The player who sheepishly answers every move opponent makes will lose. That was the theme of endgame in Kageyama's Fundamentals. I'm sure it would apply to a lot of situations. I've watched some professional games where all their defensive moves create a feeling they're doing something powerful. Connecting solidly for example. For non-defensive moves the professional is always trying to wrestle control of the game by playing exchanges that benefit them. Could we amateurs learn something here?

Prerequisite for mutual damage is learning to count or at very least estimate. Second prerequisite is the understanding that very few moves need to be answered in the strict sense of not answering leads to loss of many points. I for one fall into trap of thinking like this: opponent plays a move. I count what the next move is going to be in the area, then play a move that prevents opponent's next move in the area from happening. Mutual damage principle would be to find another move of equal or bigger value than the one just played and play that move instead.

So why bother with this? For one thing, it makes the game much more interesting and engaging. It's also a great learning tool to stop habitual playing. Korean players have adopted this tenacious fighting style. You can see it in WBaduk server.

I wonder, is it really typical of Korean play? Careful, cautious play based on calculation of relative advantage actually seems typical of Japanese style. See this entry from New In Go, which we have previously discussed on the boards: http://www.gogod.co.uk/NewInGo/WangXi_1.htm.

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Occupy Babel!

yeah, that's my problem -- I don't count (very often, nor accurately)
so I catch myself following my opponent around the board quite often

and at the moment, I too lazy to work on improving that skill (counting/estimating) -- so I may never improve very far above my current rank (which is really ok for me at the moment)

What does counting have to do with it? If you don't count, you can choose to always answer, or always go for mutual damage. Seems more like a state of mind. The counting part comes into play when you want to decide what is the *best* choice: defend or mutual damage. Rather boring if you ask me. Mutual damage forever!

I think you are talking about "counting" as in "estimating the score" whereas they are talking about "counting" as in "figuring the value of each play."

I find that in the second kind of counting, I often get very confused about whether it is the move, the follow-up to the move, the follow-up to the follow-up of the move, or some still more distant follow that is truly big. This is unfortunate because sente moves, gote moves with sente follow-ups, and gote moves with gote follow-ups which in turn have sente follow-ups are quite different. (I get confused in the first kind of counting too, of course.)

Here is a game of mine from a few days ago with extremely large mutual damage in the bitter endgame:

[deleted]

Mostly I was joking, thus the many emoticons.

The quibble I was poking at was he implied that if you don't count the value of both options, then you will always be defending. So I was saying if you don't count the value of both options, why not always go for mutual damage?

Making such an implication exposes the writer's natural tendency to follow the opponent.

Unrelated, but you should know black had a play for a ko at move 181 (and before that too)

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

Oh wow, that's a hard one to spot. I was looking for something vaguely like that, but I didn't see the shortage of liberties that keeps W from connecting. Thanks.

I may be misunderstanding your point here...

The kind of counting you're talking about sounds like it would take a lot of time, concentration and energy. I don't think even pros have time to do that in most games. Maybe if you have two days to play a game you could do this, but even then I'd question whether it's an effective use of time and (limited) energy.

Maybe you'd get a bigger return out of putting that effort into reading more deeply, looking for tesuji, figuring out whether groups have any weakness and then coming up with middle game strategies to use all that information. You could use your intuition to judge the relative profit and loss of each exchange instead because that's much faster. You can hone this feeling by reviewing your games and seeing where you misjudged things.

I'm not sure whether you can precisely count most exchanges like that anyway, because slightly less tangible things like shape, thickness, and relative strength and weakness of groups come into it. You need to evaluate all those things, along with any territory gained or lost, by feeling. And how about the whole board value of a move compared to the local value? I'm not saying don't count, but don't spend too much time counting when you could be finding the move that settles the game.

If you really enjoy playing this way, then by all means go ahead and enjoy yourself. If you're only talking about the endgame, then evaluating the value of individual moves is worthwhile at that point. I'm just worried that if you're doing this to try to improve you might actually hold yourself back in the long run. Developing your intuition instead is very important.

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David

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