanks for pointing this out!

I've edited the post to include the variation now.

I think this kind of thorough shape study is an excellent thing to study.

I hope that you continue in this thread with several more shapes!

_________________
be immersed

Yes, really interesting so far. I only knew about the basic shape, but not what happens with all the extra liberties and stuff.

Keep it up ^_^

So many interesting things happen in the corners of a goban. Today, I want to look at a common situation in which one player attempts to invade an opponent's corner. As with most of my studies, the goal here is to research these variations ahead of time, so that I am not scrambling to untangle the various options under time pressure. (Studying this position was inspired by a recent question from paK0.)

(Edited Dec. 17, 2014 to fix errors and incorporate comments from Uberdude and Dragonfist)
(Edited Dec. 20, 2014 to fix error in response C)

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B Corner
$$ ------------------
$$ . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . 3 . a W . . |
$$ . . . . . 1 e c . |
$$ . . . . . . 5 b . |
$$ . . . . . 6 2 d . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . 4 . . . |[/go]

Black has a number of options for his next play, and his response will vary depending on the overall board situation. In particular, the Black should consider the weakness of the white stones on the side and the remaining strength of his corner group if it is invaded.

• A is the peaceful continuation, allowing White to reduce the black corner by connecting the invading stone back to the outside stones.
• B and C attempt to split White's invasion and force it to live inside.
• D and E are other attempts to force White to live inside, but are less commonly seen.

Let's explore each.











I probably missed some important continuations and variations here. Please feel free to point them out, or any errors I might have made.

Something you missed is that after black q17 s15 r16 it is often better for white to tenuki as if white gets to defend the cutting point, either by black peeping it or making hanging connection herself for eyeshape, then white can later connect to the 3-3 stone with descent.

With the 4th variation of hane, white can also just block rather than living in the corner, black then q17, and white captures the stone in sente and black keeps a big corner.

And in the last sgf, if white pushes (kosumi is also possible), then p17 block is normal, extend seems rather soft.

Also I think you have given too much prominence to C: D and E are more common: the order from ps.wlatheri.net is B, D, E, A, C. The most common beginner mistake I see is playing the wimpish A too much, though in pak0's case it would probably have been prudent .

Also it's important to say black's choice is strongly influenced by how weak white's outside group is.

This is really good stuff. I can't really contribute but it's a good read.

Thanks for the very helpful comments @Uberdude. I'm going to work on integrating these into the sgfs in the post.

I think my focus on variation C is probably due to playing on Tygem recently, where the aggressive nature of many players probably explains why I see it played against me more than is called for.

Hi, I'm curious about a variation.

After black Q17 after the 3-3 invasion, how about wR16? I think it's possible, but rarely good. However if the side is strong W can take the corner like this later. If black just connects at q15 white will get the corner with s15. Feels like black must play s15 in response to r16, but then white will play w q18, bp18, ws18. If black does anything but connect at q15 white will kill the 2 stones, so black must connect and white will live with r19. What are your thoughts on these variations? Looks like an option to me, but have never heard of it being possible, although I believe I saw one or 2 pro games where it was played but I'm unable to find them now. In addition to black breaking the side living in the corner like this will also end in gote for white, as opposed to the usual sente variations. Am I missing something?

_________________
My go YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/DragonfistGaming
My website: http://learnbaduk.com/

I've made a bunch of edits to the 3-3 corner invasions post to incorporate Uberdude's helpful comments. Also, in working to respond to Dragonfist's question, I discovered some serious errors in my discussion of Black's response at C. I've updated everything to hopefully be more correct, but I encourage anyone else to point out other errors/omissions.


I don't think Black would respond to W q18 at p18, but rather at s17. However, let me know if I'm missing something about why you think the p18 response is necessary.

You're right, I put the wrong order. Instead of Q18 white should immediately play S18. Now W has miai to cut of the 2 stones or live in the corner.

Not sure how to get the embedding to work but anyway like this: http://eidogo.com/#2kfrK74ln

_________________
My go YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/DragonfistGaming
My website: http://learnbaduk.com/

Interesting! S18 is quite the vital point. I've fixed this in the post. Thanks for pointing this idea out. I'd never seen it before.

I spent some time watching the first few of Haylee L's streaming games. This wasn't the most serious of study, but everyone needs a day off now and then. Still, I feel I came away from the games with something useful. Mostly, I was impressed by how calm she seemed to be in the face of moyos built by her opponents, particularly in Games 1, 2, and 7. I need to be better in my own games about resisting the temptation to immediately deeply invade after my opponent builds a framework. With patience and proper play, it's possible to build up enough strength on the outside that the moyo can be reduced naturally, as she showed in her games.

Here are the games I watched:

• Game 1 - An eventual invasion of a Kobayashi framework leads to the opponent's collapse
• Game 2 - The opponent opens with 5-4 and an extension, and Haylee is happy to give thickness, pointing our the flawed shapes. Eventually, Haylee builds her own moyo and kills the resulting invasion.
• Game 3 - An error in a complicated joseki in the lower right leads to an early resignation
• Game 4 - Lots of patience shown here. Little victories around the board eventually create an insurmountable lead in points.
• Game 5 - A good example of how to deal with the high-chinese opening without panicking.
• Game 6 - This game ended early on time, so there wasn't much to it. I do need to add the lower right joseki to my list of things to study.
• Game 7 - More patience in the face of a black framework, but also shows just how hard it is to kill a strong player's stones when that is all they have to worry about.

You can find the remainder of her games at her channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTji1kQNoWIH85dB_Vxka9g.

Note: Streaming games while thinking out loud seems to be a growing trend in the online go community. I've found these streams to be of varying quality, but Haylee L's videos seem to be particularly good, if only because of the player's strength. (The consensus seems to be that she is a professional, which would make her the first English-speaking professional I'm aware of who has done something like this.)

I heard she is an ex kenkyuusei(didn't make it to pro though), but then again this was without a source, so it might not be true.

But yeah, her videos are awesome and she tends to explain herself really well.

Pretty sure she is Hajin Lee, 3d pro. At least the voice seems to match.

_________________
be immersed

3d pro registering as Tygem 5d, such a sandbagger!

Isn't that the highest rating you can pick when initially signing up? Looking at the English language sign-up page now, it appears you can't set an initial rating higher than even 3d.

One of the weakest areas of my game is endgame (yose). This is probably because it is much harder to succeed at endgame by intuition; what "feels" big often isn't, and large gote plays are difficult to resist in order to play reverse sente plays that feel smaller. Instead, endgame is all about precisely counting point values. To fix this, I'd like to calculate in advance some of the most common endgame moves, so that I can avoid having to do so during games.

Today, I want to look at some of the simplest endgame plays, hanes on the first line.

Basic variations
First, let's look at the basic types of hanes on the first line.


Other common shapes
There are a number of other common first-line hane shapes worth examining


Plays in the corner
Things are always slightly different in the corner. Here are two of the more common first line hane situations there:


Given how weak my endgame skills are, it's quite likely I missed something important or made some errors here. Please let me know if you spot any.