I would be very interested in any advice on the following game because it was as close to my best play as can be reasonably expected. I made a defense mistake at the very end. However, the reason for this was primarily that according to my count, it was very close, so I felt that I had to forgo any defensive move if I were not sure that it was needed. At move 207, I tried very hard to identify sente/gote/values with moderate success, so I would be happy with any information about this.

At move 230, you have to fight the ko. Not fighting it is tantamount to declaring that you've lost.

I looked all the ko threats and I was sure that I could not win the ko because of the asymmetric situation. Is this incorrect?

Hi Gotraskhalana,

A few ideas :

- feels really small at this stage. Approaching the upper left corner seems ok.

- , this is likely to give birth to a weak group, which will probably enable white to reduce black's potential in the bottom right. Playing at n15 looks interesting.

- , since black cannot find two eyes here anyway (and didn't need this move to prevent white from connecting his weak s13 group), I think it would be better to jump in the center first.

At move , black has three small, scattered groups (q16, f17 and c6), two of them quite weak, and his bottom right strength is not doing much, this is quite a contrast with the situation after . My feeling is that black didn't really have a plan for developing his position after and created small groups here and there while letting white play the big points (d10, c15, q10).

It's probably right, but you are already behind, so you've lost anyways. A ko at least provides an opportunity for your opponent to screw up, and black has at least a couple threats that are doozies. I only counted a couple really big ones for white too, so you're not in terrible shape. Black can also play the game move at any time in lieu of a threat, so it's not the biggest deal to run out of threats.