hey guys. so i'm white and this is on tygem. so i played this joseki i learned and failed pretty big so i just resigned immediately out of frustration and confusion. so, c8, right? i have learned from opening theory made easy to respond to that move within this shape by capping the stone. but instead of fighting he just nobi'd and i wasn't sure how to respond to it. as i was trying to read, i couldn't see a way to kill those stones, so i figured i was going to be left with a lot of thickness in exchange.

but as you'll see, i have no idea how to use thickness. i get that it's important and helpful but i didn't know how to defend it as it was immediately under attack and it seemed in 3 moves it went from thickness to just a bunch of dead stones. after f10 it just felt like there was nothing i could do but im not sure what do to to prevent f10 from happening. but hm i dunno maybe i had botched it well before that...

I'm only slightly better than you so I'll stick to general advice.

1. Do not resign early
2. In fact, do not resign

You're still a weak player playing weak players. Anything can happen. Even if you're basically dead, your opponent might make a mistake and kill one of his own groups. Besides, the most important thing for you now is experience and you don't get experience by giving up at move 30. So keep playing. Retaliate. The more you fall behind, the more you must be aggressive and fight back. If it doesn't work, so what? The result is the same, you lost the game.

Now, about thickness. A wall is a fine thing to have but it's eyeless. To be efficient it needs to be out in the open. So do not let it get surrounded. Try to extend or, if you get the chance, to attack the stones surrounding you.

Edit: Some ideas that may or not be correct:
move 20 at E11 (atari from the other direction) would probably have saved a lot of trouble. It means black gets more territory on the left but you can get compensation by invading the bottom. That would be a nice way to use your thickness.
At move 22 you really need to take care of your wall, connecting as in the game looks small.
Move 26 at G6 would give you some eye shape and keep running. That stone you connect doesn't help you to live or escape so it's not important.
Obviously anyone is welcome to correct any of the above.

I think it went wrong on move 18, up to that point you had played it out correctly. Instead of connecting at D6 I would have connected at D11. That would give the wall nice shape and influence towards both the centre and the top.

Connecting the C6 stone isn't that important since the black stones are connected anyway and it doesn't really help your stones make shape as you notice later on.

Once black got the cut at D11 I think I would have played something like G7 at move 24. It keeps your stones running ahead of him and should give you an easier time to make life.

At move 26 you should play F8 if you really want to secure the connecting between that stone and your wall, but I would prefer a move around G7 or G6 now that black as one more stone on the top.

A couple of comments.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Just a general comment towards the commentators here:

We have this wonderful tool for replaying game records and entering variations on L19 and the best you can do is to show single-move alternative with a meaningless comment like 'this is better'? Guys - if you want to help, then would be nice to try to explain a little *why* is it better, or *why* a bad shape is a bad shape, or whatever... give a few more moves in the sequence you propose so the poor 18k can actually get a better picture what the heck you are talking about.

Sure, you guys are helping, but with minimum effort you could be helping so much more...

I mean - really...

PS>
This is not specifically meant towards this thread but its something I meant to say for quite a while. Just a gripe from a grumpy old man, 'tis all.

But this reminds me of the useless pro teacher I have seen many years ago who just lean over your board, point to a stone saying 'bad' and walk away loftily like his job as a teacher is done for the week. Maybe this is just my hot button, but if you try to teach, try to really teach!

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

I'm not that good a player so take my advice with a grain of salt. On move twenty you are in a cross cut situation and you atari black. Almost always it's better to extend your stone instead. When you atari your opponent you force him to extend and get stronger while you still have a weakness (which you saw and went back to defend). If instead you just extend to make your stone stronger then his weak stone is painful. If he strengthens that stone then it's still a fight but its your move. And you don't owe a move to go back and fix your weakness.

I think the general rule is to extend your weaker stone when crosscut. There may be exceptions, but usually that will be a good move.

Thus, the job of this teacher was to initiate thinking processes but not to complete thinking processes (in German schools, its often vise versa...). At least the information that a certain move - which no one has taken care of before - is "bad" can trigger a lot of thinking which may be beneficial.

I was also impressed by a recent game analysis in this forum http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8286 where Uberdude and Bill were in total disagreement about the value of move 40 ("...this is the losing move" vs. "...probably the best play" ). You would encounter such disagreement in a chess forum very rarely; this is IMHO one of the interesting points in Go.

