Hey all,

I've just started playing on kgs, and was lucky enough to play with a very helpful 10k player. After smoking me in 13x13, he suggested we play a 9x9,and after he advised my opening two moves and then stopped helping me, I was actually able to beat him (I'm almost positive he didn't play his hardest). I'm very new, and would like some critiques of what I could have done better, or even what he didn't do that would've beaten me -- it's a fast game, I promise! I realize that my opponent was also giving me analysis, but I'd welcome additional perspecitve. I was black.

Fisher

Well done on your first win.

A few comments

Well done. You will indeed learn fast playing 9x9 games.
For bonus points, see if you can find a way, at the end of the game, for B to play and kill the entire lower W group

For double bonus points, find both points that kill

For style points, which of these moves is an elegant tesuji, and which is a brute force kill?

Thank you so much for the analysis! That was very helpful. Particularly, your variation of move 35... I've been reading about life and death, and I jumped at the chance to place that killing stone in the "critical point" of the eye.. yet, as you demonstrated, I needed to first possess the A5 spot before that move would be effective. Do you generally need to have an eye surrounded to play those single stones in an enemy eye that kill the whole group? Thinking back on it, most of the examples I studied involved nearly or totally surrounded eyes that were killed.

Cheers

I'm not sure if it's the elegant solution you mentioned, but it looks like a play at D1 would be a tesuji. My stone would have two liberties, and by taking either liberty away, he would reduce one of his large groups in that corner to 1 liberty, allowing me to kill it. Thanks for pointing that out!

That is the elegant solution, and usually the better one to play in a game. There is another way to do it.

You are very welcome. Many vital points don't require the opponent's group to be completely surrounded, but many do. It's about something referred commonly to as a "shortage of liberties", where you create a situation where the only obvious route for your opponent to prevent your attempt to kill is to put himself in atari. Both in this case and the tesuji to kill at the bottom (you are quite right D1 is the best point, C1 followed by D1 being the cruder way of achieving the same thing).

Look at the final bottom tesuji carefully - we all know that 4 points in a row is just alive, because both of the middle two points should create two eyes - if your opponent plays in one, you play in the other to create two eyes and tadaaa, you live. However, that's also dependendent on the single group actually consisting of one contiguous chain of stones, so that any liberties are fully shared. However, in this case, they are only diagonally connected (c3-d2), which means each "half" of that group needs to not run out of liberties. As a result, D1 works because C1 (the normal move to make two eyes) is actually a self-atari.

The bottom line is reading. Practicing L+D problems and tesuji problems will help you spot the vital points (as you did in the top left), and then you have to read carefully to make sure they actually work - in my cases, like the top left, you can see "they will work, but only if I get that point first" - in which case, get that point first for some profit, knowing that you either pull off a coup because your opponent misses it, or you just get smaller guaranteed profit without losing the initiative of it being your turn.

I can imagine sometimes C1 is better sometimes D1. Depending for example on the strength of the surrounding strings. But the experts seem to favor D1. Casanova might be very elegant, he is not my favourite gentleman though.