This game can not be that hard..


I had a go at Dr Yang mid game..and the thing that got me was the thing I didn't kill

An embarrassing and humiliating defeat exacerbated with a major blunder..

As ever.. hints and tips as to what I did right (the list will be shorter)

Bill comments much appreciated..although tips that help me beat this guy are appreciated from anyone...

it can't?

I just looked briefly, B134 lost about 50 points. B has to connect there.

ye..that was my Jack Damials moment...

Uh...what did you expect? You're playing someone 16 stones stronger than you in a 4 stone game. One can already tell by move 13 that your mindset wasn't even in winning the game, the passivity and submissiveness behind the formation of the stones is already glaring. By move 55 you've already lost your 4 stone handicap.

3d - 14k = 16 stones. [EDIT: ninja'd!]

Assuming these ratings are from the same system, Dr. Yang can give nine stones to someone who can give you 7 stones.

Just so you don't feel like something's wrong with you for not winning any of these. Your chances of winning a game like this are approximately (Dr. Yang's chance of missing an atari on a 50 stone group) * (chance of 50 stone white group in atari) * (chance black behind by less than 100 points). Probably less than 1 out of 100 but more than 1 out of 10,000.

For such a large rating difference you seem to do pretty well on the board.

...and to try and be constructive:

By move 12 in this game something has already gone wrong. White has no weak stones, you have nothing to attack. You can't win a 4 stone game merely by holding on to your corners. Individually and locally there's nothing wrong with your moves, but globally white's stones work together and he has no headaches. I think you need to learn and try playing some pincers once in a while: http://senseis.xmp.net/?44PointLowApproach (try "e" and "h" on that page for examples)

_________________
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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You're not going to be able to beat this man without a lot of effort and time. No amount of advice that we give here will propel you to anywhere close to his strength. If you want to beat him, start doing tsumego every day, and be sure to try to get a game in as often as possible as well. You can also try to keep playing him, and try to get him to review your game as well. Also, you might want to try to play a nine-stone handicap game against him - you barely stand a chance at that, so why push it even further?

If you do all these things, you will definitely be much closer to him in a year's time then you are now. I was able to improve from 12k to 1k in a year through regular studying and online games, as well as playing a stronger (3-2k) opponent for a few hours once every week. So if you're willing to put the effort into it, you may be able to improve quickly too. But it won't happen overnight.

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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.

ok... let me explain my thinking up to move 17

up to 12
these moves are just about the only joseki I know...

unless something went wrong then surely I am still ahead
as the joseki retain balance and I have four stones.
I totted up the territory guess and it seems Im ahead

Post 12..big points I think I played tit for tat here:

At move 16 I could go short pincer..but.. by going long I still give myself room to form a base deeper on his side. and push into him reducing territory.

Move 18

I understood it was standard to split groups using 5,5 in this manner.

this leaves Yang the choice of being squeezed on the bottom
or defending a weak stone on r6.

If he pushes underneath me I'd be building thickness on the bottom right
to augment my postion on bottom left.I'm pretty confident he isn't going to get rich down in that corner..

I've must have really missed the point here. I played pretty "standard" with a view
to maintaining balance and hence the four stone advantage... and yet I've lost by this point??

You're not looking at the big picture. Joseki is not joseki if you're only looking at just a part of the board, you must consider the whole board before playing your move. Locally your moves are fine, but globally the moves you played do not make much sense.

"By move 12 in this game something has already gone wrong.", "One can already tell by move 13 that your mindset wasn't even in winning the game, the passivity and submissiveness behind the formation of the stones is already glaring." != you lost at this point.

I'm only around your strength, but the first thing that pops up to me is how you handle the invasion at move 49. In the first place, you attack the stone by initiating contact with a diagonal play. Furthermore, you do it from your thickest side. This drives him to exploit weaknesses on the thinner right side. That and some misreads really screwed things up. Your move at 52 effectively pre-peeps your formation for your opponent, and he takes immediate advantage of it. Why not play at L6, K6 or K5 there? It seems much more solid. If I could summarize the problem with the approach here it's that you were using your thickness to attack from the wrong direction. You want to drive your opponent towards your thickness because it is strong, not away from it (in this case, the left side isn't really very thick or strong, but it's in better shape than the right from what I can tell). Second is you're attacking with contact (albeit the most indirect form of contact) which is usually not a good way to attack. As I understand it, this is first because when you play in contact your opponent gets the initiative (I play adjacent to your stone, we both have three liberties, now you hane and I have two!). Secondly because it commits you to local responses which limits the amount of profit you can take from your opponent's flight. Thirdly because it commits you to local responses, your opponent can gain strength tit-for-tat with you. This produces the opposite result you want. In this case your opponent didn't continue contact, but be wary of that possibility.

Move 54 takes the two stones white is willing to sacrifice by not blocking your peep, but the damage it allows is horrendous. Playing elsewhere probably would have saved the 6 or so points you'd gain here. Capping white's group here wouldn't stop it from connecting to safety, but it would at least give your lower left group more room to breath and given white a lot less gain in the center. Notice that your lower left group ends up being severely attacked.

Hopefully someone will correct me if I'm off on any of this. Take it with a grain of salt anyway, though.

EDIT: Derp, got left and right mixed up.

I wasn't fond of the response to 49.. I pushed him ioto weakness and I played a sevre price for it....

Yeah, to clarify, black is still pretty far ahead on the board after move 13. But moves say things, and black's moves said, "I'm going to hunker down in my corners while you chip away at my lead a couple points at a time and hope that at the end of the game I'll just barely have enough." (That is probably not what you were thinking when you played those moves, but that is what they communicate to a stronger player.) This is not the way to win a 4 stone game-- if this strategy works, you're strong enough that you shouldn't be getting 4 stones. If I'm white in this game vs. a 3k, I feel cautiously optimistic by move 13.

It's a lot easier to learn from dramatic misreads that obviously lose the game than it is from getting to the end of a 300 move game and being behind by a few points. I would encourage you to over-correct and be more aggressive. It might not feel like it, but you'll probably learn more.

_________________
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
--
My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

Your opponent is 8 stones stronger than me so I am completely incapable of advising you how to beat him. I just want to say in my experience this submissiveness especially in the fuseki is really common among ddks. This is why when I am black in a handicap game I almost always answer the first approach with a pincer, just to let white know I won't put up with his shenanigans

To continue this line of thought, at my level I have lots of luck as black in handicap games by playing two-space low pincers. They're obviously playable but so uncommon from a 4-4 stone that I tend to get an advantage - not only does my opponent have to figure out how to continue in this area but how to do it in such a way that I don't gain some sort of overwhelming territorial advantage.