- It may be the result of too much commitment to killing. All-or-nothing attack is like playing out a ladder without knowing if it's going to work or not in the end. You can recognize good attack by asking this question: would you be satisfied with the move if your opponent lives? If yes, then the attack is effective and if not, then the attack is unreasonable.

Well, the move was mostly gote. Yes, it threatens his enclosure a bit, but I can't kill it. The enclosure is quite upset, but it isn't dying.

Gote and sente are incredibly subjective. For example: is an enclosure always gote, or can it be sente?


Some would say "An enclosure is always gote." However, some of these threaten good follow up moves that white may want to respond to.

Really good players are able to make sente moves that do what would otherwise take a gote move. Shusaku had several of these in the ear-reddening game. However, the most famous move in all of go history is pretty much gote...

_________________
"You have to walk before you can run. Black 1 was a walking move.
I blushed inwardly to recall the ignorant thoughts that had gone through
my mind before, when I had not realized the true worth of Black 1."
-Kageyama Toshiro on proper moves

If he is losing games on a regular basis because a large group of his dies, then there is a problem he needs to address with those groups. How is a large group that dies a "safe group" that does not need to be safer?

I believe that I mentioned in my post that it is important to know when a group needs help or when you can play away. If you somehow construed my post as meaning that you shouldn't read the position or that you should make a safe move when it is not needed, then you've misread it.

I do not believe that giving the advice "maybe make your group safer" to someone who has large groups die is inappropriate.

If you interpret this in the narrow way - "Don't let your groups die if you can play a move so that they live" - then of course the advice is appropriate. The key question is, when is the right time to play that move? If I heard, "Play a move to make your groups safe," I assume you mean: "... before they come under attack in the first place." But it's hard to know whether that is actually good advice in Subotai's games.

Without going into the minutia of when it's a good idea to defend and when to call your opponent's bluff, let's just say that if Subotai is playing a tight middle game and then flubbing the L&D at the end, "play a slack middle game" is not winning advice. Even if we rationalize it by saying, "Well, L&D is his weakness, so he should avoid L&D situations", we're still just handing out a crutch.

This is pretty much what I've been thinking. Playing an extra move is fine if you've the life and death skills equal to the task. If, in even games, your groups are constantly dying to moves you don't see coming then automatically playing an extra move in areas is just going to paper over the crack in the wall instead of filling it.

The question is, do we want to win more games now or improve more over the longer term. Surely the latter is more desirable and in this case means figuring out why groups are dying (either you're not reading or your reading isn't good enough for the rank you're playing at usually) and fixing this rather than playing safety moves "just in case," which could turn into a very annoying bad habit.