Doesn't have anything to do with that as much as I am willing to see how tengen works, and 4-4 is one answer I would be just about be guaranteed of seeing. Though in theory 4-4 is supposed to be about center oriented influence, but with a black stone sitting there on tengen. I am thinking one way to go about it would be to have some ladder related joseki that would force the issue, but I am not coming up with any.

If there was a move that immediately gave a better result due to tengen being played, I think you would see more professionals playing tengen.

I would settle for playable in this instance.

It seems there are a list of ladder joseki. I think the strength of tengen, is that ladder breaker approaches to tengen wouldn't have sente like approaches to the corners
http://senseis.xmp.net/?LadderJoseki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katsukiyo_Kubomatsu

The Great Amateur opened at tengen. I guess consistency/predictability is the primary reason pros don't play especially difficult sequences to read.

I feel like there's some big assumption underlying your question that makes it so there's no real communication happening on this thread.

There's such a thing as a prepared move--some pro sits in his study and works on a particular joseki or whole opening and finds a new move that's interesting. It might be either a) a brilliant refutation of some way that people have been playing, or b) a complex move that has a lot of variations, but where that pro can benefit from his greater study. More often than not, we're not talking about a huge do or die thing--New In Go just featured a Go Seigen innovation in the large avalance. It potentially gave him two points in the opening, and it was considered a huge deal.

Now, all professionals do this--some are more creative than others, but they all try to find new moves. It's not a tactic for particular opponents, it's just something they do. You might save such a move for a tough opponent, or a title match, since you don't find these moves every day (and once you play a move, people start studying it, and then your advantage is gone). But it's not a strategy for opponents who are particularly good at reading.

Read New In Go, or the commentaries in GoGameGuru. I seem to remember you can find some examples of prepared moves/research in Charles Matthews' On Your Side series.

The other thing is that prepared moves can happen in almost any joseki. Except for a limited number of very simple josekis, they were all innovations at some point in time. It's not just the magic sword and avalanche that have new variations. And any new variation is a potential trap for an opponent who doesn't know about it.

Now, let's say you're facing Lee Sedol, and you plunk down the avalanche (or whatever else), and you don't have a prepared move in mind. How is that supposed to help you? Either you stick to the paths that both of you are familiar with, in which case you're playing joseki*. How does that help you? Maybe it means it takes more moves for Lee to kill you, but you're not gaining any advantage. Alternately, maybe you go down some path that's unfamiliar to you both. That's even worse, since now you're pitting your reading against Lee's. Sure, there are too many variations for either of you to read, but how does that help you? You'll both read part of the tree, not the whole thing, and odds are that Lee's reading will be sharper than yours, and you'll end up at a disadvantage.

Now, does that answer your question, or were you imagining something else?

* Pros almost always read even while playing joseki. They will look for places where one side might want to deviate from the joseki. My point here is that if they're playing a familiar line, they're not going to get trapped.

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Occupy Babel!

Those are all good points. What I am interested about with this thread are playing styles that are difficult to read because there are a large number of miai, but also as a corollary resilient to prepared plays. IE it isn't good enough to simply let the opponent choose their favorite joseki. The theory is that with with large number of miai, the combinations of plays will be difficult to read. Generally I wouldn't think that these styles would be necessarily complicated as much as ambiguous.

Shuei was known for a miai style--you could look at John Faibairn's books on him. Whether that would be what you were looking for, I don't know.

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Occupy Babel!

Two space pincer, press, cut, avalanche sounds like something you might be interested in.

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Revisiting Go - Study Journal
My Programming Blog - About the evolution of my go bot.

You are asking if Pro A, who is weaker at reading that Pro B, has employed complicated lines of play that are "impossible" to read as a defense against the strong reading abilities of Pro B.

If the variations are numerous and complicated then Pro B would be the one who is at an advantage since he can read more variations and deeper variations. Pro B would be taking steps forward with greater vision of the future than Pro A.

This is like asking whether a lightweight boxer could compensate for the weight difference against a heavyweight by getting into a slugging match.

One might try compensating for a weakness in reading by trying to obtain settled positions whenever it is possible to do so without falling behind by too much. For example, amateur players who fear the complications of the avalanche joseki are often advised to just connect at the 3-3 point if the joseki occurs early in the opening.

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Another idea is to make corner enclosures. There are fewer variations that arise from a finished corner. That said, for the pros, such tactics are probably a matter of style rather than to compensate for any perceived weakness. The gap b/t top pros and the new 1Ps is razor thin.

I don't think that lines of play with many variations are necessarily complicated.


I am thinking of it more like Texas' holdem where one of the strategies is to increase the bids early on before the flop so that people don't get as much information to work with and can't predict the odds as well.



As an amateur I used to prefer the simple enclosures, but if someone can read it out better you are in trouble.

That's not what I said. "Numerous AND complicated" is what I wrote, not "numerous and THEREFORE complicated".

