Life In 19x19

mccccc wrote:Is it true, that shin kaya is a spruce both in Japan and in China?
What does "hon" mean in "hon kaya" ?

The "hon" in hon kaya means "real" or "true", as opposed to shin kaya which is "new" aka "faux".

Without looking too closely, I feel like if black plays B and white tenukis, black's best follow-up is still A, so B is just a suboptimal gote move.

The goal is euler 1 dan by January 1st 2023, which is about equivalent I guess to about EGF 3 dan to 4 dan, around the level you can remember your games from memory well.

It might be less relevant to your entire study plan, but I found I could remember my games quite well when I was playing ...

In the absence of other local stones, I would call them approaches. From a strictly taxonomic perspective I'm reluctant to call playing 3-3 under a lone 4-4 stone early on an invasion, but I realize it's accepted usage. I think in that case, the word invasion comes from the fact that until recently ...

$$Bc
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . O . . . . . |
$$ | . O . O . . . . . O . . . . . X . . . |
$$ | . X O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . X O O ...

It also depends on what you call reading. I think many amateurs think of reading as something like: I play this, she plays that, etc. ... one move at a time. Skilled players like higher amateur dan or pro players just see the moves flow onto the board in their minds. I suppose that sort of mental ...

I suppose the question then is whether komi is high enough now that black would want to play an active game with early fighting to make up for it.

John Fairbairn wrote: The traditional thinking about cross (tasuki) openings was that they led to early fighting, which (especially in no-komi games) Black might do best to avoid.

Is this a view that was ever revised in the komi era?

I suppose it could also be an artifact of the selection process for a cross opening. Both players have to agree to play a cross opening in some sense, so if you were to just assign an equal probability for either player deciding to aim for a cross opening, you would only get one 25% of the time.

I ...

I have evaluated a few more of these lectures with KataGo and I can say they are essentially rubbish.

The recommended move is often just as doubtful as the "mistake", often the best move is not taken into account, or the best move is only marginally better. On occasions there's a move in a ...

I originally learned to play go using Japanese-style territory counting to score the game.

For a long time, I thought that parallel openings favoured black more than cross openings, because cross openings lead to games with lower territory counts, and so komi would have a bigger effect on the score ...

But isn't that essentially what has been going on in the Honinbo and other houses, or since then has evolved to teaching circles like Kitani's? And I would argue eventually the stronger individual will gravitate towards the circle with better resources.

I agree at that level. But when the ...

I suspect part of the issue with translations like this is that Japanese tends to be a high-context language/culture while English is generally a low context one. That is to say, in English things are generally spelled out quite explicitly while in Japanese there is a higher level of inference and ...

If White is disconnected then I think that White can live like this but this weakens the bottom left group. In addition the situation of the white marked group is becoming unclear.

$$Bc ...

As White, I would have taken away the base (probably with C13) without a second thought, for better or worse. It's one of those moves that seems so correct from a fundamentals viewpoint that I'd really need a serious concrete reason not to play it.
I would have chosen D13 personally, but it's the ...