Of course, certain basics such as empty triangles or not to atari when crosscut can be just explained for beginners, but that's IMHO what also happened here.

The job of the teacher is to teach the student. Giving the student direction and having the student struggle to get to the right destination is one method, and perhaps you can say the student will remember the idea better having struggled with it. But it will likely be a difficult, and thus slow, process for the student and will possibly be beyond him, or at least involve many blind alleys. I do not find that method of teaching to be very beneficial to me. If you tell me why the move is bad then I can spend my effort on absorbing that knowledge and trying to extrapolate from it, instead of flailing around trying out various reasons why it might be bad and never quite knowing if I'm on the right path or not.

Well, not total disagreement. We both agree that it is shobute. We disagree about White's chances with other moves.

Maybe an analogy can be made to a speculative sacrifice in chess. Whether it is a good idea or not depends on the player's chances with less speculative plays.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

When you teach a dan player - what you say might be true.
I doubt that an 18k has the tools necessary to analyse why a move is "bad" without any follow up or explanation and then figure out all the ideas for himself.

Not to mention he fact that the teacher himself might not be right very often in this case, which makes the issue even harder. I would say it is very important to give some indication of your reasoning - not only for the benefit of the student, but also as validation of the teacher's ideas. Which, as I said, might be wrong more often than they are right.

_________________
- Bantari
______________________________________________
WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Bantari, all of Bill's variations and all but one of Ed Lee's have comments. Given what a large proportion of the board's reviews they are responsible for, it seems silly to single them out!

I agree with the basic claim - alternatives without explanations can be puzzling. Pedagogically, though, letting the student say what he needs explained can make the explanation more incisive.

Hi Jts,
Sorry if I have offended your tender sensibilities.

As I said in my initial post, I did not really mean to single anybody or anything out. Just my general feelings that comments and especially variations in many of these 'reviews' are very inadequate. The reviews in the thread can be seen as an example, according to my ideas of what a 'review' should be.

As a matter of fact, we are hijacking this thread for this discussion, which I did not mean to do. So if you wish to discuss it further, lets do it in private or we can ask Joaz to move it to a separate thread.

_________________
- Bantari
______________________________________________
WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Bad.



Good.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

My tender sensibilities are doing well, but thank you for your concern. I view L19 as a great big circus of nonsense which occasionally produces game reviews and some interesting data analysis. The nonsense is mostly harmless, but it would be unfortunate if any of it inadvertently discouraged the reviewers from reviewing.

As Bill says, hijacking the thread for discussion is probably a good thing, so I'm curious what you think about my contention that in a written review, the reviewer can pour effort into an explanation of something that the student may already understand (or not want to understand), while neglecting the aspect of the question that he or she finds most seriously puzzling. When the subject of the review has all your suggestions and comments in front of him, he can come back, counter with alternative moves, and start a dialogue. In a verbal review (of the sort you seemed to be picturing with the amazing disappearing pro), it may be harder for the student to come back to a position at the end of the review, and there spinning out content-free variations is probably not useful, but a written review gives you a crack at several rounds of commentary, guided by the peculiar needs of the reviewee.

Anyway, I hope you will favor us with a few reviews that meet your standards; I'm sure I would find an example of your ideas put into practice very inspiring.

_________________
We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

Well, I was joking around, but this comment does make Bantari's point. My "good" comment is ambiguous, isn't it? Am I saying that it was good to hijack the threat, or good of Bantari to respond as he did?

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I find that when I post a game for review, it's usually a move that it never even occurred to me to say much about winds up being the one that gives reviewers apoplectic fits as a horrible move.

In fact, I would suggest to the 18kyus that they go over the games and include their own comments when looking for reviews. I don't get that many requests for reviews from the GTL, but there's something I find irritating about a request with no annotations.

As a further aside, I do sometimes find when I'm going over my own games in thinking about whether to request a review that I'll come to a certain move of my own and realize that it was terrible and should have done something else that would have saved one of my groups and prevented me from losing right then and there. Now if only I could realize those moves are blunders while the clock is ticking....

The first paragraph is why I think it's a good idea not to comment on a game you want reviewed. Reviewers have a tendency to focus on replying, when imho it's often more useful to see what they focus on unprompted. Depending on the format questions can be asked afterwards anyway.