The key difference is that go is a game of "complete and perfect information" in the language of game theory. Poker is a game of "incomplete and imperfect information". The private information that each player has must be inferred in a probabilistic manner by combining the public information (the open flop cards and observed bids) with conjectures about the strategic behavior of the opponents. There is an information asymmetry to begin with since each player gets to privately observe his own two cards-in-hand. That is, you begin the game knowing something your opponent does not EVEN IF you are the weaker poker player. In go, even if you complicate the situation there is no such initial information asymmetry. In fact, the asymmetry of information only arises due to the number of moves one can read ahead. A stronger player will read ahead more moves and will therefore you will be the one with the relatively greater information deficit after a "clever" attempt to create a situation that is unreadable. It will still be partially readable. The difference is that it will be more readable for stronger players and less readable for weaker players.

You are likely in trouble if someone can read out a situation (be it a joseki, a center fight, or a corner enclosure invasion) better than you. It just so happens that corner enclosures require less reading to handle as long as you don't commit the sin of allowing the corner to be completely surrounded. Once the corner is surrounded, strong players are sometimes capable of creating dan-level life and death problems out of the situation. Of course, us weaker players complain, saying "My global judgment was better and I would have won if the strong player didn't unfairly kill my corner and its 15 points". However, the truth is that, many groups, when surrounded, can be reduced by squeezing even if they are allowed to live. Surrounded corner territory also has no potential for future greatness. A player likely has poor global judgment if he allowed such a situation to arise in the first place without taking big compensation elsewhere.

I am not sure if that's the kind of thing you are imagining, but playing corner enclosures will indeed simplify a situation in many cases if you have decent global judgment. Anyhow, I somehow get the feeling that you are looking too hard for ways to completely protect yourself from a deficit in reading ability. As a person who is not very good at reading, I am sympathetic to your cause, but there is sadly no magic bullet.

You inferred complicated from what I said. For the record simply numerous.



I don't think you understand how limited reading is.

You mentioned avalanche and magic sword, which are notorious for having many complicated variations. Therefore, I talked about situations in which there are many complicated variations. You responded to this by saying that lines of play with many variations are not necessarily complicated. Nothing in my post suggested that lines with many variations are necessarily complicated. I was simply talking about situations in which variations are numerous and complicated (such those involving avalanche or magic sword...which were given as examples by...you). Furthermore, if an opponent is better at reading than you are, then he will be able to read more variations. Even if we are talking about variations that are 2 moves long each, do you think that there will be more than 50 of them? If there are 50 such short variations and one side will lose a huge group in all but two of them, who is more likely to choose the better variation, the person who can look at 10 of them or the person who can look at 20 of them? This is so painfully obvious that I am almost worried that it may be impolite to state it.
May I point out the extreme incongruity of decrying the limitations of reading while simultaneously starting a thread asking for ways to overcome the disadvantage one might experience due to inferior reading abilities? What superior alternative do we have? Even good global judgment is heavily dependent on good reading. Identifying urgent moves, which is probably the most important part of global judgment, often requires good reading. If you don't see the sequence that will make your group eyeless and send it running into the center, then you will not play the urgent move to preempt it. If you don't see the sequence that will get a good result against what looks like an overplay, then playing away does not mean that you have good judgment; it just means that you are reckless and gambling. Yes, reading by itself is quite limited because there are many possibilities in the game, that is why we also use intuition, experience, theory, and judgment with our reading. However, your use of those other tools must be backed up by reading most of the time. Doing otherwise is similar to shooting tip-less arrows at the weak points of a knight's armor. Of course, reading by itself is problematic as well. I really do not deny this. If you are unknowingly trying to achieve an inferior position on the board as an objective of your reading, then your reading abilities are working against you. It still does not change the fact that reading is important to executing other phases of the game well.

It is sometimes possible to settle the situation simply (and perhaps take some non-critical local losses) and use your sente more wisely than your opponent (or hope that your opponent uses his sente unwisely and plays bad fuseki points). But if there was a way to nullify your opponent's advantage in one of the most important aspects of the game at a discounted cost, then the game would be boring as heck. Life is like that. To quote a famous alchemist (cough/wink):

To drive the point home. This thread is about lines of play that frustrate a reading oriented player.

What point?

Anyways, the way to play against someone who is good at reading is to play more globally, NOT playing complex local fights.

I don't think you understand how powerful reading is.

If this thread is about trying to win against someone who reads better, give up. The better reader will win a majority of games. There is a reason why tsumego and tesuji are so highly rated.

Doesn't seem like a convincing argument. Better readers read better so play easy to read lines so they can read better. It seems like better readers would facilitate difficult reading conditions, maybe the better readers aren't all that good at reading in the first place, and they just memorized their tsumego and tesuji.

I'm not trying to make a convincing argument. I'm not going to to try to convince someone the sky is blue either, I will just tell them.

This is like trying to find a way to be a better golfer without actually swinging a golf club.

Projection much? Aren't you trying to learn/memorize lines of play to compensate for your own lack of reading ability?